My friend is a born-again virgin.

This friend informed me last week that she had gone one calendar year without getting booty and has now been reflowered.

I kind of like the idea. We get so many second chances in life, but losing your virginity is a one-shot deal. Most of the people I know wish their first time had gone differently. They wish it were more passionate. Or with someone they loved. As for me, I just wish I had known it happened.

During my freshman year at Northwestern, I was fooling around with a more experienced woman — whom I had informed of my resolute desire to wait until I was married before having sex — when she froze.

“Umm, you’re kind of, you know, in me,” she said.

“Really?” I said. “Umm, are you OK?”

“Very OK.”

“OK.”

So that was that. Now, three years later, my friend had given me an idea. I could have a do-over. I just had to follow her lead and become a born-again virgin. But a few questions needed to be answered, first.

“Does it have to be a year?” another friend asked. “Because I’ve gone 17 hours without sex, and I think I can feel my virginity growing back.”

“No,” she snapped. “You can’t be a born-again virgin until you’ve gone a year without sex. You have to know the agony of it before you get the benefits.”

“What are the benefits?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s like all the good things from being a virgin, but you’ve had sex.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Men are too picky,” she said.

Hmm. Not a very convincing argument — I needed a second opinion.

So I called Wendy Keller, author of the “The Cult of the Born-Again Virgin: The New Sexual Revolution.” She told me she interviewed more than 1,000 women — and a few men — before writing her book, which describes a new movement of celibacy forming as a backlash of the sexual revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s.

She said most women she talked to began their conversion to born-again virginity after several dead-end relationships made it clear to them that sex was getting in the way of their happiness.

Most of the people she interviewed saw “a number of benefits” from their new lifestyle.

“They enhanced their self-esteem,” she said. “There were financial benefits, or benefits to their grades, or being able to spend more time with their children — depending on what stage of life they were going through.”

I thought about my friend. Since she stopped shtupping men, she graduated from NU, got a good job, rented an apartment in a nice neighborhood in Chicago and began writing short stories — her true passion.

Maybe there is something to be said about this born-again virginity. If I took all the energy I used trying to kiss girls (one girl, actually) and put it to use for other means, I could probably write a novel, have rippling abs and design a new spring line for Versace.

But then again, why do those things if you can’t get laid?

Dan Murtaugh is a Medill senior. He can be reached at d-murtaugh @northwestern.edu.