Sex Before Marriage
I’m going to tell it like it is. This is 2018 after all and we should be talking openly about this type of thing. It’s human nature. There are pheromones, libido and orgasms by design. The human race was intended to procreate. That’s how we got here, right?
Sometimes sex is just that, sex and sometimes sex is intimacy. It’s a form of emotional expression. We can attach romance to it but the basic foundation is, I really dig you and let’s get each other off.
I speak from personal experience and if you think about it, I bet you can too.
My husband and I had a great deal of sex before we got married. I don’t know an exact count. I guesstimate it’s most likely tripled since then.
Neither my husband nor I were previously married. The first time he brought me home to his parent’s farm I was 37 and he was 46. The evening we arrived his father pointed to opposite sides of the house and said, Your rooms have been made up for you.
I get it but no offense, a lot has changed since the 1950's. Still a rule is a rule but regardless, my husband tip-toed passed his parent’s bedroom that night and crawled into bed with me.
Aren’t you worried about getting into trouble? I asked.
I’m 46 years old. They must know I’ve had sex before, right?
How would I know? They’re your parents. I just met them five hours ago.
Okay, yes. We absolutely did it that night. It kind of had this rebellious teenage nostalgic feel about it. I don’t regret the sex itself but I suppose there’s a part of me with a conscious, aware I disrespected them even if they may not have been aware of it.
Years went by and each time we visited his 47 relatives (seriously tho, between his four siblings and their children, and their children) they asked when we were going to get married.
I knew he always wanted to. It’s his culture. Get married, have 9.7 kids and then stick with it until the day you die. Each time I was asked my response was the same, redirection. I think we should just be grateful he was able to get a girl to come home with him.
I mean, let’s face it. Once you reach our age and you’ve never been married people start to wonder what’s wrong with you.
It couldn’t possibly be our beliefs such as we believe in having lots of sex and shacking up together without being married.
We both needed to know we were ready and that marriage was the right thing for us because there’s the “until the day you die” that most definitely heightens the level of relationship seriousness.
I’s also never saw myself as the marrying type. To be clear, it’s not that I have commitment issues or I’m anti-life companion. It’s because I take the vow of marriage extremely seriously so I wasn’t about to jump into anything I wasn’t 100% certain was with the right person for me and it was the right thing to do.
Roughly four years into our relationship we wanted to buy a house in Iowa. The house is the bomb. It’s the kind of house I never thought I’d ever live in. We wanted to buy it outright. So we did some shifting and finagling. He sold his house, moved into mine and then we used the money from the sale of his house and split the rest of the cost.
There we had it, mortgage free. Without debt we were going against the very fabric of what it means to be American, but what does this have to do with sex?
Well, it didn’t take long for his parents to realize that we were now living under the same roof out of wedlock. The pressure was on. It was important to them that we married and it was important to us that we did before they weren’t around to be a part of it.
When he and I sat down and talked about it we didn’t have many (any, I swear it) reasons not to get married.
We were ready. He was 50 and I was 41.
We traveled from Arizona to our house in Iowa where we had planned a small ceremony. We did it in our style meaning potluck dinner, BYOB (bring your own beer which in Iowa’s case means Busch Light in a can) and my now husband pretend threatening to jump out the window as I walked down the aisle toward him.
I was nervous but it was more so social anxiety than it was the actual act of marrying him. Everyone was starring at me.
The night of our wedding everyone filed out of the house at the same time with the exception of his parents who stayed behind to talk with us after everyone else left. It was weird. In a blink of an eye the party was over and the house was empty with no explanation whatsoever.
The four of us stood in the kitchen entryway chatting until his mother said, We’re going to leave so you can finally practice being Mrs. Sauter. Then she winked at me.
At that moment I realized his parents never knew he snuck into my bedroom at night the first time he brought me home to the farm to visit them. Knowing this I didn’t have it in me to tell her. She believed we’d never had sex before but the truth is, by the time we were married we already had that shit mastered.
