“Still no—after all, we were first.”
On the airport shuttle, she rested her head on my knee. Eleven months apart.
- You’ve been well?
- Yeah. You?
- Same.
After the clipped greeting, her breath grazed my nape. In the half-light of two a.m. her fingertip brushed mine. I seized it by reflex; she trembled.
Still the same, then.
You still haven’t done it?
We were a late first love, both near thirty: senior and junior in the same graduate circle. Three years together, yet my hand had never slipped beneath her bra.
“I won’t—until we’re married.” She said it the morning after our first kiss. I thought it simple conservatism, nodded awkwardly. At first.
Laboratory of Desire
The prohibition became an odd experiment. Whenever we lay side by side, we never crossed the invisible meridian; instead, we traced that border like mad cartographers.
- I could spend an hour sucking the alabaster curve of her neck.
- I could rake my nails to within a millimeter of her breasts.
- She could moan, I could throb, so long as the red line stayed intact.
Sujin’s Story
“We kissed for over an hour straight,” Sujin, twenty-nine, told me last week—days after her own wedding. After seven years together she and her husband had finally spent their first night as a married couple. Both once devout Protestants, she assumed that explained the wait. But in year three she rifled his wallet while he slept and found a receipt for contraceptives. Someone else had already known him that way.
From that night Sujin grew adamant.
“Then I must hold out longer. Only by keeping mine can I eclipse his past.”
Joon-kyu and Ha-eun, Dead End
Joon-kyu, thirty-one, surrendered six months before the wedding. “I can’t do this anymore.” He had slept with a previous girlfriend years earlier; Ha-eun, twenty-nine, was still a virgin.
He burned; she remained calm.
- Still no.
- Why?
- If you take me now, my first time will belong to a husband who isn’t you.
That sentence scalded him for life. On their wedding night Ha-eun wept and whispered:
“Now it can be you. Because—truth is—I wanted it too.”
Why We Worship the Taboo
Virginity is not mere belief; it is the last fortress of power. By barricading her body, a woman stretches a man’s desire toward the infinite. He, in turn, pours that boundless ache back upon her. The cycle is narcotic: the longer the abstinence, the fiercer the dopamine rush.
So the night before our wedding, my lover said:
- You waited so long.
- No, I loved it.
- Really?
- Yes. Thanks to you, I realized how purely I can covet.
She laughed, then breathed against my ear:
“And I discovered how cruel I can be while you held back.”
How Long Can You Wait?
Wedding day. I headed for the bride’s waiting room. Friends blocked the door, but one look from her scattered them. I paused at the threshold, turned the knob.
She stood in white, makeup not yet applied, her lips thin.
- You came.
- I did.
- Even today… would it be all right?
- If you want.
Silence. She stepped close and whispered:
“But after today we’ll never have to wait again. So perhaps today is no longer special.”
In those words I heard the brutal truth: the taboo we guarded would vanish the instant marriage unlocked it.
How long can you wait for someone? And if, at the end, the waiting itself disappears—how then will you love them?