Читать книгу The Secret of Happy Parents: How to Stay in Love as a Couple and True to Yourself - Steve Biddulph - Страница 31

How soon in a relationship should one hop into bed with one’s new love? Ideas on this have swung wildly in the last forty years. People used to wait for years. Today sex on a first date is not uncommon among older single adults.

Mary Pipher in her excellent book Reviving Ophelia points out that girls as young as their mid-teens today feel they have to be sexually active; that the sexual revolution has just turned into another pressure. Boys also admit privately that they want more romance and closeness, that sex is a pressure they feel they have to live up to. This is not to say that girls or boys are not also strongly sexually motivated as well. Just that their sense of timing and romance is being violated by what they think is expected of them. It’s far from rare for a teenage boy and a girl to have sex because each thinks the other expects it of them.

It’s possible that having sex too soon actually prevents closeness, rather than promotes it. Our counselling experience is that many singles get trapped in this pattern, actually preventing any strong or good relationship from growing. One night stands are full of guardedness and morning-after embarrassment. As the veteran family therapist Carl Whitaker once said, it’s a penis and a vagina going out on a date together. When you are physically intimate but still mentally distant, you put on more armour. It’s a very schizophrenic situation. Like someone who tells their life story to everyone they meet, there is no feeling of specialness or vulnerability. Also, because tension has not had a chance to build, there is no big deal, and the sexual chemistry is only mediocre.

The best sexual bonding requires some tension and exploration, some chasing and holding back, and even some old fashioned courtship. Jumping into lust can fool your senses: you can be confused about whether true liking or loving are present. (What actor Robin Williams calls the difference between Miss Right and Miss Right Now!) Liking actually arises from good AND bad experiences: discovering how your partner reacts when the car breaks down, when you are sick, broke or hassled. These things test the liking and loving you have felt. A hundred hot nights of passion, delightful as they may be, aren’t actually going to test any of these things. Lust-based relationships in the real world wind down quite quickly when the other two elements are not around.

The more complete the combination of love, liking and lust, the greater the degree of emotional letting-go into truly transforming sexuality.