Life as a virgin in college

F or the college freshman virgin, the first week of school can feel like happening upon an awkward but rambunctious teenage orgy. Indeed, your sexual inexperience will never be more keenly felt than in these first few weeks when everyone appears to major in the coital arts except you. When I say that I was a virgin when I started college, I do not just mean it in the heteronormative sense of not having had penetrative vaginal sex with a man. The completeness of my virginity was a matter of self-consciousness more than any sense of duty to moral self-preservation via sexual abstinence.

Warning: some things discussed in this personal essay may be triggering to survivors of sexual assault. Most people are still surprised that I voluntarily stayed a virgin throughout college. Given some of the less forgiving stigmas and stereotypes about abstinence, I can definitely understand why. I'm not religious in any sense of the word, nor do I believe in the slightest that women should abide by a particular standard when it comes to their body-related decisions. I certainly wasn't "conservative" about my own body, either. Admittedly, I was a late bloomer. I grew up attending a small New Jersey private school that became the narrow, sheltered lens through which I saw and experienced the world.

When you were younger and thought about college, what did you think? Did you envision it like the movies? Could you even really imagine it?

For the first three and a half years of college , I was a virgin. I was one of the only virgins in my group of friends and I always felt like it was written on my forehead. Being a virgin in college is like being a needle in a haystack.