Hi Chechelle,
It seems you're handeling this quite well.

Getting professional help, in combination with a wonderful husband is a good start.

The depression may be interfering with your sex drive and/or your sense of self worth. On the other hand, anti-depressants are known to suppress your libido.

I guess you should get yourself out of the 'must-do-right-framework'. Sounds a bit self-defeating, doesn't it?

I was raised in a fairly moderate religious environment, though my parents did drag myself and my two sisters who a very conservative Christian church which preached abstaining from sex. I attended it for a few years before I left in disgust and became a member of a much more liberal faith group.

I think what concerned me most is how this conservative church romanticized the idea of virginity. One of my friends from that congregation some years later became engaged and attached some kind of purity mystique to the idea that he and his soon-to-be wife would both be virgins on their wedding night. And while to some extent I can understand how that might be appealing in theory, I doubt it was a particularly pleasurable experience for the both of them. My first time certainly was not. It was awkward, fumbling, and embarrassing because neither of us knew what we were doing, really.

I can't imagine there would be much sense or romance in advancing an agenda where a lack of experience and context meant something very beneficial rather than detrimental. If that were the case, then there is something pure about an airline pilot who has never had any experience in the air or a surgeon who has never operated on a patient before.

I can't really offer good advice on the psychological aspects of your problems, but something else jumped out at me: you said that sex hurts and you sometimes can't go long enough for your husband. This is my experience as well. I've been having (or attempting) regular sex with the same partner for 5 years and this still happens to me, because I have vaginismus. If you're still having pain, there really could be a physical component and I encourage you to check out online resources and consult a doctor.

It sounds as though you are going to have to really work to redefine how you view the act of sex.

Both my SO and I grew up somewhat religious and were definitely told to wait until marriage. But both of us grew to really, really resent the way that religion tried to control this aspect of our lives. So sex before marriage became this great, rebellious FU to patriarchal religion: the more we enjoyed it, the more we had "won." We were both kind of bummed when we got married, but it turned out that our feelings about having sex, the original desire for it, hasn't changed at all.

Therapy will probably help, but I'll tell you how I came to grips with sexual desire. I love who I am. I love my SO. I want to feel good and I want to make him feel good. I also want to be as close as physically possible to him. Sex accomplishes this.

Another way I've looked at it: The universe is big. Huge. There are stars and galaxies even beyond our imaginations. According to most religions, God is in charge of all of this, the movement of the galaxies, the way the individual parts of the whole universe and all of the stars and all of the planets of those stars and all of the beings on those planets. Really, God has a lot going on, so I doubt that the timing of how (at His perspective) two microscopic specks decide to show their love for one another, before or after a ritual, is probably of the least of his worries.

But I'm agnostic, so I might have that perspective all wrong.

I am a liberal Christian, and I have long been fascinated by sexuality and the Christian church.

It seems to me that some of the problem stems from the emphasis within Christianity rather than the doctrine itself. Even if one accepts the doctrines of Christian sexual morality -- i.e. that pre-marital relations are forbidden, etc. -- there is a distinct problem in the way these doctrines are taught.

There is so much emphasis on what a healthy Christian sexuality ISN'T, and no mention of what a healthy Christian sexuality IS. Pastors and Priests spend so much time speaking about what is forbidden that they tend to neglect that which is permitted under their doctrines. This can leave married couples with an extremely distorted impression of Christian sexuality within marriage, and can cause many of the problems that the OP has encountered.

There has recently been some change in this, at least among a couple of the more prominent Protestant pastors. Mark Driscoll, an edgy conservative Calvinist pastor out of Seattle, recently did a relatively explicit series on Christian sexuality and the Song of Solomon. Ed Young, Jr., a conservative Baptist mega-church pastor out of Dallas, issued a one-week "sex challenge" to his married congregants.

This is not to say that one must accept of the tenets Christian sexual morality -- I certainly don't -- only that those that do could have much healthier married relationships if Pastors adopted a more balanced teaching of sexuality within Christianity.

kbz

I'm not Christian, so my perspective is about social pressure only- but might still be helpful to you. When I read your story, it doesn't strike me that the problem is you're guilty about having had sex before marriage. The problem seems to be that your upbringing equated sex with guilt and being wrong. If that's all you're taught, how could you expect yourself to just turn that off once you're married? The message is still there. Sex still seems shameful. I had a similar issue when I got pregnant with my son. I had been married for several years, I was fully an adult, etc- I got pregnant under the most societally-approved conditions possible. But I still felt weird going out in public pregnant, because I had spent so many years learning that smart girls don't get pregnant. It felt shameful to go around with a pregnant belly, and even though I was a decade past girlhood and legally married, I still felt like someone was going to call me a slut.

My point is, that this kind of conditioning is powerful, and a marriage certificate isn't a silver bullet or any other kind of magic. Be kind to yourself as you work through your feelings about sex. Those feelings are a logical consequence of your upbringing, and you're not the only one in your situation.