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Sexual feelings begin long before puberty. As noted by Havelock Ellis, Freud, and Kinsey, very young children and even babies two and three months old have sexual experiences (both through self-stimulation and through handling, caring, and fondling by parents). Valid sensuous/sexual pleasures can be experienced between child and parent, especially between mother and child during nursing or nude cuddling. While such pleasures are loving, healthy, and beneficial, those pleasurable values for both the child and parent are often inhibited by incest fears and taboos.
Adolescent sex never need be approached with inhibition or forbiddance. But few adolescents have sufficient emotional development, knowledge, or desire for deep emotional involvements and serious mutual commitments with sexual partners. For adolescents and adults alike, sexual involvement should always be judged from a good-for-me/bad-for-me standard. Serious sexual experiences that deliver growth and happiness through exchanges of objective values are usually good for everyone involved, regardless of age. But sexual relations that are casual, not grounded in objective values, or neurotically based are bad for everyone, regardless of age. For casual sexual relationships undermine self-esteem and psychuous pleasures.
Adolescents having sexual relationships before they are able or desire to involve themselves in serious, value-exchanging relationships will undermine their future capacity for romantic love. The loss of self-esteem resulting from casually giving away one's personal self militates against psychuous pleasures, romantic love, and long-range happiness. For, casual or manipulative sex undercuts self-esteem. But, by understanding the concepts of psychuous sex, one can identify and correct past sexual errors while creating conditions for psychuous pleasures.
Marriage itself is no criterion to commence sexual relations. In fact, avoiding sex until marriage would usually be irrational and potentially harmful to future happiness. In any romantic-love relationship, satisfactory sex is required for full emotional intimacy and growth. In addition to achieving emotional growth, value-oriented premarital sex helps eliminate harmful anxieties for sex performance often experienced in virginal marriages. That release from sexual anxieties lets each partner concentrate on those nonsexual aspects required for long-lasting, value-producing, romantic relationships.
Nonmarital sexual relations can provide a full range of sexual values and psychuous pleasures. [Re: Concept 68, Neo-Tech Reference Encyclopedia.] Serious nonmarital sexual affairs offer important life-lifting values while avoiding the sacrifice of happiness that dominates closed marriages based on duty and sacrifice rather than honesty and values. Moreover, nonmarital sexual relationships generally allow more time and freedom for self-development and career advancement, which in turn, provides increasing values, happiness, and strength to the relationship.
Most valid, growing romantic-love relationships can and do lead to marriage[ 22 ], usually a flourishing, lasting marriage.
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[ 22 ] Marriage in that context does not necessarily mean "legal" marriage, but means any serious long-term, romantic-love relationship mutually agreed on by each partner. "Legal" marriage has no bearing on the success or failure of a relationship. The mutual decision for sharing life in a serious, sexual-love relationship is the fundamental entity for building a romantic-love relationship that delivers psychuous pleasures and long-range happiness.
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