Ch
Author's note: although this contains erotic material, it is more of a discussion about chastity, especially as practised within marriage. Please do not be disappointed at the lack of hardcore erotica
I've long been interested in chastity. Why couples or individuals would want to practice it. What happens when one half of a couple wants to practice it and the other doesn't. It's not much of a thing in the UK, but when on holiday in the U.S.A. I sought out people involved in the chastity movement. One woman in particular - I'll call her Annie - gave me a detailed and articulate account of her journey, which I've done my best to replicate here. I hope it will be of interest.
Annie is a fine-looking well-built woman in her early forties. She has an air of self-confidence, of knowing her own mind
'Thank you,' she said, when I told her. 'But it wasn't always that way. My husband and I married young. He was very highly sexed - I thought I was too - you were supposed to be back in those days - but I couldn't begin to keep up with him. I tried. I was flattered by his desire for me, and I wanted to please him. But it took only a year or two for me to realise that I really did not want to have sex day in day out. But my husband was always so persuasive - it was generally easier to open my legs for him and let him have what he wanted than to say no.
So things continued until, aged thirty, I gave birth to our first child. It was a difficult birth, I was sore for a long time afterwards and - as any new mother will know - exhausted. Sex was the last thing on my mind. My husband tried to be understanding, but he has his needs too, and so, when I didn't fall asleep the moment my head hit the pillow I would sometimes give him hand relief.
My husband hoped that in time I would recover my appetite for sex. In reality it had been in decline for years, and I never recovered what little I'd had. Two years later we had our second child, and after another period of soreness and exhaustion we tried to resume sexual relations. But my heart was not in it. I had sex out of a sense of duty to my husband - but I had come to resent what I now regarded as 'being messed about with'. I was much happier giving him hand relief and being left alone.
I'd been brought up a Christian, but had lapsed from any active participation. Now I began to get involved in my local church again. This church had a chastity group, and out of interest I went along. I had had a somewhat prejudiced view of such groups. I thought of them as populated by Puritan killjoys who disapproved of sex. In fact it was a revelation. I met a number of women, mostly middle-aged or older, whose experience was very similar to my own. They had husbands or partners. They had children. They had had an active sex life. Now they had lost all interest in sex. They wanted a complete break from sex. They wanted to be left alone.
When I heard these women express almost exactly what I felt but had been unable to put into words I felt an immediate kinship. I felt they understood me and I understood them. I told them how things were for me. They listened sympathetically, they welcomed and embraced me - and they told me that unless I followed my inclinations to cease having sex I would be doing violence to myself.
My husband, they told me, had had a good innings. Now it was time to put my own needs first.
When I told my husband I wanted to take up chastity he cried. He said our marriage would be over. The women at the chastity group had warned me he would probably take it like this and advised me what to say. So I assured him that I still loved him, that this didn't mean I wanted to break up our home, and that I wasn't trying to punish him. He had done nothing wrong. This was about me and my needs. I told him I just couldn't go on having sex. He asked: what about him? He couldn't do without.
The chastity group consisted of about fifteen women and three men. The men were all older than my husband, and were quite happy to share what they called the new adventure of chastity with their wives. Their view (and that of the group in general) was that chastity was liberating. By freeing up all the energy that used to go into sex, they had more energy for other projects.
But what of the women in the group? How had they convinced, or pacified, their reluctant husbands?