ghosts from the past

One of the best arguments (though not her intention) for not having pre-marital sex that I've read from a non-Christian:

My relationship with Dan started on rocky footing. When we met, Dan was working through the aftershocks of a torrid affair with an emotionally sadistic, sexually self-aggrandizing woman. She said mean things to him; he said mean things to me (“Why do you kiss like that?”). Not a perfect foundation for a marriage. Nor was the fact that Dan spent the early years of ours writing an erotic bildungsroman about this nightmare ex-girlfriend, the novel at one point ballooning to 500 pages and including references to everyone he’d ever slept with. Even after the book was published, I never quite shook the feeling that my role in Dan’s life was to be the steady, vanilla lay. We never discussed this. We just had a strenuously normal sex, year after year after year...

[With a therapist specializing in sexuality] Dan began with an exhaustive history. “When I was 15 years old I was dating a girl. . . .” I can’t tell you how monumentally tired I was of hearing about Dan’s ex-girlfriends. Could we please never discuss this again? “We had this completely psychologically sadistic thing that was incredibly disturbing to me. . . . Every few years I’d have a relationship that mirrored that one, and then I had the bull moose of these relationships. It was like sticking my finger in the electrical socket of my own unconscious."

...The layers of our erotic life kept pulling back. I allowed that I felt hemmed in by our excessively regular sex life and annoyed that, in the context of our marriage, Dan supposedly had an important sexual history while I had none. Dan then admitted his fantasies about my past lovers, his fear that they had accessed parts of me that were walled off from him. How, nine years into our marriage, could our sex life still be under the thumbs of exes we no longer talked to or even desired? The thought made me angry and nauseated.

From: Married (Happily) With Issues by ELIZABETH WEIL, NY Times Magazine, December 6, 2009