‘I was just 14 when my boyfriend and I decided to have sex. It wasn’t as if it had been an impulsive decision. After all, we’d wanted to wait, but after nine months we gave in, thinking it was the right thing to do. My boyfriend was a year older than me and both of us felt at the time that waiting nine months was commendable. It didn’t occur to us that we were too young to deal with the emotional consequences.
At school the teachers were already showing us how to put condoms on bananas, and we all thought everyone else was having sex. Personally, I thought the idea of someone reaching the age of 18 and still being a virgin was a myth.
Our sex education teacher didn’t make things any better, saying: “It’s illegal for you to have sex before you’re 16, but we all know you’re going to do it anyway.”
Those words echoed around my head on leaving that class. I wanted it to stop – the pressure, the overwhelming sense of what I had always considered to be right and wrong was becoming blurred.
Meanwhile, at my close friend Christine’s school, a supply personal and social education teacher had just told her and her friends that it’s a myth to think that nobody’s doing it. “Most people who say they’re having sex are having sex,” she stated quite categorically.
Now we are all being told about the physical consequences of sex, but not the emotional consequences. The physical can often be cured but the emotional consequences stick around a lot longer. If only someone had told me then what I know now.
Read it all here.
Hat Tip Anglican Mainstream
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