I left elementary school looking forward to having a normal high school experience. So I was very upset when I ended up at an all-girl Catholic High School. I had wanted to go to a Catholic co-ed high school across town, but my parents wouldn’t have it because they said that it was too far and not as good. Obviously, I had wanted to go to the other school because it had boys. I was not fast like some girls who could pick up boys on the street after school and on weekends. I knew that if I did not come into contact with boys in my day-to-day environment, it was likely that I would not date. I was right. I didn’t even go to prom mainly because I did not have a date. So aside from continued bullying, my high school years were uneventful.

By the time I got around to dating in college I discovered that it wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. The “relationships” I had never came to much. Guys just couldn’t accept that I would not have sex with them, and before long… they would dump me, or I would dump them.

When I entered the working world at 25, I started to question my beliefs about the Bible and Christianity. So many things that I had been taught no longer made sense to me… but then, but I suppose they never really did. I had never belonged to a church. My mother had been open-minded in allowing me to make up my own mind about religion and never imposed any beliefs on me as a child. But I considered myself a Christian because I had been raised in a Christian culture and it was all I knew. I tried to renew my faith. One day, I decided that I would read the Bible from cover to cover to get a better understanding of its teachings. But I had barely started reading Genesis before I put it down even more confused than when I started. And so, I decided that I would no longer be a Christian. I did not see the point of going along with something that I could not fully accept just because other people said it was right. The way I saw it, I was doing Christianity a favor by staying out of it. There were already too many people who call themselves Christians that don’t believe in or practice anything that the Bible says, not to mention those that make up their own version of what is clearly written in the scriptures. People like that, in my view, did nothing but bring the church down. As for me, I would rather be an honest non-believer than a bogus “saint.” At least I had the integrity to admit that I was a non-believer and move on to a religion that I could fully embrace as there are Many paths to God.

I may have left Christianity but I still maintained a strong belief in God, and my search for another belief system led me to the New Age Movement. I started reading books on New Age philosophy and the ancient spiritual traditions of my African ancestors. I didn’t agree with everything the New Age Movement advocated either, but unlike Christianity that said “IT’S THIS WAY OR THE HIGHWAY” — New Age spirituality was flexible.

A couple of years later, I began to have doubts about my virginity. Now that I was older I began to question the logic of this vow that I had made so many years ago. I had made the vow to remain a Virgin when I was a Christian, and now that I was no longer a Christian what was the point of keeping it? Everything that I had ever seen about Virginity or Chastity had described it as “a religious thing,” and more specially, “a Christian thing.” Keeping your virginity was portrayed as something that was only for Christians — not people like me. If I was no longer a Christian, I thought, shouldn’t I be having sex? There was nothing to keep me from it now. The vow I had made was a Christian vow that no longer applied.

Besides, I was getting too old for this abstinence stuff, I thought. People who promote abstinence tell you to “wait” for this fairy tale to happen about some prince who is supposed to be your “true love” coming along and making you his bride before you can have sex. It’s easy to believe in when you are in your teens and early twenties and marriage seems just over the horizon, right after college. But as you grow older and there is no prospect of marriage in sight, the abstinence fairy tale only seems to become more and more of a joke with each passing year. I mean, there I was 27 years old and still as pure as the day I was born. I wondered if I was normal. Society said that I should have lost my virginity ages ago, and that if I didn’t lose it before 30, I would certainly be abnormal. I decided that sitting around waiting on a prince that wasn’t coming because of a Christian vow that was no longer relevant was foolish and that it was time to move on. I decided it was time I lost my virginity.

How I came to be a Perpetual Virgin menu