What did chastity mean to me, all my life?

Sure, we all have limits. Just because I didn't have a boyfriend, I announced recently, didn't mean that boys didn't want to sleep with me. TONS of boys did! I could've got married if I wanted to!- That last bit is a bit well-, but all of a sudden I was awash in an orgy of excess. Lots of people wanted me! I'm hot, damnit! Boys were lining up to sleep with me. I'm not the stigmatised virgin.

And then I had to ask myself why it mattered. Is my spirit not strong enough to brave a little transient scorn, in favour of something lasting and more enduring? All my life I've answered yes to that question, and have seen people who once believed otherwise, acknowledge its power, and this transcendent path continues to reassure me now.

I had one guiding truism in my life, to be married, and in a spiritual, deep commitment with another human being. I didn't expect the other to be perfect- they could quite leave me, or cheat on me. One of the things about life is that it is alive with that sort of possibility, and is chock a block with dizzying unpredictability. But I knew that I wouldn't regret giving it my best shot even if some sort of calamity occurred. In life, my parents taught me to always enter into your endeavours- like marriage, with your fullest effort. Then, even if things go wrong, you can at least feel that you gave it a fair go.

I wasn't always sure that I wanted to be married. All I knew is that the other sorts of connections that I braved witness to were deeply unsatisfactory. It didn't resonate with me to have ten, twenty or thirty partners. Even now, I'd watch my roommates lie about sleeping with different men, generally because they were ashamed- ashamed of having done it, but even more profoundly, ashamed of being rejected, or severing the relationship. And they had been uprooted from their body's deepest sharing so many different times- sometimes by socially guided, personal whim, often by the whims of the men that they were with. They suffered. And they hardened their hearts. They wouldn't put so much effort in next time. They wouldn't have patience again because it was all too much- to hope and then not care. In the insignia of the modern era, one of the guys whose blog I used to read penned the following line for his personal interests: "caring but not caring".

"Caring but not caring"- it was the ultimate suave, in rico, one of the most fluid and admirable ways of epitomizing exactly how we should be. Care enough to shag her and make her breakfast. But don't mind when she walks away, because that's just not cool.

Yet the girls I lived with did mind. It really bothered them, but they hid it, awash in the little packages of birth control pills, the flavoured condoms, and the graphic details on how best to have bondage sex and tie successful rope knots at our local campus women's centre. Somehow no one was teaching them how to untie the knots in their heartstrings, their memories, and their loss of faith that when you invest in someone, he is there for you. Instead they got older, and stopped remembering what it was like to have a lasting bond with any partner at all. Sometimes they slept with one guy, then another, then they hooked back up with the first guy again. And they stopped being so nice because lots of people had stepped on them. Yet still they cried over various men, and wondered what was wrong with them. But at this point they were like addicts. They didn't know how all of this had started. It seemed, though, that their own capacity for bonding was so damaged, they couldn't stop. Or else they just couldn't find anybody who was willing to give up on the surfeit of free sex and relinquish their own addiction to consider them.

Alcohol, the classic helper, did its damage when it came to lacerating these girls as well. Without it, many of the wild tales and fast times might've been subject to a person's natural inhibitions. I've listened to stories from young, beautiful women that would shock any society. They would get so drunk that that they would be vomiting everywhere, and the guys who brought them home would throw them in the shower, rinse them off, and then throw them into their beds to have encounters that the girls would barely remember later. The girls who told me these stories afterward would wish they hadn't occurred, but no one had created a safe space for them, of help and love and acceptance- so that they had the strength to resist the lure of these mistakes, for which the ground was prepared by popular culture.

In an era where one of the most inspirational movies is American Pie, in which a bevy of young men and women must shed the terrible burden of their virginity before they leave for the adult world of college, young women have hardly anywhere to turn to be safe, to be cherished, to be loved without having to sacrifice their bodies, their esteem and their self worth. The narratives being put forward for the young American girl, and those minorities that are to be deemed socially acceptable assimilates are ones which fundamentally betray them as creatures of beauty and wonder worth nourishing and sustaining so that they can make maximum contributions to the greatness of western society.

I am not the only one to have walked away from this taut tightrope, a barely realized juggernaut through which young women seek to shape their reality. A whole generation of women, and its leaders, are slowly starting to realize where they were being let down. But as long as people believe that "caring but not caring" is the cynosure of social success, and the credo of belong, young men and women will continue to falter in building a place where less people suffer and more people succeed. And avoiding that bleak future should be what we all want.