What is not as people imagine it?
When I first had sex, the girl was also a virgin. What I expected, given this information, was to feel the hymen rupture and some blood flow after penetration.
That's what I expected, since everything I've been taught about the hymen and female virginity has to do with this perception of "breakup." In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a book Garcia Marques had read at the time, the husband would "return" his wife to the family if the wedding night sheet did not end up stained and bloody (some cultures, even , still perpetuates this, exposing the sheet to the window, stained, after the first night of the wedding.
In the end, none of this happened.
I noticed a persistence during the penetration of the vagina, but purely muscular, because of the girl's fear of the first sexual intercourse. She herself imagined, we will talk about it later, that the hymen "hurts" when it breaks.
This did not happen for a simple reason: there are at least five types of hymen (depending on the classification). Among them are those that support penetration without breaking (hymen conformal), those that have a series of holes (cribiform), those that have two openings (septa), those that have a single opening (annular, most current) and those without openings (not perforated).
The latter, as they do not allow the penetration or even the exit of the menstrual contents, require a small surgical intervention for the opening.
There are women who are born without a hymen, and it is also common for the hymen (when present) to break in everyday actions, such as sports or even masturbation.
Thus, the first intercourse may or may not have bleeding, depending on the type of hymen. The pain, on the other hand, is more due to the non-relaxed state (frequent during the first report) than to the rupture of this membrane (which is not innervated).
As I got older, I met a client who used so-called "artificial hymens", and only then did I feel like my penis was "breaking" something. I wrote about it here and, as assumed, it was just an "artificial" perception.
Hymens and female virginity are things we often think of differently than they really are.