The Virgin & The Trollop: A True Tale of Sexual Triumph for Christ-Honoring Couples

By Michael Smith and Connie Smith

What happens when a Pastor—sold out for God and a virgin to boot—falls madly in love with a newly Christian woman with a checkered past?

From their first date over Italian cuisine to the decade they spent struggling to create passionate sexual connection, "The Virgin & the Trollop" chronicles an unlikely love story in bare-bones transparency.

With their signature wit and self-deprecating humor, Michael and Connie Smith take us on a bittersweet journey into the realities of perfect, Christ-honoring love between two imperfect people.

Through painful recollections, hopeful prayers, and the healing of two shattered souls, the Smiths happen upon a Garden of marital bliss. What follows is an epiphany so profound they cannot help but share their story with other couples who long for the same in their Marriage Bed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9780999726051

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The course of true love never did run smooth.

— William Shakespeare (1595)

It’s amazing how words penned centuries ago still ring so true. Marriage relationships are complicated because people are complicated. Each person brings their own history to the altar, an amalgam of experiences, expectations, and worldviews. These complex pre-marital stories are written with the help—and hindrance—of other people from other places in other times, long before true lovers actually meet. Is it any wonder the road is so rocky?

What you are about to read is a true love story. It’s chock-full of beauty, joy, and humor. It’s also filled with darkness, pain, and sorrow. It is our story, fraught with difficulty and misunderstanding yet glorious to behold.

You may be wondering why we would publish such personal—and possibly damaging—information about ourselves. I’ve asked myself that repeatedly throughout this process only to return to the same answer each time: others. Michael and I believe the tale we have to tell can bring hope to countless couples (and individuals) who so desperately need it. For this reason alone, we are willing to put our dignity and reputation at risk. We understand not everyone’s story is like ours, but we also know most true love stories unfold along a common trajectory: next-level divine-discovery next-level self-discovery next-level partner-discovery next-level bliss.

We hope our vulnerability fosters an environment for couples to become more vulnerable with each other, that they might drop their guards and immerse themselves more deeply into their shared inner worlds. We know from experience this simple act of trust can yield greater levels of intimacy. Above all, it is our sincere prayer that each reader will lay hold on a new dimension of wholeness and peace—with God and within themselves.

As a final note, please bear in mind this book includes several real and raw accounts of Great Married Sex. You’re likely to have sexual thoughts as you read. That’s okay. What matters is that you steward each of those thoughts in a manner that honors Christ, re-directing them toward your own spouse with each turn of the page. Though our story gets bumpy at times, it is our privilege to take you along for the ride. If it blesses you, we invite you to recommend it to others, but please, no spoilers. Each reader should be free to enjoy the adventure as it unfolds.

May God do even greater things in your Marriage Bed than He has done in ours!

Connie M. Smith

Atlanta, Georgia

2021

PART ONE

PERPETUAL BOYHOOD

There’s only one relationship more inseparable than a boy and his dog.

I. THE DUCK FLIES SOUTH

I was a late bloomer, so late I wondered if I would ever bloom. So late, in fact, I didn’t even notice when I actually had.

My parents divorced before I was two, and my birthfather’s inner demons made him all but a no-show in my life thereafter. As such, I didn’t have much day-to-day male influence during early childhood. My mother had male friends and colleagues who would visit our house from time to time for one reason or another. She also had her share of boyfriends over the years, some of whom I briefly met whenever they picked her up for a date. I was typically fast asleep in my bed by the time they returned home, and was, therefore, quite surprised to learn (decades later) from my mother that a few of her gentlemen callers had actually shared the night with her while I slept soundly at the end of the hall.

I kept it from you by making sure they were gone before you woke up, she said. I had no intention of granting any man short-term access to my baby boy. You didn’t need any added distress.

None of these men were role models or mentors for me. They were in my mom’s life, not mine. They weren’t interested in me anyway. My mother was young, beautiful, fun-loving, and wildly successful—with a larger-than-life personality. I don’t fault her suitors for failing to notice the towheaded boy playing quietly in the corner of the living room; they were undoubtedly preoccupied by other things.

When I was four, my mother and I relocated from Indiana to Florida and temporarily moved in with my grandparents in Winter Springs. My grandmother was glad to have her youngest daughter and favorite grandson (smile) close by. My grandfather was delighted at the prospect of having a pint-sized sidekick to pal around with. He’d nicknamed me Duck when I was a baby, a reference to how I seemed to waddle whenever I walked around wearing nothing but a diaper. The news that Duck would be moving in sent my grandfather over the moon. I had no way of appreciating it at the time, but the few months I spent living with him would inform my idea of manhood for many years to come.

My mom was usually off to work before the sun was awake and came home after it had gone to bed. I’m not sure what my grandmother did each day, but because Grandpa was retired and I was still six months away from starting kindergarten, he and I spent nearly every weekday puttering—his word for keeping out of trouble by busying himself with household projects and other chores. We fixed leaky hoses, scrubbed the garage floor, cleaned up dog poop from the yard, trimmed the hedges, and so on. Each day had its own agenda, and my favorite days included running errands for my grandmother to 1970s retail stalwarts like Kmart and Zayre. Grandpa always punctuated such trips by a sweet treat of some kind or other, and no one made an art form of such indulgences quite like him.

We were attached at the hip, tackling our daily to-do lists come hellacious heat or high water—sometimes both. My grandfather always kept ice-cold tap water on hand to combat the blistering Florida summers. He stored it in a repurposed orange juice bottle on the bottom shelf of their bisque-colored, top-freezer Whirlpool. We’d come in sweat- soaked and musty from the scorching heat and gulp that angelic liquid down, standing right in front of the fridge with the door swung wide— Grandma and her rumblings be damned. The refrigerated air billowed over my sun-reddened body like an arctic blanket while I waited patiently for Grandpa to pass me the rectangular rescue bottle. I always got the second swig, and that horrific blend of his backwash, rust from the old metal cap, and stale citrus still lingers on my taste buds.

On the hottest days, Grandma would have a chilled bottle of Gatorade waiting for us in the late afternoon. There were only two flavors in 1978—orange and lemon-lime. If I had a choice, I preferred the green one, but the flavor didn’t really matter as long as I got to share it with Grandpa. My hands were too little to emulate his one-handed swig technique, but with two hands I could kick my head back and gulp it down almost as well as he did. I can still feel the slippery glass trembling in my hands as I pressed the too-wide-for-little-faces bottle tightly against my mouth. No matter how hard I tried, I was never able to completely tame that high-tide flow of chemical nectar. I inevitably wound up with twin streams of electrolyte goodness streaking down my cheeks and pooling in the folds of my dirt-crusted neck. As messy as it was, I don’t reckon I’ve had a thirst so thoroughly quenched in all my days.

Beyond puttering and sweating, we also spent many hours relaxing together. Like most mundane things, Grandpa somehow turned quittin’ time into a spectacle. He would herald its arrival with loud announcements during our last few chores each afternoon.

Almost time to shut it down, Duck!

Boss man says we got one more hour to get it done and pack it in, Duck!

Keep sweeping, Duck. You can’t get tired now.

We’ve got a quota to meet, Duck!

We’re too close to quittin’for you to think about quittin’, Duck.

I never knew who the boss man was or who gave us the quota. I just knew there were people somewhere who had an interest in us getting our work done right and on time. I tried to take these people and my grandfather seriously, but many days quittin’ time couldn’t arrive fast enough for my tired little body.

Everything my grandfather did was big, especially when he was doing nothing. The end of each puttering day usually arrived between three and four o’clock. When the work was finished, he’d set up two aluminum lawn chairs in the center of his orderly garage. Those two chairs signaled we had just about an hour or so to kick back and unwind before Grandma summoned us to the dinner table. Our palm-blistering, back-breaking tasks were finally done. It was sittin’ time at last, with more manly lessons to learn, some healthier than others.

After the last swig of Gatorade had been swug, my grandfather immediately switched over to sippin’. He wasn’t picky about his beer, at least not as far as my four-year-old mind could determine. Each afternoon I pulled countless cans of Busch, Budweiser, Pabst, and Coors from the mini-fridge he kept in the garage. My guess is that his beer of choice was whatever had been on sale that week at Joe’s, the country store around the corner from our house. It seemed Grandpa had to make a quick stop there every time we ran errands for Grandma. I didn’t mind because I always got to pick out a piece of candy or two.

Grab me another, Duck was my cue to hop up from my lawn chair and fetch my grandfather a fresh one. As I recall, he asked for a beer every twenty minutes or so, knocking back four or five before dinner each day. Now and again, Grandpa let me have a sip or two from his can, but only after I’d made a solemn oath not to tell my mother or grandmother. The beer in those cans and on my grandfather’s breath smelled and tasted just as you’d expect to a young boy descended from multi-generational alcoholics—it smelled and tasted like love.

My grandfather’s next contribution to my childhood was a baptism into the care-melting joys of outlaw country music. He introduced me to many of his 8-track heroes with funny-sounding names like Paycheck, Waylon, Willie, and Merle. I learned how to quit jobs in style, the importance of rearing children in non-country ways, and how boys sometimes turn out bad no matter how much a mama tries.

This sittin’, swiggin’, sippin’, and listenin’ reached its peak when the central Florida sky let loose its clockwork fury every summer afternoon. My grandfather would close our single-panel garage door just enough to keep the torrent at bay, but not so much that I couldn’t see the massive raindrops exploding on our driveway and forming rivers in the streets. The sound of water rushing through the aluminum gutters we’d just cleaned and the sight of God’s sprinklers soaking the grass we’d just mowed was an affirming nod to work well done. Thunder and lightning boomed so close it seemed to rattle every sliding glass door for four square miles. Hailstones the size of scuppernongs crashed down like crystal meteors, banging furiously on our metal garage door like a crazed man calling on a sleeping neighbor in the middle of the night.

Though often startled, I was never afraid during these daily rendezvous between heaven and earth. How could I be? I was sitting with my Grandpa, the man who laid the foundation for my sense of maleness during my most impressionable and formative years.

II. AND SO IT BEGINS…

Perhaps the most determinative factor in a man’s sexual self-concept is the journey he must take to embrace the perfection of his own penis. How a man relates to it and, more importantly, how he learns to view himself in light of it are not to be under-emphasized. For most boys—even those with an active male presence during their prepubescent years—this journey is largely made in isolation. Though surrounded by countless other males on a similar quest, guys rarely discuss their deeply personal feelings and fears with each other. This leaves each boy to feel his way through this manifold discovery on his own.

There is no universal time or sequence by which this eight-tiered realization unfolds, but for most men the first four revelations occur during their pre-elementary years, in no hard and fast order.

Penis Revelation #1: A boy discovers his own penis.

A man’s lifelong and supremely complex relationship with his penis begins before speech capability and continues through death—maybe even beyond it. What starts as his curious fascination with a familiar appendage eventually morphs into an abiding bond that is central to his sense of personhood. This deep union is something non-penis owners can never fully appreciate.

Penis Revelation #2: A boy learns that girls don’t have penises.

Depending on his accidental or incidental access to females in various stages of undress—including mothers, sisters, grandmothers, cousins, neighborhood kids, or porn—a young boy inevitably becomes acquainted with the below-the-waist distinction between himself and the fairer sex. What he observes on prepubescent girls is an oddity, a seeming malformation of what lies between his own legs. What he sees when at last he happens upon an unclad and often unsuspecting adult woman, surprised and scurrying though she may be, defies comprehension and explanation.

A young boy is incapable of finding correlation between his own penis and the non-penile patch of godknowswhat on an adult woman’s pubic region. Further, he’s unable to connect the dots between a grown woman’s furry it and whatever prepubescent, non-penile curiosities he may have previously seen—and vice versa. The enchantment of a non-penis stays with most men throughout their lives. They never outgrow or tire of it, much to the bewilderment of non-penis owners.

Penis Revelation #3: A boy realizes it feels good to touch his penis.

Even before puberty and the capacity for ejaculatory climax, a boy discovers the pleasure found in fondling his own penis and testicles. It’s his first experience with drugs, an intoxicating introduction to the mood-lightening power of manual self-delight. Though he’ll most likely enjoy expanded forms of solo and/or partnered highs throughout his sexual journey, nothing will ever replace the self-soothing buzz a man feels from casually fondling his own junk. Non-penis owners are left to watch and wonder.

Penis Revelation #4: A boy observes an adult penis.

This marked discovery makes an indelible impression. The earlier in life it occurs, the less jarring it is. Nearly every adult male can recall becoming aware of the difference between his own prepubescent penis and one belonging to a postpubescent male—father, brother, cousin, neighborhood kid, porn, or, as in my case, grandfather.

III. YOU NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST

A year or so after we moved to Florida, my mother was financially on her feet enough to purchase my grandparents’ small home in Winter Springs. Grandma and Grandpa relocated to a seniors-only community in DeBary, Florida, and settled into a trailer nestled on the banks of the St. John’s River. Grandpa and I didn’t get to see each other often, but during school holidays and summer vacations, I spent as many days as I could puttering with him in and around their single-wide Shangri-La.

Though officially retired, my grandparents picked up some extra cash by cleaning the DeBary Golf and Country Club on the graveyard shift a few nights per week. Whenever I stayed with my grandparents in the summer months, I got to be part of the team alongside my Aunt Sandy and a few of my cousins. We vacuumed the meeting rooms, picked up cigarette butts from around the parking lot, cleaned the bathrooms, and took out all the trash. I still recall the smell of sour booze and stale smoke from the bar area along with the dew-soaked scent of grass clippings strewn across every sidewalk and threshold. I’m not sure I made much of a contribution to their tasks, but for a little fella, I sure tried to shoulder my share of the workload. It didn’t really matter though; I was just happy to be trailing behind my Grandpa.

One of the last things my grandfather did each shift was take a shower. He was the only one on our cleaning crew to do so. I can only surmise the large, open showers at the club had more space and hot water than what his little trailer could offer. The calcified fixtures and sloth-rate drains were probably a luxury compared to the trickling water pressure in the tiny aquatic phone booth he had waiting for him at home. Whatever his reasoning, Grandpa chose to shower at the country club, which meant I did too.

There were lots of lessons in these pre-sunrise showers for anyone who had a mind to learn them, not the least of which was my grandfather’s sense of utility. A retired corporate executive from the Midwest, he had settled into a Florida Cracker lifestyle quite nicely. I’m not sure if it was the austerity of his upbringing, his experience during the war, or a generational thing, but for some reason my grandfather brought nothing more than a bar of soap to the shower each night. This was in stark contrast to my experience at home. My showers always included a washcloth, soap, and some tear-free shampoo. Not Grandpa’s. A bar of Ivory soap and his bare hands were his only provisions.

I’ll never forget my first time seeing him lather up his body and then using the same bar to scrub his face and wash his hair. How strange. I stood under the spigot next to him as his sudsy water washed over my feet and meandered toward the stubborn drain. When it was finally my turn, Grandpa handed me the foamy bar, and I followed his example. Starting with my toes and working up over my entire face, head, and hair, I took my very first single-product shower. In retrospect, the thought of handling his (or anyone’s) secondhand soap froth repulses me even more than my memory of all those second swigs I had standing in front of his refrigerator. Oh, and as it turns out, the good folks at Ivory didn’t offer a tear-free formula. Boy, did my eyes burn.

Because I lived with my mom—whose room I had thoughtlessly entered a time or two without knocking—I’d already seen what nearly all young boys see of their mother’s exposed body: more than I ever wanted to. But growing up without a father in my house meant I had never seen a naked adult man before—accidentally or otherwise. I had no older brothers, cousins, or neighborhood kids who changed clothes in my presence, not even before or after a swim. I had never inadvertently entered an occupied bathroom to see a man getting out of the shower or standing in front of the toilet taking a leak. Nope. The first adult penis I ever saw was my grandfather’s. I was six years old.

Grandpa was no doubt oblivious to the education I received during that first shower. My perception of adult male physical normalcy was being shaped in real time, while his thoughts were most likely on his soon-coming first beer of the day. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether he noticed me; I noticed him. So much was going through my young mind. I knew better than to stare, but everything my eyes saw was so foreign and unfamiliar that I found myself in a state of mild shock.

For starters, my grandfather had hair down there and I didn’t. This was enlightening. I had been exposed to pornography a year earlier while standing over my sixteen-year-old babysitter’s shoulder as she and a friend perused her dad’s Playboy magazine. The dark patch on those late-1970s nude models was similar to what I’d seen on my startled mother a time or two, but I didn’t realize it was hair until I stood next to my grandfather.

It wasn’t just his pubic hair I noticed; he was hairy elsewhere too. I was not. His body hair was amplified by the water and lather, causing it to appear thicker and more abundant than it would otherwise. This made the contrast between our bodies starker. From that moment, body hair became a major demarcation line between manhood and boyhood in my emerging self-concept.

My grandfather’s penis, obviously, was larger than mine. I’d always understood the proportional differences between grown-up bodies and little-kid bodies, but it wasn’t just the size of his penis that was dis- similar: it was the behavior. His hung and pointed downward while mine seemed affixed to the front of my body and pointed outward. The same with his testicles. Mine clung close while his appeared to sway between his thighs. As he washed himself, the motion and movement of his package was also quite different from mine. His entire pubic region filled with suds as he singlehandedly cleaned each surface; his penis and testicles lifted and fell with weighty determination from each skillful flyby. Despite my clumsy effort to mimic Grandpa’s one-handed style, the washing of my mini-package was decidedly less dramatic. There was no flipping, flopping, or swinging to speak of. My penis only boinged for a millisecond before snapping back into place like a spring- coiled doorstop—and there was no sudsy fur to frame the action.

The shower ended the same way most everything else did when I was with my grandfather. He rinsed one final time; I did too. He turned off the water nice and tight; I did too. He got dressed while he was still soaking wet; I did too. He lit a cigarette as he stepped out of the locker room and into the dawn light; I didn’t. It would be a few more years before I picked up that behavior, but I was already making notes.

These many years later, I’m actually amazed and a little embarrassed at my recall of these events. I don’t know what to tell you. A mark was made on my fatherless soul.¹

IV. MAN LAW

Man law is a demonically crafted system of messaging designed to attach masculine identity to temporal, trivial things. It designates certain attitudes, actions, and reactions as manly while relegating others to how women think, act, and react. According to custom, only men who align themselves with enough man law missives are esteemed as real men. The rest, those who fall too short of pseudo-masculine standards, are deemed womanlike, and accordingly labeled sissy, wimp, pussy, or bitch.

The rational feebleness of this viewpoint ought to be self-evident. While I don’t subscribe to the idea that men and women are exactly alike, I do think it’s dangerous to label specific beliefs and behaviors as inherently masculine or feminine. To declare that a person is acting like a man or like a woman is as philosophically indefensible as the declaration that someone is acting black or white. Such generalizations are built atop slippery slopes, easily toppled by the slightest skepticism and scrutiny. Still, many men hold to these mistruths for a lifetime and pass them on generationally—even though they’re supported by little more than anecdotal, self-confirming observation.

At the root of man law is the theory that competition is synonymous with maleness, that men comparing and contrasting themselves with each other is part and parcel of being a man. This misguided notion begins very early in life and continues throughout old age. It becomes the primary filter through which most men see themselves and estimate their value—even in the face of glaring evidence to the contrary.

As men age, they can become so engrained in this errant idea that they begin to interpret and experience the world through this same filter. Their sense of personhood is affected, and their ability to feel joy becomes encumbered. Even if a man’s parents, wife, children, and peers effusively affirm him as a man, he’ll often struggle to escape his earliest impressions of masculinity—perpetually seeing himself as less than despite having markedly surpassed all reasonable standards.