Relationship Problems Caused My Vaginal Pain

Jamie, 26, of Santa Cruz, Calif., experienced vaginismus—involuntary, painful tightening of the vaginal muscles—the very first time she had sex at age 15. "I knew it would hurt to lose my virginity, but the pain was ridiculous," she says. "After about five minutes I was like, 'Ow—OK, neat, we're done now.'" Still, she continued to try sex. For the first couple of minutes it would feel fine, she says, but then she'd start to feel like she was "getting ripped in half."

At first Jamie thought these feelings were normal. "I figured, 'A foreign object is in my body. My body is rejecting it,'" she says. She didn't realize just how big her problem was until, on her 18th birthday, she had sex with her boyfriend and the pain was beyond excruciating: "regular, gentle, 20-minute sex that left me so swollen and in so much pain that I could barely walk."

This time she went to a doctor who, Jamie says, "was afraid to touch anything, because she didn't know what caused it. Had I been stabbed in the vagina? Was the sex violent? She said she'd never seen anything like it, except with women who had just given birth."

The doctor told Jamie not to have sex and to come back in two weeks, after the swelling went down. When Jamie returned with a normal-looking vagina, the doctor said nothing was wrong and sent her home. Jamie talked to friends about it from time to time, but it was embarrassing, and everyone assumed it was just a problem with Jamie's sex skills. "'Try lube,' they'd say, or 'You just need more foreplay.'"