Father Knows Best
By Amanda Robb
“It awakened everything in me,”
Lauren says later of her first kiss. “It
was beyond. I was just like, Wow!”
“Wow” is also how she describes
her first night with Brett after their
wedding reception, when they
checked in to the Broadmoor Hotel.
An explicit promise of the virginity-until-
marriage movement is that if
you wait for the big day to have intercourse,
the sex will be mind-blowing.
(A popular public-school sex-ed
curriculum in Colorado is called “Wait
Training: Learn How to Have the Best
Sex — By Waiting Until Marriage!”) In
their hotel room, the first thing
Lauren did was get a basin and water
pitcher and wash Brett’s feet.
Come again?
“My spiritual gift is serving,” she
explains. “And I wanted to show
Brett, ‘I’m here to love you, follow
you, and serve you.’”
Oh.
After drying her new husband’s
feet, the night only got better. “It was
incredible,” Lauren says of losing her
virginity.
I push for details.
She sticks to “incredible.”
I describe the first time I had sex. I
was 17, and my boyfriend’s parents
were out of town. My boyfriend (Bob),
his buddy, my best friend (Jen), and I
were at his house fooling around, and
Jen came into Bob’s bedroom and said,
“I’ll do it if you do it.” We all did it.
In Bob’s bedroom there was some
confusion about mechanics (hips
synchronized or in opposition?), a bit of
discomfort on my part, and a little performance
anxiety on his. Afterward,
Jen and I confabbed and decided that
sex had “potential.”
Lauren nods and smiles.
I flat-out ask if she has orgasms.
She defers with an “it’s amazing.”
Three weeks after their
wedding, I visit Lauren at
their apartment near
Luke Air Force Base in
Arizona, where Brett is
temporarily stationed. She looks the
same — smiling, doll-like. When we sit
down to talk, Lauren tells me about a
17-year-old girl she met in the computer
room of her new apartment complex.
Crying, the girl told Lauren, “I
think my fiancé’s cheating on me, and
I’m trying to figure out what to do
because I’m pregnant with his kid.”
“And I thought, Oh, that’s really
interesting,” says Lauren. “She’s had
sex with him, and now she’s opened the
door to fear and rejection. What’s she
going to do if he leaves? She’s got his
child, she’s only 17, she didn’t graduate
high school. Now what?”
Lauren thinks the trouble began
when the couple had sex. I think the
trouble began when that girl didn’t use
birth control. Before I’ve put these
thoughts into words, Lauren continues.
“For me,” she says, “I’m stronger as a
woman because I came into marriage
as a virgin. I’m whole.”
Despite my past lovers, I feel remarkably
whole, too, and tell Lauren so.
“But when you’ve saved yourselves
for only each other, there’s
trust,” she says. “Now I’m able to
give Brett everything. I know that
I’m the only one who knows him intimately.
I’m not afraid of, ‘When is he
going to ditch me?’ or ‘Will he cheat on me?’”
I hold the opposite view. It’s kind of like dieting: Limit
me to vanilla wafers, and I’ll be craving a bakery. And
while I sampled many cookies before getting hitched, I
never worry that either of us is going to stray.
That night in Arizona, Lauren, Brett, and I dine at a
restaurant across from Wal-Mart called Mimi’s. She
wears a beaded gauzy top, he wears a T-shirt that
shows off his admirable muscles. They sit side by side
and share shy smiles, looking and acting like a couple
who just met — which, in many ways, is what they are.
Unlike my husband and me after we married, Lauren
doesn’t automatically know what Brett will order. He
stares intently at Lauren when I ask her a question —
not sure what she’ll answer. He’s amused to learn that
Lauren feels like they are playing house; she’s surprised
that Brett feels guilty when he lingers at the
base after work. They are great mysteries to each
other, but even so — or maybe because of that — the
sexual heat between them is palpable.
Lauren says she embraces her new life as a stay-at-home
wife, spending her days cleaning, grocery shopping,
decorating, e-mailing, “then waiting for Brett to
get home.” Though she misses her family, she’s determined
to succeed in her new role. “I see my life as
helping Brett,” she says. I tell her it sounds like she’s
giving up her personal freedom. She disagrees.
“Freedom,” she says, “comes from living within
boundaries. It’s like driving. There are lanes and
signs — which some might find constraining — but if
they weren’t there, it would be chaos.” Stay in your
lane, though, and it’s easy to get where you want to go.
Before I catch a plane back to New York, Lauren
and I visit the mall to get our eyes done at a MAC
cosmetics counter. Lauren looks modelesque in a
range of plums; I look like a large leprechaun in a
trio of lime greens. As we laugh together over that
girly universal, eyeshadow, you’d never know that
Lauren fears for my marriage and maybe my soul,
and I fear that she — a bright, passionate girl — is living
a subjugated life.
I rub the green grub from my eyelids and mutter
obscenities about evil makeup pushers as we leave the
store. Lauren giggles, and we step out into the blinding
Arizona sun. We agree — oddly, in a way only two
women who have shared a beauty ritual can — that
perhaps subjugation depends on your point of view.
Consider Randy. Consider Lindsay, Paris, and Britney.
Consider the thousands of American high-school students
taking a sex-ed class that suggests the only thing
you need to know about sex is how not to have it.
For now, ours is a confused culture in a free country.
Lauren and I find our car and, burning our fingertips
on the hot metal, unlock it. Soon, to the tune of the
Kelly Clarkson song, I mentally sing, “Go forth and
search for love any way you can.”
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