Having sex within the first few dates is somewhat common, but I recently dated a guy pretty seriously and decided to wait — not just for a few weeks, but a whole six months. The result? We never actually slept together and eventually broke up… but it had nothing to do with sex!
- My gut told me it’d be better to wait. I had spent a lot of time in my 20s completely ignoring my intuition when it came to guys, so I learned the hard way how important that voice is. Although I really liked this guy and was super attracted to him, something was just telling me to hold on, so I listened.
- He wanted to work towards something bigger. The guy could sense sex wasn’t going to be on the table (yet), so he never pressured me. He showed me that he wanted to work towards something real by saying, “Relationships are not a race. I’m in this for the long haul.” Wow. I felt like I had found someone really special who wanted more than just sex from me.
- But then cracks started to show. Weirdly, when sex was off the table, it was no longer a distraction. We could see what was really there and, um, we didn’t really have much in common. We had very different interests, hobbies and values. Sometimes I had nothing much to say to him. Awkward.
- He had a reputation. After getting to know him more and hearing about his life (well, it’s not like we could go have sex instead), I realized he used to be a huge player. He even admitted it. It made me wonder if he still was. It would make a lot of sense in regards to why he was so chill about us not sleeping together.
- I wanted to be loved. I was sick and tired of guys only wanting one thing for me and so I thought this time around I would focus on love coming before sex. After all, I deserved that. The only problem was that the guy wasn’t exactly showing me much love. He was sometimes distant and never really supported me when I was going through a tough time.
- I was only attracted to his appearance. The revelations that came to me when sex wasn’t in the picture were not just about him, but about myself. I realized that I had been distracted by his gorgeous looks. I was in lust, but not in love.
- Instead of moving forward, we hit a dead-end. Besides realizing that feelings were not coming to this party, other issues started to crop up. One of the biggest was how he’d go AWOL sometimes for a few days at a time. WTF was he doing during this time? It made me feel insecure but I knew I would have felt so much more insecurity if we’d been lovers.
- Then the guilt trap started. After four months of dating, the guy started to drop a few hints into conversation about how important sex was and how weird that we weren’t having it. He wasn’t grown enough to talk to me about it in a mature way and he didn’t really seem to care why I didn’t want it. It was all about him and his needs. Ugh.
- Yup, he was cheating on me. No wonder the guy had initially been so cool with not having sex — the bastard was getting it elsewhere. I saw a text on his phone from another woman about the night they’d spent together. My gut had been right.
- Of course, he tried to turn the tables. Not having sex with him turned out to be a way for him to turn the tables on me, or at least try. When I confronted him about the text, he said I was the problem because I had snooped through his phone and I clearly had been cheating for months because I never wanted sex. Um, no. Lame attempt, loser.
- I learned the importance of being different. He had been a bad boy and player and I didn’t want to be like all the other women who had fallen into bed with him. I saw the lustful looks he got when we were out in public and I wanted to be myself and hold onto my dignity. I wanted to know where I stood with someone and be with someone who respected me. Holding back was the best way to see what he was really like.
- I learned the value of not jumping in. If I had had sex with this guy from the beginning of our relationship, it might have prevented me from seeing all the dodgy things that were there. We would have been high on each other but not really in a healthy relationship, and I am damn sure the loser still would’ve cheated because he was dodgy AF. I dodged a bullet.
