This article was originally published in The Lonely Girls Guide newsletter. You can subscribe right here. For the majority of my late teens into early adulthood, I believed that all women found penetrative sex extremely painful , and that we were all just pretending that we enjoyed it. It was only when I found this article by my friend Billi, that I realised the pain I was experiencing was not normal. In fact, it was a condition that many women suffer with, most of them like myself, in complete silence.
Usually when it came to penetrative sex in a casual setting, I would either try to avoid it completely or just silently accept the excruciating pain. That would usually result in no further questions however those encounters never lasted very long. When I did attempt to have PIV, I would try to make it as quick as possible and hide my face so they wouldn't see the pain I was going through.
I'd then promptly go to the bathroom to have a little cry and take some deep breaths to calm myself down. I know. Extremely unhealthy. A post shared by Emily Vernem emilyvernem. After a few months, I was ready to try having penetrative sex. But not only was the pain the worst it had ever been, but it was physically not happening. It was like there was something blocking my vagina and nothing was working. As advised in the article, I went to my GP to find out what was going on.
After a very painful physical examination, she diagnosed me with vaginismus and referred me to a physio who specialises in women's health. I won't go into too much detail about my therapy sessions because I know that curing vaginismus is different for everyone and I am currently still working through mine.
I remember during my first session I told my physio that I was currently dating someone which is why I wanted to cure my vaginismus ASAP. She did say that it would take some time but I was determined to get this over and done with. Long story short, the guy I was seeing at the time broke it off about a month after my first physio session. He said it wasn't because of my vaginismus, and I would like to believe that.
