My Story: Having Sex and Living with Vaginismus

ARB talks about living with vaginismus and her expectations for sex.

 

Transcript:

OBOS Today: When you like mentioned kind of like almost accepting that this is like what sex was going to be for you, I guess just like how did that feel and like did you feel like you had a way forward at all?

ARB: You know I felt a lot of shame and embarrassment to be very frank about it because I think that I have had a lot of, and probably still do, like have a lot of expectations for myself.

And like what is the right way to act especially as a young, you know, a young woman.

And like—

Which makes it sound a lot more frumpy than it is, but you know if you’re a young person, like you should be free and like have lowering inhibitions and up for anything, you know.

And I felt very like embarrassed that I was not that person or that I could appear to be that person.

And then once like I was in that setting like shut freezing made me feel like very awkward or hard to open up to people who I would be may be interested in having sex with, you know?

And then so I think that that coupled again with this fear of pregnancy, fear of birth control, made me I feel like abstinence might be like the best option even though that wasn’t what I wanted either,

But feeling like what like if I can’t talk about this with anybody and if these things are so intense, like I think a lot of a lot of what happened was I just had a lot of internal shame and negative associations with sex rather than you know, pleasure.