There’s nothing wrong with having sex before marriage, but if your moral or religious beliefs make you want to wait until you say “I do” to be intimate with someone, that’s OK too. That was the case for 23-year-old Stephanie Muller, a Christian woman who chose to save herself for her husband… only to find out that she couldn’t actually do it when the time came.
Incredibly Brave Woman to share this ❤️ I truly believe if it wasn’t for the ✈️ that made me pay attention to my body I would have found out the hard way on my wedding night too. #VictoryOverPelvicPain Insta https://t.co/dWiVci0tpJ
— Mel (@xo_mellyb) January 9, 2020
- Stephanie met her husband Andrew in 2013. The pair met in 2013 at their church in New York, though it wasn’t until two years later that they actually started dating (likely due to Stephanie’s age since she would have been 17 or so then, while Andrew is eight years older). In 2017, after dating for two years, they got married.
- They planned to have sex on their honeymoon. Of course they did! They’d probably been going nuts not being able to be intimate in that way for so long, so it was going to be a wonderful occasion.
- Unfortunately, it wasn’t the wonderful occasion they hoped it would be. When Stephanie and Andrew tried to have sex, Stephanie found penetration nearly impossible and incredibly painful. She ended up getting a terrible yeast infection, medication for which didn’t help take the infection away. In fact, she ended up suffering with it for three months!
- A pelvic exam exposed a major problem. The exam was so painful that Stephanie was left screaming, crying, and shaking. However, doctors still weren’t able to diagnose her with any conditions. Instead, she waited for the infection to clear and decided to try again.
- Then came a devastating diagnosis. Unfortunately, even after Stephanie’s infection cleared up, she still wasn’t able to have sex with Andrew and she was finally forced to seek help from her gynecologist and tell her about what had been going on. She was eventually diagnosed with vaginismus, which causes an involuntary contraction of the vaginal muscles making sex uncomfortable at best and pretty much impossible at worst.
- The gynecologist had a suggestion. “She told me about Women’s Therapy Centre, which is a treatment clinic on Long Island that cures vaginismus and told me that if I wasn’t able to go there, I could try to take Vicodin in order to have sex with my husband,” Stephanie recalled. “It felt like a pretty insensitive suggestion to just throw it out there, and I just remember crying the entire rest of the day.”
- Stephanie tried to solve the problem herself. She refused to take Vicodin and instead bought a dilator set to try and help herself. She didn’t find them helpful, though, and did eventually seek help at the Women’s Therapy Center, which she says was a game-changer.
- Therapy helped solve the problem. Stephanie and Andrew had their first appointment at the Women’s Therapy Center in Long Island in January 2019 and by May, Stephanie said she was completely healed. No doubt it was an incredible relief given how much she struggled with not being able to consummate her relationship with her husband. “My husband and I have talked about how vaginismus really desexualised our relationship; it was almost like living with a roommate,” she admitted. “We would even be careful about other physical things because neither of us wanted to suggest trying to have sex, be disappointed, and the night ending in tears.”
- While she’s healed, she still wants to help others who may be struggling. Stephanie hopes that by speaking out about vaginismus, she can help to cancel the “massive lack of awareness about” the condition because “where there is a lack of knowledge, there is fear.” Good for her!
