Losing my Virginity

The story of a broken ring, part one.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, thoughtfully looking out the window at everything and nothing at all, spinning my ring around the base of my finger (as I do when I am lost in my head), when it abruptly broke in half and made two consecutive “tinging” sounds as the pieces hit the floor at my feet. I looked in disbelief first at my naked left ring finger and then at the silver half moons, how they caught the light as they wobbled and then stilled, a tragic and beautiful thing. I imagined the snapshot as a still life in a museum.

Kendall Lamb

Portrait of a Broken Promise, 2008

Silver on Tile

Is there anything more metaphorical than a broken ring?

What if I told you it was a “purity ring” and that I had lost my virginity the night before? What then?

I had been wearing this ring for eleven years. I had worn it through my junior and senior years in high school- through school dances and clumsy teenage kisses, awkward, sloppy, stolen things. I had been wearing it when I first fell in love, a thing that left me breathless and dizzy and totally consumed, and I was wearing it when that beautiful boy broke my heart four years later. I spun it round and round as I sat on the curb watching him drive away in his 1979 baby blue mustang, feeling like I would come apart, unable to breathe. A broken engagement, a foreshadowing perhaps. Was this the moment when the ring was weakened? Was it from all of the spinning? I had wanted him to replace the sliver ring with a gold one, one with more substance, but he told me that God didn’t want him to marry me anymore. We were too alike. Which meant, I think, that I was too willful and opinionated to make a good, submissive Christian wife.

I wore it through a wide variety of non-penetrative sexual encounters in my early twenties. Some tender and intimate, some casual. Some dangerous, some soft and almost achingly vulnerable.

I wore it on my back and on my knees, alone in my bed and tangled up in someone else’s sheets. I wore it in the hot engine room on the Miss Cape Ann, my whole body vibrating against his, my hands tugging at his uniform. I wore it on the back of a motorcycle, my body pressed against his, flying down the highway in the Florida Keys towards hotel rooms that would always leave me aching. I wore it on an island in a room filled with patchouli, listening to 311 sing, “Amber is the color of your energy” as I thought to myself, now is the moment I need to tell him I can’t go any further, rolling over on the bed to the tune of his frustrated sigh, wishing I was someone else.

My body was insatiable, craving heat and touch as ravenously as it craved chocolate and salty sea air and the sound of whale song underwater. It demanded to be fed, and I did my best to give it just enough to quiet the cravings without overindulging. But it’s hard to stop eating when you are starving. I didn’t know what it felt like to be satisfied, I only knew want.

Always I held on to that most valuable thing, my Virginity. I had to. I had made a promise to God and my father when I was fifteen, and I take promises very seriously. I had even signed a contract of sorts that hung on my wall in my childhood bedroom.

The terms were unclear. To spell them out would have been vulgar and woefully inappropriate. What does it mean to be “morally clean and pure," exactly? How much touching was too much touching? How much nakedness? Was cunnilingus allowed? Masturbation? Was having an orgasm a “sin”? We were told to use our judgement, our moral discernment. But we had also been taught not to trust ourselves, so that was a real pickle. Our “flesh” apparently tempted us to do terrible things, but what about when your very soul was the part of you that craved closeness? What then?

Why did it feel so sacred?

---

I’m sixteen, sitting in a circle in on floor of the room my youth group meets in every Wednesday night. The girls have been separated from the boys. We’re still and relaxed on our side of the room. I see the boys in their corner, shifty and restless. This is the way things are.

The woman who usually helps with sound and lights is in charge of us this evening, and she is holding a rose.

“Pass this around,” she instructs us, handing it the the girl closest to her, “And when it comes to you, pluck off one petal. Careful!” She says, almost as an afterthought. “It has thorns!”

There are only a few petals left when it reaches me, and I dutifully remove a petal, rubbing the silky softness between my fingers, bringing it to my nose and sneaking a smell of its sweetness as it makes its way around the circle. I can’t help myself. I never can.

The woman at the front holds the stem up dramatically when she has our full attention.

“This rose represents your virginity.” She says, solemnly. “Every time you give yourself to another person, you pluck a petal off, until all that remains is this thorny stem. Who would want to receive this on their wedding day?” She says, catching all of our eyes.

I want to laugh, but I don’t. I just sit there looking very serious, fingering the petal, wondering if I will smell like a rose when I leave.

---

I ultimately decide that if I just tie a bow around my hymen, if keep that one sacred piece of flesh off limits, I will be technically within the bounds of my contract and my integrity will remain intact.

It all came down to a ring of tissue, really. A ring that determined my worth as a woman. A ring that mustn’t be broken prematurely.

To still be a virgin at the age of twenty seven is quite a thing. It had become as much a part of my identity as my curly hair and remarkable dark blue eyes. As my quiet faith, as my laugh, as my impressive boat handling skills, my ability to identify a species of whale by the shape of its spout. I was proud of my restraint, of this thing that made me different than everyone else.

Until, one day, I just got so tired of it.

I was dating a man who was older than me, and far more sexually experienced. I had known him when I was seventeen- he was my manager at a camping and hiking store where I worked on the weekends to save up for college. Four years my senior, a sage twenty-one year old with a baby boy from a previous relationship, he seemed worldly and dangerous. He was everything I wasn’t. Loud, audacious, promiscuous, Italian, contrary, magnetic. Even then, there was chemistry between us, but I was too naïve to name it. I only knew that when we bantered back and forth in the fishing aisle, it felt like there was fire in my veins.

During my senior year we would meet up at a coffee shop downtown, a dark and edgy place next to a biker bar. We would flirt under dim lights and make out in the parking lot, and I would leave feeling abuzz and not at all like the girl who sat in the pews on Sunday, crossing her legs and smoothing her skirt.

We lost touch after I went to college and later began my career in marine biology. But one night he found me on Facebook just after I had moved back to my hometown in Tucson, Arizona for a season, and I agreed to meet him for a drink later that week.

What ensued was a free-fall of sorts, a spiraling, heated, entirely toxic and intoxicating affair. He love-bombed me and isolated me. I was the only person he could tolerate. He re-wrote me. He told me who I was and who I wasn’t, and I lost all sense of up and down. I wanted him with a passion that I couldn’t understand, and I loathed him just the same. I didn’t know myself. I didn’t know how to get away from him, or if I even wanted to.

What I did know was that I had become tired of the dance around my virginity. I had done everything except the “one thing” that still qualified me as a virgin at the point, and it had started to feel a more than a little silly. I am many things, but I’m no fool. I was no maiden fair, just a woman desperately holding a single, dying flower and calling it a bouquet.

A year into our tumultuous relationship, I told him I wanted to have sex with him. Like, for reals.

He was not a healthy person, not by any stretch, but I will give him this: he was very respectful that night. He told me that he was going to make me dinner, and we were going to eat a slow and delicious meal and have a glass of wine and if I still felt the same way at the end of it, he would take me into the bedroom and ravage me.

Which is exactly what happened.

(Side note, dear reader: he was a chef, and he made me a meal that included jalapenos. He did not wear gloves while slicing said hot peppers. Alas, there was a great deal of uncomfortable burning and heat that night that I believed must either be normal OR some kind of fiery punishment for my sexual transgressions. It was just capsaicin oil, okay? Not everything is a metaphor.)

But then there was this: When I was leaving his house late that night, shaky and tingly and swimming in all of my feelings, I backed out of his driveway and ran right into a stop sign. It crashed to the ground, laying on both the grass and in the street, face up, mocking me. I got out of the car and just stared at it.

Kendall Lamb

Failure to Stop, 2008

Metal on Asphalt

I tried and failed to prop it back up and left laughing while I watched it get smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror.

I was probably contemplating the sign the next morning over coffee while my spinning sent my promise ring clattering to the floor.

I picked up the pieces and placed them in the palm of my hand.

Well, that’s that. I thought, tracing the sharp edges with my finger.

Did I feel broken, used up, less whole, less valuable? Was I being punished, admonished?

I placed one hand on my sacrum and one on my heart, letting the images of the previous night, of the previous eleven years, flood my body as I breathed in and out with my eyes closed.

I tried to imagine a thorny stem inside of me. Had I done that? Plucked off all the petals? Ruined myself in on the alter of desire?

What I saw instead was a dying flower coming back to life.

What if it had not been brought to death’s door because I had pulled it apart, but because I had refused to water it? What if the ring, and the promise I had made, had not been anchoring me to my value and worth, but had been strangling me in fear and shame? Could it be that in breaking that oath, I had broken a dam? That the waters that now flowed were what my body had been thirsting for all along?

For what I felt in the stillness was something close to satisfaction. My body would never stop needing and craving and desiring, for she was alive with the pulse of wanting, as all bodies are, but just then she was at ease. Nothing is broken, she told me in between heartbeats. Sometimes things need to undone so that you may live.

I took the pieces of the ring and placed them in my jewelry box. I closed the lid and massaged the indentation that it had left on my finger. I didn’t know it then, of course, but in almost two years to the day another man, a better, kinder man would slip a wedding ring onto that same finger in front of all of my friends and family. He would see me as a thing in bloom, beautiful and fragrant.

That ring would break as well, ten years into our marriage, but that’s a story for next time.

Just know this: some broken things remain broken forever, and that is exactly as it should be. And some…. well, some surprise you. Some are mended in the most miraculous of ways.

When something shatters, you must ask yourself:

Is this the breaking of a dam, free of constraints, watering a barren landscape?

Or

Is this something that needs time and tending to? A broken wing that might fly once more?

The answer might surprise you.

Stay tuned for Part Two.

Photo by Dare Artworks on Unsplash