A COLLEGE GIRL'S GUIDE TO: SEX & RELIGION

SEX & RELIGION

When I was fifteen and oh-so naive I had a heated argument with a boy in my class, along with my fellow girlfriends who basked in the glory of being naive, about when we'd lose our virginities. He argued that we'd probably lose it during our college years when we were practically independent to make our own choices. He pointed out, while he laughed at us, that the first guys we WERE going to lose our virginities to were not going to be the last guys. In fact, he stated quite rudely, that he probably wouldn't even care so much about us and we would spend the rest of our lives blocking him out of out memories. I, of course, took offence to his reasoning because up until that moment in my life, I was very certain that I was going to lose my virginity to my husband. ON OUR WEDDING NIGHT. In our hotel room overlooking the Atlantic with rose petals on our bed and champagne on our bedside table. So I told proudly that I was not going to lose it to some guy in some dorm room with his roommates looking on. I was all about my dignity as a woman.

"So", he asked me with disbelief dancing in his eyes, "are you telling me you are going to have sex with only one man for the rest of your life?"

"Yes!" I declared as the other girls applauded me.

Later, when the other girls had dispersed, he came up to me clearly not satisfied with my answer because he asked me again. "Tessa, are you sure of what you are saying?"

I had to admit that with the girls not backing me up, I wasn't as confident as I had seemed to be. "Well, I am a Christian so even if I wanted to have sex, I wouldn't be able to."

He looked at me for a while before shrugging as if to say 'You do NOT know.'

Nevertheless, he never argued with me about sex.

I suppose he was right about us girls losing our virginities earlier than we had once imagined. He was right though about me not knowing anything and for someone who really didn't know I sure did read a lot of those Harlequin books imagining myself as the female protagonist and I sure did watch a lot of those 'blue' movies just to know what sex looked liked. So was it wrong for me to secretly fantasise about having sex when I knew my stance against pre-marital sex? Was it also hypocritical of me to keep my virginity but imagine how good it would feel if I actually lost it? At one point, I made up my mind that if I did lose my virginity before I actually got married, I'd lose it to the guy I was sure I was going to get married to. And also that God would be very understanding of us.

But BOY was I sadly mistaken because the second I entered college, my eyes...well, they really opened! No, they shone. I realised that, at the time of my argument with my mate, half of the girls who had joined me were probably not even virgins at that time! And almost every girl I met talked about her first sexual partner not forgetting to scrunch their noses up in disgust mainly at themselves and the boys they had hooked up with. Some of them couldn't even remember how they had lost it!

"It's not that we hate them", my best friend Jolene told me one day.

"Then what?"

"We really hate them! It's like you can't seem to imagine why you would ever find that boy interesting enough to sleep with them", she explained.

Jolene also said the disdain and disgust comes only when you've met a new guy who is noticeably better in all things; most especially, in sex.

I suppose I got lucky during my first year in college. I met a really nice guy called NK, short for Nana Kofi. He used to live in my hall for a while and before we started dating we passed each other several times saying 'hi' to each other until one day he gathered courage and said something longer than our usual 'hi.' He was a year older than I was, the first 'older' guy to actually show interest in me. We hang out casually before making it official after a month. And we talked about everything. Yes! Everything including S-E-X. And we talked about our faiths. He was one of kind, really. I got him and he got me too. So we agreed not to have sex but I think we sort of miscommunicated each other during that period. I thought we agreed because of our faith and beliefs whereas he thought he would wait until I trusted him enough to give him my virginity. I only realised this when it was nearing a year since we started dating when he started dropping subtle hints like asking me what I thought of about a particular condom or telling me how he couldn't wait for our first anniversary in the middle of a hot make out. It wasn't his fault though. Literally everyone, except Ashiaki my best friend, was having sex. So, as our anniversary date approached, I panicked. And it looked like he had told his friends about it because they started giving me thumbs up signs whenever I saw them. It was just weird. And being the coward that I am, I could not tell NK I wasn't ready to have sex. Which was how I eventually found myself standing in the middle of the Holiday Inn parking lot with tears stinging my eyes as I scrolled down my contacts list to call Jeremy on my anniversary night.