I had created a blog about remaining sexually abstinant. I don't update it anymore, but I thought I'd repost an old entry here.Maybe it will resonate with someone out there?------[This was written just over a year ago:] The troubling thing that I can’t seem to get past is that I need her to have waited, too. I’ve always felt this way. Now, it's become agonizing. For the majority of my life, I’ve just never seen myself doing it with someone who’s already done it with someone else.Following a conversation about this with a girl last night that brought up tumultuous feelings in me, I’m trying to figure out just why. Not why I want to wait, but why I can’t fathom haveing sex for the first time with someone who’s done it with someone else. I'm struggling to understand what this boils down to for me. It’s not easy, but I feel I must reach a tangible reason in order to reconcile my deep-seated wish to wait with my powerful feelings of lust.I’m not “lucky” enough to be able to attribute my wish to wait to religious beliefs (though I believe in God). And I’m not looking for a significant other who’s religiously orthodox; to the contrary, I want to find someone who has faith in God but lives secularly, like me. Someone who’s cool that way.But I’ve seen statistics. The percentage of people my age who have never had sex are, if I recall, in the single digits, or else in the teens. The chances of my meeting someone who I feel attracted to and who’s Jewish and who I hit it off with and who’s never done it with anyone else…It makes me depressed.For most of my life, I’ve thought that the girl I’d get into a long-term relationship with would just understand about waiting. End of story.Of course, if I could find that, all of my worrying would be a moot point. But that’s an ideal. The probability of finding now what I want is, in fact, very low.I’m 28, soon to be 29. Is this something I can compromise on? If so, will there be a turning point?Will I suddenly throw off my inhibitions and succumb to temptation and rid myself— rid myself!— of the stigma of waiting... and waiting for someone ELSE who has waited.--As it stands now, I won’t open myself up romantically to someone who’s had sex. I won’t do it. This is ingrained in me. Of all the hurt that I’ve felt, of all the things I’ve experienced in my life as a young adult, this has been something of myself that I’ve been able to hold on to from when I was younger. Adhering to it is a way of protecting who I was. For all that’s changed over time, this is something I’m still connected to.But it’s not out of stubbornness that I hold onto this. It’s out of hope. A hope for knowing a greater joy. Hope for a more profound sense of excitement and release and closeness and sharing and discovery than I’ve known. I hold onto the “knowledge” buried, safe, that she, too, has been waiting to give up something so special of herself. That when I give it for the first time, she will appreciate it in a way that I will appreciate it from her. That I will give and receive on the same level. That we’ll both go through the same experience that we both know in a secret.Does that make sense to you? Maybe it doesn’t.Anyone I tell this to who’s already had sex… I don’t know as that they’ll really understand. But if someone feels as I do, if she’s looking to be received in such a special way, then the beauty of that understanding between us seems to me so indescribable. In life, there are some things that you can try to explain to people who can’t relate; but in the end, you’ll feel a connection over those things only with people who can.