I was a married virgin, terrified of having sex. Then I met a handsome stranger and everything changed

Alyne Tamir was not the first person to be a virgin on her wedding evening.

An increasing number of men and women saved themselves for marriage – in 2023, The number of virgins in America HIT record numbers, with 10 percent of men and seven percent of women between 22 and 34 reports that have never had sex.

However, the fact that she was there for a few years – until she was 27 – is much less common.

Alyne – An entrepreneur with 333K Followers on Instagram – Was raised in the Mormon Church and learned that sex would send her directly to hell outside of marriage.

So when other high school children cheerfully explored their sexuality, she remained happy and consciously, purely.

“I mean, in high school nobody liked me I knew, so it was just nothing to worry about,” she says the Daily Mail.

By the time she switched to the university in Utah, however, something changed – boys suddenly began to notice her, and she launched herself with surrender to the dating scene.

Collecting proposals from hopeful young men were almost like a game. Yet being physically was completely off the table.

“I didn’t want sex,” she says. “I was afraid of penises. I had something like that: ‘Oh my, horrible! Thank goodness I don’t have to touch or see or communicate them. ‘

She adds: ‘But I was sexually without acknowledging … We would see it – me and my friends – and we would press each other. Now I have something like: “Oh, I was orgasming.” But then I was just: “I’m finished kissing now.”

Then Max came. Is called. Pleasure. And friendly. It also helped that the timing was good. All her friends were engaged, and it was expected that she too would meet a beautiful Mormon man, to get married in the Mormon Temple, settled and raises many Mormon children.

But at her wedding night – 23 years old in 2012 – she was in a luxurious hotel room with her handsome new husband. And she couldn’t.

A year after their marriage they had tried most things to move the needle – muscle relaxants, sexy lingerie, even a nude photo shoot – but just trying sex was still pain.

A gynecologist eventually diagnosed her vaginism. “It is when there is pain due to penetration that is not medically explained,” she was told.

Which means that the problem was psychological.

In her new book, Dear AlyneShe writes: ‘My body could read my thoughts and knew that I was afraid of sex. This was not something I could just wish for.

‘And if I am honest, I have nothing away. I didn’t want to have sex. I didn’t want anything about this. If I allowed myself to want this, what power did I have about my life? I would be stuck there forever. ‘

For his part Max was patient and sweet.

“I think he was sad and felt rejected internally and tried to be a good partner,” she says.

They stumbled their first year until Alyne’s annual summer trip to visit her father and extensive family in Israel. While Max had some work to finish in the US, Alyne preceded him, ready to enjoy the sun.

Finally free – from her troubled marriage and her pretenting Mormon family – she lay on the beach in Tel Aviv and started relaxing. On the outside she must look strong and together. Inside, she says, she was hollow and broken.

Maybe the handsome young stranger felt her grief? Was that why he had a conversation? And was she that she flirted back, played the game while she was determined to her: ‘I am a married woman’ defense?

In the beginning, the friendship of the couple seemed innocent enough, while they spoke to books and philosophy and explored the city together. But by the time it became sexual, she says she couldn’t – or could not resist.

“This was a one -off thing,” she writes in the book, “but it wasn’t meaningless. It was my escape. My only broken, defective, terrible way to communicate: “I suffer.”

It would take another three years before she would completely lose her virginity. But the handsome stranger on the beach made her realize that she might not have been as separated from her sexuality as she had thought.

Why did her body work with the stranger and not her husband?

“I think he was all the things that I felt like; The other side of me that is not seen in church, “she says.

“And he loved all these philosophy books, so he was really good at moral relativism. He would take my little spirit and be like: “This is a construction” … He built this world in which I am not a bad person when I do the bad things.

“I was not in love with him,” she adds, “and I knew. It was just an escape button ‘.

Looking back, she realizes that it all looks so simple: why didn’t she get a divorce?

“But I couldn’t do it at the time.”

The couple stayed together for another two years – tried ‘not – penetrating intimacy’ but still failing with a satisfactory sex life – until Max finally called it a day.

But although she dates, she remained resolutely NDTF (not to F ***).

Only when she was 27 – on a beach holiday in Sri Lanka – she finally lost her virginity.

“It hurt in the beginning,” she writes, “but this time I was prepared. Breathe in, breathe out and release your muscles, release control, relaxed, breathe, everything will be fine.

“He had no idea it was my first time, and that’s how I wanted it exactly. No busy, just another day, a normal experience. ‘

When her breathing strategy worked and finally gave her body, she writes: ‘I turned my head to hide while I torn, a bit of pain, but more of a huge sense of relief. A relief that this was possible. A release of a curse that I thought could mark all my life. ‘

Now 34, she still works through a lifelong conditioning that told her that it was a sin to feel sexually excited; that she would go to hell as a ‘adulterous’; A woman who had committed the cardinal sin to break out her family.

Her years of celibatary dating, she now says, were about “looking for a safe space to just exist around another person I like and who didn’t want something from me … I don’t owe them anything.”

She adds: “I think I was accepted by men my proxy, because I didn’t know I had to accept myself.”

That, she says, is still a process.

‘Since the book was written, I was with someone who helped me apparently understanding something fundamentally, namely that sex is about connection, which I did not know.

“He said,” it feels like you are taking a series of steps, “what I was all my life. “First you do this, then you do this.” And he says: ‘Just feel and feel … finishing doesn’t matter. The point is that we connect. ‘

‘I started crying because we had just slept together for the first time, and I had something like that:’ Oh my God, I am 33 and I don’t know how to have sex. ‘

“I feel like a 15-year-old … I learn. But every time I am ashamed of what I still feel, I let it go faster. ‘

She adds: ‘I didn’t want to write this book. I don’t want my mother to see this. I don’t want my father to see this … But the only way I came where I am is because other women have written their books [and they helped me].

‘So although it is painful to share this stuff and have negative feedback and mean people and misunderstood, I get those messages from a 27-year-old who is married and had no sex with her husband for two years and she thought I have something like’ okay, that was worth it. ‘

She says that there is a surprising number of men and women who relate to her story -who from Muslim cultures, Mennonites and other revivalistic American religions, homosexual men.

“There are even straight men who are happy to talk about it,” she says.

“But above all, they are women from a kind of religious, baptists, conservative culture that essentially tries to make you feel bad for something, and it’s just tiring.”

Dear Alyne: My years as a married virgin by Alynne Tamir is published by Harperone