As I mentioned many many blog posts back, I’m working on a book manuscript. The working title is Sex 101: An Introductory Guide for Christian Virgins. I’ll include some excerpts from my introduction below, but before I get to that, I’d like to take a moment to ask anyone who is willing to help me out by answering some survey questions.

While the book is mainly going to be about and from my perspective, I’d like to make it a little more comprehensive by including completely anonymous perspectives from others. I’d also like to make sure some assumptions that I’m making are correct, and the best way to do that is to get feedback from people other than myself.

So if you wouldn’t mind helping out, please take a moment to think about and respond to the following questions.

I realize these are intensely personal questions, so please feel free to respond to these anonymously. You can do so by entering a fake name and email in the comment boxes. Even if you do give me your real name, I will not use it in the book manuscript.

1) What is one of your earliest memories concerning something sexual? How old were you when it occurred?

2) Who or what first taught you what sex means? (i.e. parents, siblings, internet, television, etc.) How do you think that shaped your early view of sexuality?

3) Did you or other adolescents you knew engage in premarital sexual activity? (anything beyond kissing) If yes, how did you feel about this spiritually?

4) Give one word that most strongly resembles your feelings toward sexuality when you were a child.

5) Give one word that most strongly resembles your feelings toward sexuality when you were an adolescent.

6) As a child and as an adolescent, how did you think that God viewed sexuality? How did you think that the Church viewed sexuality? Please describe any specific experiences that led you to your beliefs.

That’s it for now. I’ll probably be posting some other surveys for book research in the future as I progress through the manuscript. Thanks in advance to anyone brave enough to share your experiences! If you prefer to have only me view your response but you would still like it to be anonymous, leave a comment with a fake name/email and ask me in the first sentence of your comment to change it from public to private view. If you don’t care if I see your name/email, feel free to email your comments to me at angel.e.bolka@gmail.com or send me a message on Facebook.

Here is an excerpt from my introduction about why I’m writing this book:

One of the side effects of removing all things that even hint at sexuality from your life is that when the time for marriage finally comes, you’re not quite sure what to think. I graduated from a conservative Christian college and realized soon after that times had changed for my friends and me. Several of us were in serious relationships, and engagements were on the horizon. Suddenly sex wasn’t some far-off taboo that needed to be avoided at all costs. It was approaching like an out-of-control freight train, and for the first time in our lives, we weren’t supposed to dive out of the way before any damage could be done.

I remember having a conversation with my boyfriend during our senior year of college. I told him how terrified I was to have sex – that I had spent my entire Christian life avoiding it and fearing it, and I didn’t know how I would be able to easily change my feelings about it once we got married. He was kind and sympathetic, but he also asked me to pray and think about how that transition to married life and sexual freedom could be healthy. Our conversation motivated me to begin researching healthy, married sex.

I found some great resources that taught how Christians could have fantastic married sex. The only problem was that most of those resources spent about two pages focusing on people like me – people who knew about sex and had all these great fantasies that sex would be wonderful, but in reality had no idea what they were getting into and were pretty scared to find out.

Some of the resources I found were quite graphic. They included diagrams of vaginas and cervixes. They encouraged readers – virgins and non-virgins alike – to take out a mirror and examine themselves. I was trying to wrap my mind around the idea of having happily married sex, but I was not ready to examine my cervix. First of all, the very thought of it was gross. Secondly, I still had strong impressions that sex – and everything that had to do with it – was bad. I wasn’t married yet, and I certainly didn’t want reading these books to bring even more temptation into my relationship with my boyfriend.

So I stopped researching and decided I would figure it all out later….

Basically, this book is the result of my “figuring it out later.” I’m writing it with the hope that others will be able to have a comprehensive resource in dealing with these kinds of issues a little more thoroughly before the honeymoon. It’s the book that I wish I had found. Now that I have some more free time, I’m hoping to get a completed manuscript finished within the next month or two. Your prayers and research support are greatly appreciated!

I have a doctor’s appointment scheduled this Friday, my first since last October. Not October as in three months ago, but the October before that, right after we got engaged. I knew that engaged women need to go to the doctor and figure out “family planning.” All the Christian relationship/engagement/sex books talk about that. So within three weeks of our engagement, Matt and I were sitting in the doctor’s office talking about contraception methods. I was nervous, as I always am when going to the doctor, but overall it wasn’t too awful. I didn’t feel like she gave us too many revelations, but she did support our decision to go with birth control pills as the cheapest, most foolproof method.

She scheduled me for a pap smear the next week and said she would write me a birth control prescription when I was ready to start taking it.

The next week I went back for the pap smear and promptly regretted our decision to get married. It was SO painful. I had heard that it would be uncomfortable, but that it shouldn’t be painful. So when it hurt, I told my doctor, and she tried a smaller instrument. It still hurt, just as badly, so she stopped and said that since it was hurting, I shouldn’t have a pap smear done until after I was sexually active.

Wait. So sex is going to hurt this badly??

I tried asking her some clarifying questions to see why it was better to have my husband hurt me this much rather than a doctor.

“It won’t hurt the same when you break your hymen having sex,” she said. “It will be quicker and you’ll want to do it. It’s better than having your hymen stretched during a pap smear.”

I walked out of the exam room with a newfound awe for every married woman I saw. I stared at the receptionist’s wedding ring as I turned in my paperwork after the appointment. How did she endure such pain? How is she so happy, calm, and normal?

I walked bowlegged for two days after that attempted pap smear, and it wasn’t even a FULL procedure! She never even got near the cervix!

So here we are, over a year later.

Our insurance has changed, so I’m going to a new doctor. Sex doesn’t hurt anymore (that is a story for another self-disclosing post), and I’m pretty sure my hymen is stretched enough to handle the pap smear this time.

But my general fear of doctors and my memory of the last pap smear are not making it easy to approach this next appointment with peace. What if she isn’t gentle enough? Honestly, the idea of anything touching my cervix still weirds the heck out of me, the same kind of feeling I get when someone tries to stick a finger in my belly button. It’s not painful, exactly, but it’s intolerable.

So that’s where I’m at this week…dreading Friday’s cold, sterile table, barely-there paper gown, and awkward stirrups. I guess it seems a little silly to pray about a pap smear in light of global tragedies like Haiti’s earthquake, but thankfully God is big enough to handle both. I will be praying during that appointment and asking for supernatural peace. I’ll let you know how it goes.  Fortunately, I have Avatar to look forward to on Saturday as a reward for my suffering on Friday.

P.S. Something funny: When I showed this post to Matt, he said, “Wow. That’s really self-disclosing. But I like it. It’s from the heart…or from the cervix.”

I get this question a lot.  ”So… how’s married life?” I often find it hard to explain, since I don’t go through my day thinking about how things are different now that I am no longer single.  I usually respond with, “Umm… it’s good.”

Sitting down and thinking about it, there’s a lot that’s different about married life.  To let you know, I have: lived in my parents’ home (20 years, baby!), in a dorm at school, and with four other guys in a house.  Marriage is very different from all three of them, especially the last one.  In fact, it’s kind of funny to think of how different living with four guys is from one woman.  Here’s the breakdown:

Laundry: It was a glorious day the first day after the wedding that I rushed off to my Wushu class. I had thought that my workout shirt would be sweaty and smelly from the last class, but magically it was clean and hung in the closet.  It was as if the laundry fairies had visited our apartment!

Cooking: Before getting married, I lived with Dan Matundan, a graduate of the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Chicago.  The other guys liked cooking too, not to mention myself.  I seriously gained fat and weight when I lived there (more on that later).  We had food all the time.  There were always leftovers, and when there weren’t there was someone cooking.  We had meat pretty much every meal, and always extra.

Cooking for two is a bit different than for five.  We eat well, but I notice that food goes bad in the fridge a lot more often than in the other house.  On the other hand, I am eating less meat, more vegetables, and less overall.

Date Night Every Night: Well, maybe not every night.  Not too much staying up late and talking, either.  But, it is nice not to have to “go home” at the end of the night.  Movie nights, eating in… I’m a fan.

Sex: Well, let’s just say it didn’t happen before and it does now, end of story.

When we went to China, our professor told us to take pictures, journal, and remember what it was to first see things.  He told us this because we would soon take the differences for granted, and forget the differences.  I think the same thing about marriage, remember the nice little things before they settle into regular life.

You’re probably all dying to hear about Matt’s other passions (I’ll give you a hint about one of his major passions–it was the very last thing he wrote about in the previous post) or at the least some controversial theology…

But, unfortunately, once again, life finds us ridiculously busy.

I work 34 hours a week at Matt’s company, Simple Truths and baby-sit for 8 hours on Friday nights, so my schedule is getting pretty packed.  We have enjoyed a few more get-togethers with some of our neighbors and hope to have more in the future.  We’ve been keeping up with some friends, but there are many more who remain on our list of friends we need to hang out with soon, but haven’t been able to yet.  (Parties are a great way to reconnect with many people at once.  Keep having them, everyone!)

Our weekends have been pretty busy lately with family coming in from Indiana to visit us.  This weekend we are going to the gospel choir concert at Wheaton.  For Thanksgiving, we are going to Michigan and then Toronto to visit Matt’s family.  Then after that, Christmas craziness starts.  Every weekend is already full of parties, get-togethers, concerts, etc.  Lots of stuff going on, but it will all be fun.  Just no time for blogging

But we WILL try to make time for some meaningful posts.  I was just encouraged this morning by our Axiom meeting to begin working on my book for real.  I have a little dream to write a book designed for engaged Christians a.k.a. sex newbs.  I looked everywhere for a book designed for that purpose before we got married and found nothing fully devoted to that subject.  I like writing and opining, so I figured I would make an attempt to put something out there.  If nothing else, you may be seeing a lot of posts related to the book as I work on it over the next several months.

Well, time to hit the sack.  We played volleyball tonight at church.  It was saweet, but we’re both pretty pooped now.  Till next time!