Catholic Guilt Ruined My Sex Life

After having a lot of really boring, quick, missionary sex with my then-boyfriend, I convinced him to try something different. We didn’t get crazy or do anything or too different, I just prepared a romantic bubble bath with candles, hoping for some long, meaningful eye gazing while we tried something a bit more exciting than our usual scuttled dick probing.

We got into the bath and I awkwardly slid my body onto his. But anyone who’s ever tried to have a sexy bath knows it’s nothing like in the movies. You get soap in your eye and trying to choreograph the mutual undulations of two bodies is like trying to walk over smooth, slimy stones quickly in bare feet. So I coaxed him out of the bath and onto the ledge next to it, which incidentally faced a large mirror. Straddling him, I told him I wanted to watch.

“Watch… what?” he asked.

“Us!” I replied, “Don’t you think that’s sexy?”

“I suppose…” he trailed off.

In my mind, I wondered what kind of a man could possibly be hesitant about watching a woman with perfect 20-year-old breasts reverse cowgirl him in the mirror. Now I was hesitant too. Could it be that my breasts weren’t as perfect as I thought they were? Was I so hideous he didn’t want to see me full frontal?

But I turned around anyway and kept fucking him. I could see us reflected in the mirror and I thought I looked great (I was pretty wrapped up in watching myself for a while) but he… he had his face pressed into my shoulder. He wasn’t looking.

“Look baby. Look!” I told him. What he said next was the beginning of the end for us.

“I can’t,” he replied, “it’s just… gross. It’s wrong.”

If you think the worst time to extricate someone dick from yourself is when you’re mad, imagine what it’s like when your boyfriend has made you feel like a total whore. And not just any whore, like an old-timey pirate movie wench who’s always drunk and has no teeth and pushes her rouged-up old tits onto any peg-leg that’ll take her.

After I put an end to our ill-fated watery adventure, he wouldn’t look me in the eye. Instead, he showered, put on pajamas, and went to bed. I got in next to him and tossed and turned until I got up the courage to wake him up and ask him if he thought I was sexy.

“It’s not that you’re not sexy, but I just wasn’t raised to see ‘sexy.’ It makes me feel awkward,” he said. He told me about his strict Catholic upbringing and how it was sinful for us to be having sex out of wedlock, and that his mother would “die” if she ever found out. I was the second girl he’d ever slept with, but he still made me feel cheap.

We loved each other, but he still saw our intimacy as somehow repulsive, and I sometimes felt like he resented me for “allowing” him to have sex with me. Sometimes, when we hadn’t had sex in weeks, I’d implore him to please just fuck me (yes, I begged for sex, don’t pretend you haven’t, also, sometimes begging is hot) and he would say things like, “Sex is the least important part of a relationship,” and “It’s offensive to me how much you care about sex,” or, when it was really bad he’d refer to my “promiscuity” as “unattractive” in far less kind words.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have stuck around with him as long as I did, but mamma didn’t raise no quitter, and besides, he was cute and funny the rest of the time. It was just the sex that he struggled with. And sometimes classism. And racism. I convinced myself (or he convinced me) that it wasn’t important, and we both used his Catholicism as an excuse. He’d never been allowed in sex education classes in school, his parents never discussed sex with him and his whole life he’d been told sex was bad, so the way he was treating me wasn’t really his fault.

Except that it completely was. There are Catholics who fuck all the time. There’s Madonna. And for the most part, aside from his parents, he was brought up in a very liberal environment, surrounded by hookers like me, and his equally un-godly, sex-crazed male peers.

After we broke up, we saw each other at a party. We were both hammered, and he led me into a bathroom where he ripped my dress off, pushed me up against the sink and absolutely smashed me. It was the best sex we’d ever had.

Afterwards, as we were dressing, he caught my eye, and I could have sworn there were seething laser beams of hate just slicing right through me, cutting up my slut vagina. But he hugged me tightly before we left the room, and I thought maybe he had changed. Maybe he’d shook off his hang-ups and was learning to question the dogmatic philosophies with which he’d been brought up.

A week later, I found out he’d told all his friends I was a filthy whore. But as a close friend once said to me, “Please, Jesus’ girlfriend was a prostitute. Don’t even try to tell me the dude didn’t get mad ass pussy up in his business all the time.” Preach.

@Kat_George

Previously:

The First Time I Got Eaten Out

Why Period Sex Is the Best Sex