To have or not to have sex—the choice should be yours.
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This comment was by Celina Doyle in reference to the post – Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Awesome Sex
I’d much rather hear fathers and mothers telling their sons and daughters that they are strong, autonomous and wise enough to make their own decisions.
• That their bodies belong to them, and that no one else gets to decide what they do with them.
• That having sex (or not) doesn’t have anything to do with their value as a person.
• That virginity is a myth, that sex is healthy, and that marriage is something to be undertaken seriously, and not because you’re desperate to get laid and terrified to have sex without it.
And how to keep themselves safe, not just physically, but also emotionally.
Teaching our children emotional resilience is part of the job. Telling them to save their hearts and their sexual experience for marriage leaves them impossibly vulnerable to abuse, abandonment and neglect once they are married. Encouraging them to go out and get their hearts broken, have sex, have good sex and lousy sex, date people casually and seriously, try themselves and the world out, means they will develop self-sufficiency, and even if their marriages do fall apart (as more than 50% of them do, even in the religious world) they’ll survive it.
I married my first sex partner. We’ve been married for 19 years. And, while I don’t ever regret marrying him, I definitely regret going into this marriage with so little sexual experience. It has put a strain on our marriage that has taken an enormous amount of work and soul searching and tears to work through. A strain that would have been easily avoided if I’d simply been brave enough to have a sex life before I met him.
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