SEX AND LOVE BEFORE MARRIAGE.

Sex and Love before Marriage 

The sexual relationship is a key factor in the normal process by which each man or woman grows to maturity. Sexuality presents itself to the vast majority of people as filled with interest and indeed fascination. It holds out the hope of a special happiness; and yet is so often characterized by tension and strife. It can be colored by idealism, and clouded by obsession. Tending to draw people powerfully together, it can also leave them bitterly separated.

If sexuality is so important in personal development and in interpersonal relationships, why should it be such a delicate matter to handle, and so filled with complexities and dangers?

It may help towards unraveling this mystery if we start from the concept of simple friendship, especially as the sexual relationship we wish to consider here implies or should imply a special form of friendship.

Friendship

The human person does not grow to maturity (or find happiness) in isolation. One needs to relate to others; and not just to others in general but to some others whom one can regard as friends, whom one can trust in a special way, in whom one finds sympathy, respect, understanding... The tendency to seek friends is universal. Friendship is one of the great blessings of life - that not everyone enjoys. The completely friendless person is at a tremendous disadvantage - with no one to trust in, to communicate and share with... The person without a friend in the world is truly alone and unhappy.

Why should human persons need to relate between themselves? Why should friendship be the most normal element drawing people together? We go back to the Book of Genesis and to that first divine comment about the human person: 'it is not good for man to be alone' (Gen 2:18). God made him for communion, not for solitude or isolation; not to have just distant acquaintances but some real companion, some real friend.

Friendship implies love (and love without the essential qualities of friendship is not true love at all). A friend is someone you care for and trust, to whom you wish well and not evil, with whom you can be more at one than with a mere acquaintance, whom you feel appreciates and respects you just as you respect him or her. Friendship usually starts out from a casual acquaintanceship, it grows as one senses oneself understood or complemented by the other, it adds a sense of completeness to one's life, becoming at times a bond that binds to death.

Young children like to have many friends, though their approach to their friends is often quite self-centered. If it remains so, they will lose their friends since no one (except God and a really good mother or father) loves a selfish person . And since we all have a large measure of selfishness, wanting what seems good for us rather than what is good for others, uncombatted selfishness is radically opposed to any enduring genuine friendship.

Friendship in childhood and adolescence

In childhood, while there is a certain tendency for boys to associate more with boys and girls more with girls, boys and girls can naturally be good friends. In any case before they get to their teens, they already have a fairly accurate idea of what is implied in friendship - that being able to rely on someone who is not selfish (at least towards you), who doesn't cheat or take advantage of you, with whom you can share your secrets, your trials, your dreams...

Among pre-teen boys and girls, there is of course a sense of sex difference, but it is not normally an obstacle to genuine friendship between a particular boy and girl - however much each may otherwise join in common peer judgments: all boys are rough and stupid; all girls are soft and silly.

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