Dave, no problem at all with questions, though I don't want it to turn into a threadjack. I suppose it's related, though, so I'll answer for now... but if you want to extend the discussion further, we should probably move it to PM's.
Well, "breaking my vow" was a bit more complicated than the usual... when I was 24, after many years of wanting to wait until marriage, I came to the conclusion that it wasn't for me to wait until marriage anymore... that basically I would like to have sex with someone I really loved, but it didn't have to be on my wedding night. This was after a LONG time of thinking about it, talking with other people about it, and just deciding that this was what I wanted. It just didn't go along with my personality anymore, to "save" myself for something like that... I wanted to experience it, just like everyone else, and I didn't really believe in the difference between pure/impure anymore.
Now, things didn't go as planned. There's a thread somewhere in General Discussion where I went into great detail about what happened (can't remember the title at the moment), because basically I got very drunk with a poor choice of people and lost control of the whole situation, and ended up having sex with no one I would have ever had sex with if I was sober.
Some people saw this as a direct result of all my years of oppression, that of course I went "wild" and had sex the first time in a way that no sober, mature person would have chosen to do. I haven't yet decided if this is true, or if I simply made a bad choice to get too drunk one night, and someone was in the position to take advantage of that situation. Honestly, it doesn't really matter, because it was the same result in the end... I was no longer a virgin.
Despite the shock of the means of shedding my virginity, however, in some way it gave me a kind of freedom that I hadn't had before. To answer your question, I think the *way* I had sex for the first time did damage me emotionally in some way, mostly because I was blacked out and could not even remember the event... but the fact that I had had sex outside of marriage was not what damaged me. After so many years of loading so much pressure on that first time, and then to not even be able to remember it... well, you can imagine how sad I was about that.
So I was sad, and angry. But I would not say that I felt guilty, as you asked in your first question. I felt negative about the manner in which it happened, but in some ways I felt positive that the whole thing was over, and that I could now move on and have sex and learn to enjoy it, without the burden of being married.
In the end, I met a very nice boy soon after this whole thing, and we got together and decided to have sex... it was his first time (he was the same age as me), and in my mind, it was pretty much my first time too, at least mentally. I did feel some minor guilt, I think mostly as a residual from my evangelical past, but as a 24 year old woman I felt very justified in making my own sexual choices, being safe about them, and moving on with my life. So I did.
And ended up marrying that man 2.5 years later
, which was kind of ironic... we would have been a good case for the evangelicals to be proud of, in that sense! But my husband is an atheist, and I am agnostic at this point, and this is just what we chose for our lives. There is nothing divine or pure or sinful or impure about any of it. It just IS. And I like it that way.
