The 25 Year-old Egyptian Male Virgin From Craigslist
Most people end up doing weird shit in high school, college or their twenties.
Not me. I lost my fucking mind in my thirties.
I became an alcoholic and frequently started sleeping with random strangers. I blacked out so much I can barely piece together what the hell happened. There are huge chunks of my life I have lost forever. But one thing I retained through all this madness was my morbid dread of sexually transmitted diseases. Even during my drunken sexual escapades, I remember vividly ensuring that I engaged in safe sex. “No condom, no sex” was my motto. Many of the men I slept with were heavy drinkers too, so sex didn’t really happen too frequently.
Fast forward to 2006. I moved to San Diego in a feeble attempt to quit drinking and sleeping with strangers. Addicts do this kind of thing a lot, I discovered. It’s the location fix. It never works, though.
Anyway, one day I had the great idea that all my sexual hang-up issues could be solved by having sex with a virgin. I thought to myself, “Then I can finally relax and have sex without freaking out about STD’s! That would be wonderful!” My search on Craigslist began that day. Within two days of putting the search term, virgin, in the male-looking-for-female section, I found a pretty good lead. His entry went like this:
I’m a 25 year-old virgin. I attend college and am from Egypt. I come from a family that still practices arranged marriages, so I will be returning to my home country after I graduate from college and marrying someone my parents choose for me. I’m getting really nervous every day because I can’t stop thinking about sex. It feels like everyone else is experiencing this except for me. It’s driving me insane. I can’t focus on my studies or anything else. I also can’t date any American girls because I would feel bad about not being able to marry them. I don’t want to be dishonest. That would go against my religion and my morals. But I’m going crazy and can’t get sex off my mind. Help.
When I found this post, I couldn’t let go of it. I was scared it might be fake and that he might be some psychopathic killer, but the vulnerability contained within it seemed real to me. After days of studying the post, I decided to go for it. I wrote to him and we corresponded a bit via email and talked for a while on the phone. He sounded normal and my gut instincts told me that he was okay. We agreed to meet soon in a public place.
We met at a fish taco restaurant. I was shocked by how attractive and nice he was. He said he was similarly surprised that I was so friendly and good-looking.
After our initial meeting, we discussed our next date. We decided he would spend the night at my apartment the following night. The tension in him while we discussed this was intense.
He arrived around 7 pm at my apartment. I had started drinking beer around 4 pm. He sat down on a chair and we began talking about neutral topics. He was slim, wore a gold chain and had short brown hair and brown eyes. He dressed in a casual, neutral style. He was quite attractive, had a medium build and a reserved nature. He was very pleasant in many ways.
He told me about his family and how they would be arranging a marriage for him when he returned to Egypt. He expressed his guilt about the idea of trying to date American women. He said he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He said he couldn’t live with himself. He wasn’t raised in a society that approved of casual sex, but he was also going crazy, thinking about sex all the time. He said he was trapped in a mental state.
We were both a bit nervous the entire time we talked. The question loomed large in both of our minds: who would make the first move?
I wasn’t as nervous as he was, but I definitely felt awkward. I had already agreed to have sex with him, but I had never been in such an awkward situation as this. It started to feel contrived, a mistake.
But we continued talking. After a while, he checked his phone then got up the nerve to ask timidly, “When do you think we, uh, er….. can do it?”
I decided to do something. I got up, turned out the light and said, “Now.”
He nervously took off his clothes and I helped him with that. We both jumped into bed and began kissing. He was trembling with fright. His body was really smooth. I don’t know what I was expecting but he definitely exceeded all my expectations as far as his nice looks and personality. I suddenly had the feeling of being lucky.
We kissed for a while longer and I noticed his dick was pretty hard by this point. I then guided his penis into me, after helping him with a condom. For once, my mind wasn’t obsessing about the horrible STD’s I’d be contracting in the morning. My mind, instead, was focused on the emotional void of this sexual encounter. I enjoyed the sensations and the lack of morbid fear but I wasn’t able to lose myself completely in the moment. I thought about the transient nature of the experience and how this situation would not truly solve my issues with fears about STD’s. It suddenly occurred to me that my fear of STD’s was most likely masking a bigger, more lethal fear……the fear of intimacy. And this was definitely not solving that issue.
There was no sexual passion for me that night. There were no emotions exchanged, but somewhere inside me, I was genuinely happy that the Egyptian virgin’s tormented mind was released from its prison. I was happy for him. Sometimes life is not about attaining your own happiness. Sometimes it’s about someone else’s journey. And my life is richer because of it.
Stellabelle is the pseudonym for Leah Stephens. She just finished her first non-fiction book, Un-Crap Your Life.
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