Читать книгу The Secret of Happy Parents: How to Stay in Love as a Couple and True to Yourself - Steve Biddulph - Страница 32

The free love ethic of the sixties was to have casual sex with anyone who appealed to you at the time and ‘as long as you’re honest’ everything would be cool. It may have been an important and necessary step when the old order was being overthrown in terms of rigid sex roles, militarism, conformity, and trusting government and business. The sexual revolution moved things along at a great pace.

Before long, however, the fallout started. Casual sex was okay in theory but for most of us it didn’t seem to work. Backyard abortions, broken hearts, drugs to block out the pain, and a deadly sense of disillusionment were often the results.

Bodies are not compartmentalized. Your heart, your mind, and your sexuality, are all parts of the whole you. It is not possible to have sex with someone you don’t like, don’t trust or don’t understand, without making enormous internal divisions, shutting down natural energies and emotions.

You can’t make love from the waist down, and keep your heart and your head out of the equation, without a lot of personal pain.

Luckily experience is a great teacher. A friend of ours separated from her husband after twelve years of marriage. She went through a rapid series of lovers – perhaps to reassure herself that she was lovable, or to capture the adolescence she felt she had missed. Then one day she told us of a new man. She proudly told us ‘I am not going to sleep with him just yet. I think this relationship is the one I really want, and I am going to do it properly’.