When young people begin going out or when they fall in love (or what they think might be love), they often find themselves faced with questions about how to handle the strong romantic and sexual feelings they may be having. When two people are attracted to each other, they quite naturally want to be physically close. Being physically close may mean something as simple as holding hands or kissing goodnight after a date. Or it may mean more than this. Physical closeness may even include something as intimate as sexual intercourse.
Some young people don’t have much trouble in deciding what kind of physical closeness is right for them or in making decisions about ‘how far’ they want to go in terms of physical intimacy. For instance, some young people have very strong religious or moral beliefs or other values that guide them in making these sorts of decision. But, other young people aren’t as certain. For example, some young people aren’t sure what’s right or wrong when it comes to deciding how far to go. And even those who are sure sometimes have a difficult time sticking to their beliefs when they’re actually in a situation in which they have to make these decisions. So we usually spend a good deal of time, especially in our classes for older boys and girls, discussing the topic of making decisions about how to handle romantic and sexual feelings. We don’t have enough space to cover everything we discuss in class, but in the following pages we’ll answer some of the most commonly asked questions.
Some of the questions you’ll find here are questions about what’s OK or not OK or what’s morally right or wrong when it comes to young people acting on their romantic or sexual feelings. If there were one set of answers with which everyone agreed, it would be easy to answer these sorts of questions, and our job as sex education teachers/writers would be much easier. We could just give the agreed-upon answers and that’s all there’d be to it. But it’s not that simple. The fact is that different people have different ideas on these issues and there isn’t one agreed-upon set of answers. Therefore, when we’re discussing these sorts of question in our classes and in our books, we don’t give one answer. Instead, we try to present the many different opinions that people have and to explain why people feel the way they do about these issues, without ‘taking sides’. We do it this way because we think it’s important for young people to hear all sides of a question and come up with their own answers rather than just going along with someone else’s opinion. Far too many young people don’t think these questions through on their own, and this can lead to trouble. For example, some young people answer questions about how to handle their sexual and romantic feelings based on what they think everyone else is doing. Not only are they often wrong about what ‘everyone else’ is doing, but the fact is that just because ‘everyone else’ does it does not mean it’s right for you.
Or, to take another example, some young people don’t think through these issues on their own and just go along with what their parents or their religions say is right or wrong. Now, please don’t misunderstand what we’re saying here. We’re not saying that you shouldn’t follow your parents’ or your religion’s teachings or rules. In fact, we think parents and religions usually have excellent advice that’s well worth following. But we’ve found that young people who just accept what they’ve been taught without thinking things through for themselves frequently run into problems when they’re actually in situations in which they have to make decisions about how far to go. Often these young people find that they don’t stick by the rules they’ve been taught. The rules sort of ‘crumble’, or ‘fall apart’ or ‘cave in’ in the face of the tremendous pressure to experiment sexually that’s often put on young people. We think this happens because the rules weren’t really their own in the first place. The rules were someone else’s rules. We believe that it’s not until you consider all the different viewpoints and decide for yourself what rules to follow that the rules become truly your own. And it’s not until the rules are truly your own that they become rules you can really live by. So you’ll find many viewpoints in the answers to the questions about what’s right/wrong or OK/not OK in the following pages. We hope this will help you find your own answers.
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