Keeping one’s virginity has become a matter of debate in recent times. There seems to be a lot of pressure these days, and it doesn’t feel like a big deal to many young people anymore, but here are some honest reasons to keep your virginity till marriage.
Being a virgin means you have never had sex with anyone before. Whether you are still a virgin or not, the lessons you’d learn in this post will be useful to you from this moment on.
Many people are still virgins for no specific reason, while others are for the right reasons. If you are contemplating losing your virginity or not, here are some honest reasons to consider keeping your virginity till you are married or fully ready.
1. Protects you from STIs
Staying clear from sexual intercourse protects you from sexually transmitted infections. Abstinence is the number one and most effective method of preventing the transmission of sexually-transmitted diseases.
Keeping your virginity means you are not going to engage in any acts of sex. And that reduces your chances of contracting any STI by over 99 per cent.
2. Keep your special gift for your future partner
Your virginity is a special gift you should keep for your future partner. Keeping your virginity earns you more lifelong respect and adoration from your partner.
3. You are too young
Being too young is another reason to keep your virginity. You may not be ready for the outcomes related to early sex. You might be too young to make such decisions to have sex. Hence, you should keep your virginity till you are old enough.
4. Your religious belief may be against it
Safeguarding your religious beliefs is another reason why you want to keep your virginity. Most religion frowns at premature sex and sex before marriage. You might want to keep your virginity to maintain good standing with your religious beliefs.
5. You are still a dependant
If you are still living under your parents, there is nothing you should be doing with sex. Everything has a phase and time for it. Sex has its own timing, and when living or depending on someone else is not the right time.
6. Gives you more sexual control over yourself
A philosopher once said that the more you don’t have sex, the less you want. It turns out that initiating sex weakens your power of self-control over sex. The more you have sex, the less you can control yourself when the urges come.
7. Helps you focus your energy on productive things
Abstinence naturally helps you focus your energy on productive things. Sex can steal some of your useful time, when you fantasize about it or when you actually have sex. Staying a virgin saves you from all that.
8. Protects your feeling of self-esteem
As a young man or woman, keeping your virginity can enhance your self-esteem. To think that someone has “used” you can make some people have low self-esteem, but choosing to stay a virgin till you are ready keeps you from all that hassle.
9. Helps you build better relationships
Making sex the anchor of any relationship is like building a large structure on a weak foundation. Sex can mask reality, and such relationships built on it are bound to fail.
By choosing to keep your virginity, you stand a chance to build great relationships based on mutual trust and partnership, instead of quick one-night stands that make the partners turn enemies the next morning.
10. You need to be mentally ready for it
Engaging in sex requires mental readiness. You need to be strong enough to hold yourself together and not feel guilty after having sex.
Even virgins who are legitimately married before having sex can feel guilty if it is their first time. The only difference is that they reassure themselves that they are doing it legitimately.
11. Makes you feel powerful enough to achieve anything
Being able to suppress the urges to have sex for long periods must make you feel like a superhero, doesn’t it? Keeping one’s virginity is not an easy feat considering the many pressures around to make you want to lose it.
This ability can give you the feeling that you can achieve anything you want to achieve, and can become a ground for greater exploits in your endeavours.
12. You worry less about diseases
Keeping your virginity protects you from the irrational fear of sexually transmitted infections. People who have lost their virginity and are sexually active sometimes attribute minor ailments to likely sexually transmitted diseases like HIV, syphilis, and Gonorrhea, which can affect mood and productivity until the tests say otherwise.
13. To avoid unwanted pregnancies
One important reason you should keep your virginity is to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Many people erroneously think you need to engage in sex very many times before you can get pregnant but that’s not true. Your first sex can get you pregnant.
Unwanted pregnancies, are of course “unwanted”. You are not financially, emotionally, and physically ready for such pregnancies, because they can put your life, or career at great risk.
14. Prevent complications of abortion
After unwanted pregnancy sets in, most teenagers opt to terminate the pregnancy through secretive ways. This often leads to serious life-threatening complications, including death if the complications are not well attended to.
Abortion is a leading cause of adolescent female deaths worldwide. By choosing to stay a virgin, you not only prevent unwanted pregnancies but also abortion and its complications.
15. You make better marital choices
The choice of who to marry can be confusing. Adding sex to it makes it even more confusing because sex could mask important aspects of your potential partner that you should focus on.
Staying away from sex gives you the opportunity to understand the person of your potential partner and see if you are okay with them or not. Sex also enslaves you in a relationship as you become unwilling to leave them when you should because you are thinking you can’t afford to leave after giving them a lot of yourself already.
16. Gives a woman confidence about fertility during marriage
If you are able to keep your virginity till marriage, this can boost your confidence regarding issues related to fertility. Premature sex raises the risk of several diseases that can affect a woman’s fertility. This can affect your life when you eventually settle down in marriage.
When a couple is unable to achieve pregnancy for one or two years of living together, many questions begin to arise. Is the issue from the man or the woman? Staying a virgin till you get married answers a lot of questions regarding whether your promiscuity in the past might have been the cause of the current situation.
17. Greater sexual satisfaction
It has been found that men and women who have had several sexual adventures before getting married find it harder to get satisfied by their current partner. They might want to continue to experience the fun of having sex with several individuals.
Maintaining your virginity not only protects your special gift for your partner. It also enhances your sexual satisfaction all through the rest of your life when you have met your life partner.
Tips that can help you keep your virginity
Now that you have seen some major reasons why you need to keep your virginity, I know there are a lot of questions on your mind. I will address them as you read on. But before then, here are some tips that can help you keep overcome the pressure and keep your virginity.
Even if you have had sex before, these tips can help you abstain from sex till you are fully ready to.
1. Make the decision
To decision to abstain from sex till you are married must be a very difficult one but there are countless people who have done it without fail. To maintain your virginity, you need to be very decisive on what you want, not sitting on the fence and watching where the wind pushes you.
By making a decision, I mean seriously and firmly telling yourself what you want, and actively making efforts to achieve it. The next points will be on things you can do to achieve your decision.
2. Avoid sexual cues
Cues are like traps that lure you into what you would not normally want to do. In this case, sexual cues can be seductions from someone you can hardly resist, too close contact with someone of the opposite sex, or exchanging gestures that can make you lose your guard.
3. Know your boundaries
Everyone has boundaries, beyond which they cannot control things anymore. For some, they can go to great lengths without losing control. For others, it’s not the same. Whatever the case, you need to know your sexual boundaries and define them clearly.
If simple hugs would turn you on and make you want to have sex, avoid them as much as you can. If little alcohol makes you drunk easily, avoid drinking even the tiniest cup when you are outside with the opposite sex. Keeping your virginity requires conscious efforts to avoid things that would lead to losing it.
4. Focus on your work
One of the advantages of keeping your virginity is that it makes you focus on other productive areas of your life. This is partly because your body naturally channels energy to those areas because it is not occupied with thoughts of sex.
You can also consciously turn your attention to those other important areas of your life to distract yourself, particularly when you are having intrusive thoughts and fantasies about sex. It is as simple as picking up your book to read when you are having sexual urges.
5. Hold your faith firmly
As I mentioned earlier, most religious beliefs uphold virginity and frown on indiscriminate sexual activity. For example, the Christian faith preaches against sexual impurity and immorality. One way to keep your virginity or abstain from sex is by holding firmly onto such beliefs of your faith.
6. Avoid pornography
Pornography is an unhealthy habit that can ruin one’s sexual life. From making one try sex out for the first time, to making one have unhealthy cravings for sex, sex positions, and styles.
If you are still a virgin, you should stay away from pornography as much as possible. Sometimes, intrusive pornographic content might pop up on your mobile device on social media or the internet, but you must consciously block yourself from becoming addicted to pornographic materials.
7. Delayed gratification
Delayed gratification is a useful tool in many life situations related to achieving success. In this case of virginity, it is also helpful in keeping one’s virginity. Delayed gratification is the decision to delay pleasure today so that you can set things right and enjoy greater pleasure tomorrow.
Delaying sex has a lot of advantages (as discussed above) but it also has a role to play in enhancing the quality of sexual pleasure you derive from sex after you are married. Delayed gratification is you saving the best for the last and not the other way around.
8. Don’t follow the trend
Trends seem to have a way of influencing people to do things they would not normally want to do. Today, it’s unusual body piercing, tomorrow, it’s tattooing. In some places right now, being a virgin is old-fashioned. Losing one’s virginity is the new trend.
To survive being able to keep yourself a virgin till you are married and ready to have sex, you need to abandon many trends. And you need to tell yourself that you don’t have to be like everyone else. You are special by being you, and even more special by being different from the crowd.
What you might experience trying to keep your virginity
If you choose to keep your virginity, there are some negative and positive experiences you might have while doing so. Here are some experiences you can rightly expect and how you can work your way around them.
1. You might be mocked for not giving in
Your friends and colleagues might mock you for being celibate. They would call you all manner of names and describe you as the girl or the boy who won’t fit with the norm.
But you should remember that people will only mock you because they want you to be like them. Losing one’s virginity is an irreversible thing that you cannot get back. Not only is the physical evidence of virginity (the hymen) lost but also your sexual psyche changes completely after you have had sex for the first time.
2. You might feel odd
It is normal to feel odd when you are one of a few who are still keeping their virginity for the right time. Many people are virgins because their parents wouldn’t let them, but here you are keeping yourself even when you are away from home.
Seeing that other people are having sex freely and rubbing it on your face can make you feel odd, but you should be proud that you are odd in the right way.
3. You might lose some friends
Typically, some of your friends would be swayed wrongly to let go of their virginity. After that, they would begin to feel odd around you knowing that you are still a virgin.
Sometimes, they might try to persuade you to give it a try so that you can be on the same page once again. If you refuse to give in to their persuasion, they might stop being friends with you. The good part is, you don’t have to be friends with everyone.
4. You will be well-rated by people of the opposite sex
Now the good part! If you are a virgin, people of the opposite sex who know that you are not sleeping around would secretly rate you as a decent person. They would describe you as being very self-controlled, focused, and decisive. That’s a plus!
5. You will feel more powerful and in control
Again, to be able to control your sexual urges at the prime of your life is a feat only superheroes can successfully pull. Being able to maintain your virginity makes you feel powerful and in control of yourself.
By extension, you can also be able to control other unhealthy habits like smoking, alcohol, junk feeding, soda addiction, and so on. This is an ability you want to keep as much as you can.
6. You are more decisive than most people
Being able to keep your virginity, particularly when you are not under any parental restrictions has to be one of the most decisive things to do. Whereas most people are not very decisive about what they want with their life, you are one of the few people who are.
Other frequently asked questions about virginity
What does it mean to be a virgin?
Classically, being a virgin means you have not engaged in penetrating sex and a woman’s hymen is still intact. This definition has been faulted on the grounds that men do not have hymen and other things can cause the hymen to break apart from sex.
Can a man be a virgin?
Of course, a man can be a virgin if he has not had penetrating sex with a woman before, whether or not he broke the woman’s hymen.
Is there an acceptable age to lose my virginity before marriage?
There is no generally acceptable age to lose one’s virginity but this is often dictated by the culture or social beliefs of the place one resides. It is however safer, better, and more honourable to keep one’s virginity up to marriage.
Is it better to marry a virgin or a non-virgin?
By general standards, it is better to marry someone who has dedicated her virginity to you. However, there have been debates about whether non-virgins are better to marry than virgins.
Asides from the virginity status, it is important to consider other important things like their personality, attitudes, beliefs, and values. These are more important for marriage than checking and ruling off someone simply because they are a virgin or not.
If I am a virgin, should I marry a non-virgin?
This decision lies in you. No one can make it for you. Most virgins prefer to marry virgins but there is nothing wrong if you find someone who is not a virgin but shares the same important values, beliefs, and love with you.
When can I lose my virginity?
The best time to lose your virginity is after you are married. This has several benefits for you and your partner.
But if you feel like you need to lose it before then, make sure you are physically, and emotionally ready to do so. Also, ensure that you and your partner are willing and capable of taking responsibility for any outcome of the act, including pregnancy.
Can a woman lose her virginity without sex?
From the classical definition based on the integrity of the hymen, a woman can break her hymen from other causes aside from sex. These might include trauma, instrumentation, etc.
Can I get back my virginity after losing it?
This is one of the most asked questions about virginity because people realise that once you lose your virginity, you can’t get it back. Virginity is not only about the hymen, it is also about your mindset and emotions. Trust me, once you get the first try, your body chemistry about sex would change very significantly.
Based on the integrity of the hymen and the elasticity of the vagina, many people believe that you can get it back to the state it was before you lost your virginity if you stop having sex for a long time. This is true. You can be a virgin at heart if you decide again not to have unwarranted sex until you are married.
How can you know if someone is a virgin?
You can know if someone is a virgin by asking them. To do so, you must have been really close to them as it will be awkward to ask someone who is not already comfortable with you.
Strange as it may sound, you can know a virgin to a good level of accuracy from their behaviours and attitude, especially with people of the opposite sex. Virgins are usually more reserved and sexually less expressive.
You can also know from the kind of topics they can freely discuss. People who are virgins often feel uncomfortable talking about sex in a vulgar tone because they fear that might lead them to lose their own virginity.
