It’s a Vaginismus Miracle!

True confessions: I stole that title. “A Vaginismus Miracle” is the title of an episode of the Netflix comedy series Lady Dynamite starring comedian Maria Bamford. Episode 8, I think. This is not something I would have found on my own, but oddly enough, The Guy told me about it.

Now, allow me to backtrack a minute because in Shannonland, you can’t tell a story without telling at least 2 stories that lead up to the main event. It’s how I roll.

As I said, The Guy is the one who told me about this show.  I remember being in his house one afternoon, sitting on the couch, talking. Well, I was forcing some conversation. Hey, if you want to touch my boobs, you have to talk to me afterwards. It's the price you pay. 

From the look on his face, our conversation was literally painful for The Guy. Physically and likely mentally, too. Seriously. He was very much “Why in God’s name do we have to talk about this??” and said that he did not understand why someone would talk about this kind of thing. I assume that by “this kind of thing” he meant sex in general. I would argue, of course, that if more folks talked about it then there might be less problems like mine in the world. Just a thought…

Anyhoo, I initiated this particular conversation because it was important to me that he knew that what was happening with my body wasn't his fault. That it was nothing he did or didn’t do. That he couldn't have changed things. (Or could he? Perhaps if his attitude and demeanor had been different then things could have worked differently, but we'll never know. And the two times we actually did attempt to have sex, we hadn’t really had any kind of conversation about what was happening with me because, y’know…naked. Oh, sometimes naked just happens. Not that I’m complaining.) 

During this conversation, he asked me if I had Netflix or access to an account. I said yes, so he told me to find Lady Dynamite and watch Episode 8. I asked why, but all he'd say was that I'd understand when I watched. I said I'd try to watch soon and he said, “No, go home and watch tonight.” Um…ok. Guess he really wanted me to watch. 

Since it seemed to actually matter to him, I did find it on YouTube and watch the next morning. While I don’t care for the comedian or the show particularly (from what I’ve read, she’s very much an acquired taste), it was interesting to see this topic sorta/kinda addressed there. (This posted was edited to remove the video of the show because YouTube had to remove it.)

The show talked about how the day of “Vaginismus” came around once a year as the day that Maria (comedian and main character) needed to have sex in order to keep everything working right “down there”. So while it got the word out to people – literally, the word “vaginismus” – it didn’t exactly tell folks what the disorder is, but I’ll bet it had people Googling to find out if it was something real and by that happening, people were educated. I found a recap show on YouTube about this episode and they actually discussed how the host had thought it was a made-up word until he looked it up and found out it was a real disorder.

Lady Dynamite is about someone dealing with mental illness (bi-polar disorder) and let me be honest here, vaginismus is a mental disorder. It’s a physical one too, but my OBGYN likes to say that “it’s at least 90% mental”. I tend to disagree with that percentage simply because if so much of it is mental, I should be in a better place physically now because my mental state is SO much better than it was a year ago when all this came to light. I think for some people it can be mostly mental, but I’ll always argue that it’s also very much physical as well. And, of course, everyone and every body is going to be different. For a lot of people, it’s about upbringing and how sex was – or wasn’t – discussed in the home and if they were taught that sex was something bad or secretive, then it may have precipitated a problem like this. And that’s a subject for another post on another day. I’m always seeing squirrels and getting off track.

My mental health counselor has said in the past that she believes my body was reacting to my subconscious mind knowing that The Guy was the wrong person for me to be having sex with. That my body shut it all down because deep in my mind, I knew he wasn’t someone I should be with. Hmmmm…interesting idea, I suppose, but I can say unequivocally that I wanted to be with that man, doing what we were doing (or trying to do) and wasn’t nervous about that at all. Heck, I was naked before I even really realized my clothes were coming off and I did not care. DID. NOT. CARE. Well, not in a negative way, at least. Ha! I was all “Yes, please! Let’s get naked!” But it’s certainly nice to care on some level if you’re naked with someone or maybe you shouldn’t be naked with them to begin with. Just sayin’…

That said, I can at least partially buy into the notion that my mind was causing my body to react the way it did due to knowing it wasn’t the right person. My MO is definitely not to be casual about sex and while this was a casual situation, it’s safe to say that I didn’t feel overly casual about it. Oh, it was a bit of a speedy decision to get together, from discussion to decision to actual connection in a matter of maybe 4 hours or less, but we’d been working up to that for a while. I suppose he was “grooming” me, for lack of better wording. Working me around to the place where I’d decide I wanted to have sex with him, rather than making it seem like he was pushing me towards it. He never pushed. He never pulled. Not overtly, anyway and I am well past the age of doing anything that I don’t want to do. That’s why the mental aspect has been a harder thing for me grasp because my mind was a-ok with what was going on, but my body…not so much.

There are too many thoughts to keep going in this post since the original point was about the episode of this TV show. While not totally on point about vaginismus, the big takeaway for me from this was that The Guy was actually paying attention. No, he could not talk to me about the problem. He’d made a few comments when we were together at times, but wouldn’t discuss it when I tried, so I had sent him some very simple information about what was going on, not knowing if he’d really read my messages or not. Telling me about this let me know that he actually had paid attention. Oh, I don’t imagine he sat around giving it a lot of thought overall, but he heard me, even against his will, so to speak. No, that doesn’t make him a hero, but I’ll give him a few points for that. I always say that if talking about this educates just one person, then it’s worth putting my life on display and he verified to me that he was paying attention. Even if only a little bit. I can live with that. I sure hope he can, too.