“Desire is often a stronger force than logic,” says Dr. Dana L. Farnsworth, who has spent his entire career working in the health departments of U.S. colleges. Here he attempts to clear away some of the confusions which often distort the judgment of today’s adolescents and young adults.
Love is an all-embracing, all-pervading feeling. Love is trust, love is tolerance, love is understanding and helpfulness. And it yields the immense and pleasurable satisfaction that comes with the honest desire to give another comfort or joy without thought of personal gain.
I think it was Oscar Hammerstein who said, “Money isn’t everything unless you don’t have it.” It is much the same with love; it isn’t everything unless there is none. For while being in love isn’t all, it is a very important part of founding and maintaining a happy marriage.
Ideally, love begins with friendship. Then, as you find yourself more and more concerned with someone else’s welfare, it becomes what they call “the real thing”. Starting with dating, it can lead to courtship, often to engagement and marriage.
Love does many wonderful things. But it is not overly preoccupied with rational decision-making. If the true reason doesn’t seem quite acceptable, you – and everyone else in love – tend to search till you find another, one that makes it all right to do or think as you want. So during much of the time you are engaged, or engaged to be engaged, desire is often a stronger force than logic. And this leads to confusion.
The pressures of today’s “civilised” freedoms only complicate matters. Our so-called emancipation has brought about an almost exhibitionistic preoccupation with sex. In the last 15 years, for example, grown-up novelists and playwrights have appropriated language for which boys of 10 and 12 used to be punished.
Sex symbols bring profit; so they are forced upon us at every opportunity with the result that a natural phenomenon is exploited like a commercial property.
Pressures force children into earlier and earlier social life; dating earlier, going steady earlier. Sexual activity has been pushed on younger groups. A colleague of mine who, for many years, ran a clinic, held that youngsters in the 1940s did just about the same things as people in the 1920s did – except that they did them two or three years earlier. And by this time we’ve probably moved those limits back another year or two more.
A young couple started courting and because of pressures within their own age group they are often made to feel that they must have sexual relations although neither of them is ready. You’re told “everybody does it” and that your education won’t be complete unless you’ve had an affair or so, that you had “better live now.”
Regrettably, the challenges of false sophistication, ridicule and other kinds of pressure are applied to make dating couples feel that intercourse is a normal part of courtship.
Powerful as these forces can be, they seem, so far, to have been limited in their effect. For instance, I don’t think that there is any strong evidence, except in a very few schools, that the actual behaviour of girl students in their late teens has changed much in this respect.
There is certainly more openness. There are more flamboyant good-nights at dormitory doors and a good deal more talk. But judging from recent information, actual relations are probably not much more frequent than when your mother was young.
What has changed, why are those of us who work with young people today so concerned about moral codes? Why are we so anxious to discuss things?
It’s a long-range proposition. We are eager to resolve the quandaries of sexual adaptation during adolescence and early adulthood as an essential first step toward helping make marital relationships meaningful – a source of strength you can rely on through an entire lifetime.
Marriage made rewarding
And, in addition to you, we’re thinking about society as a whole. Sexual morality channels the sexual urge – over and above that which perpetuates the race – into constructive activities.
And, by making marriage rewarding, healthy morality lays the foundation for successful family living, thus reinforcing the fabric of our whole civilisation.
As a psychiatrist and a citizen with a stake in the life around me, I’m interested in how values are developed and transmitted. For, speaking as a person who has a certain responsibility to young people, I have come to feel that sexual relations before marriage can be condoned under only the most unusual circumstances.
I’m sure that sounds moralistic, and I don’t mean it to. Certainly, I respect individual dignity too much to try to force you or anyone into a mould of my shaping. I know that the only real protection you have against the “everybody’s doing it” forces is your own decision as to what you want to do. The only thing I – and people like me – can do is offer help.
Sexual urges may be repressed by intellect, by religion, by fear. But as far as I know there is no one who doesn’t have them. And there is no one in his right mind who wants to eliminate sex.
In essence, what society’s regulations – and all societies have them – attempt to do is to channel sexuality into heterosexual relationships at a socially acceptable time and place and with the rights of the two individuals and any children involved appropriately protected,
Against these considerations what arguments do the “do-it-now” forces have to offer? Their attack has remained rather remarkably the same over a period of years. And – since in our society young men, whether they want to win or not, must seem to be aggressive or risk being looked on as incapable, inadequate and almost certainly dull – the attack is most often a boy-against-girl proposition.
One of the most popular approaches has always been that pre-marital sex will help you see whether you are compatible. The largest problem here is that nobody seems to know exactly what the word means. From our standing as physicians and psychiatrists we can say that human beings of any shape and size can mate successfully if there’s no disease or congenital defect present. The crucial factors in sexual compatibility – understanding, gentleness, generosity, even humour – are psychological, not physical.
The next argument is often that it will strengthen your relationship and test your love – which is a plausible reason – especially if it is what you want to believe. But young women who have accepted this argument have often found that it dulls a young man’s ardour. And the strain of the deception and secrecy that are almost always present destroy more often than they strengthen.
A third argument, says the young man, is that “It is necessary for my health.” If it were true that releasing sexual tensions is essential to health, then all members of religious orders and, in fact, all people who choose not to or have no opportunity to marry would be in impaired health. And such is simply not the case.
Sexual abstinence is perfectly compatible with excellent health.
A couple can often convince themselves that pre-marital relations will help them to grow up when actually early and precipitous physical involvement is more an effort to reassure (one’s self) than to mature.
Confidence and maturity may be slow in ripening, but they are just as well, often better, developed under socially approved circumstances.
Finally, the clincher: “Why wait when we’re getting married anyway?” Now this is a pretty hard one to resist – particularly if he is still a full-time student and you don’t plan to be married for three more years. That’s a lot of waiting.
Providing no psychological problems are created by his feeling he’s not the breadwinner or by your family resenting his not supporting you, I think the thing to do is to move the wedding date ahead if you possibly can.
Although I have my doubts about early marriages in general, I have considerably less worry about them under these circumstances since obviously some planning has been done.
Otherwise, you’re in for a rather difficult time if you decide to refrain from physical relations and some pretty unattractive risks if you don’t.
Once you could sum the risks up quite concisely; fear of detection, fear of disease and fear of pregnancy. Thanks to sociology and science, all three are less important than they once were.
But what about the effect of unrestrained physical intimacy on long-term relationships? The pity is that too much physical sex too early can short-circuit the desire to explore and get to know and understand yourselves in other very important ways. Sex becomes something it was never meant to be: a tranquilizer, an escape, insurance against loneliness. And everything stops there.
Intimacy between two people is so much more than physical. It is a matter of minds as well as bodies. And courtship has to do with both. It has to do with such down-to-earth considerations as careers and children and where you’d like to live. And it has to do with intangibles – things that can’t be stated in so many words, but which take some time to discover.
There is temperament. Sometimes an extroverted husband and an introverted wife team up very well, but it can’t be taken for granted. So if you are extremely sensitive, a bit inclined to nurse hurts – even sulk, while he is the bounce-back type who is mystified by moods, it takes a while to make sure understanding can bridge the gap.
Religious differences can be surmounted. So can cultural differences, social differences and differences in age – provided they have been well considered ahead of time. A variety of viewpoints and experiences can make a marriage more interesting.
Differences in taste, as long as they are complementary and not antagonistic, can make the blend exciting. But all these things should be explored in leisure and with utter candour because you can rest assured that the man you marry is going to be – after marriage – remarkably like the man he was before.
What kind of relationship can two people in love have if they cannot marry for some time? Can a long engagement survive and satisfy for two, three or four years without sexual intercourse? The answer, of course, is that it can.
How dangerous is petting?
It has been done by thousands, by millions of couples. But it cannot be done by denying the feeling of need for intimate relations. It is rather a matter of planning your time together in public, to keep yourselves visible and active, and avoid extended periods of complete privacy. You have to have a fair sense of humour about this.
Practically speaking it is simply asking too much of two healthy young people to be alone for long hours over a long period of time and not have sexual relations. That’s just not the way we’re put together.
How dangerous in terms of long-range frustrations is deep petting short of intercourse? The answer has several aspects.
First of all, intense but incomplete sexual activity can result in considerable physical discomfort for a man. What’s more, a couple who indulge in passionate but limited practices may find after an extended amount of time – say two or three years – that this is a pattern they like, a fact which sometimes makes later full relationships something of an anti-climax, and that can produce serious troubles for a marriage.
Is it ever possible for a couple who have had sexual relations to return to limited intimacy? It isn’t easy, but it is possible.
A girl I once knew had been having relations with her fiance for nearly two years. They still had a year and a half to wait before they could marry. Theirs was a hit-or-miss affair, and neither was very comfortable with it. Meanwhile marriage seemed to be receding further into the distance.
Finally she proposed that they limit physical relationships again. Frankly, I didn’t think it would work because it seemed more than was humanly justifiable to expect of them in the circumstances.
But in a letter at the time of their wedding she told me that they had been successful and it had taught them – together – self-discipline. They had learned a meaning of love much deeper than merely gratification. And the respect they had found for each other was such that it got their marriage off to a good start.
My answer to the question “What should we do?” is that there is no stock answer. For the moment, think of sexual activity as a kind of spectrum. At one extreme is the type of person who has relationships with anyone he chooses at any time he chooses with no reservations whatever. At the other is the person who permits no intimacy of any kind until marriage.
Each of these seems to be heading for a great deal of unhappiness. It is up to you to find your own place on the curve. And whatever you two decide it is a matter for your knowledge alone.
No one has the right to approve or disapprove. Nor should you ask anyone to. Since, as the population explodes, privacy is harder and harder to come by, you and all of us might do well to cultivate the little we have left.
In the final analysis, physical adaptation is only an index of one’s total relationship, and most young couples who are reasonably healthy, who get along well in other ways, are going to manage to have pleasant physical relations.
Here, as in the rest of life, the surest confidence and the deepest maturity are attained slowly and with patience and understanding. No single experience is more important than any other, and a forward-going, satisfying relationship depends not on frequency, but on the quality of your enjoyment.
It has always seemed to me that the proper use of sex is to heighten the satisfaction of living. Men and women have a civilising influence on each other. It is good for us to have women around – we are much more polite, more thoughtful; occasionally we even dress better when you are! And the same applies to you.
You are more feminine, more attractive when there are men around to notice. I like to think of sexuality as something that is akin to art, to religion, to everything that makes life worthwhile.
It is not simply a function that starts at puberty and ends sometimes late in middle age. It is a quality that begins at birth and before, and, if we are fortunate, can enrich our days as long as there is life.
From Woman’s Day with Woman. Australia. August 2, 1965.
