I agree wholeheartedly with #1, but I’m not sure I understand or agree with #2. The person you marry is not necessarily the person with whom you are most sexually compatible, indeed is most likely not the same person.
The person you choose to marry is the one that is most aligned with your dreams in life: where do you want to live, what do you like to do in your free time, do you want children and how many, is family important, do you have the same theological beliefs, can they put up with your imperfections and you them, etc.
If sexual compatibility lines up with those things above, then that is great, but from my experience and those of my friends, you marry the person that has those qualities in the above paragraph and you work on the sex later. You don’t marry that girl that you had the wild, sweaty week in Vegas with, but decided that she wanted to live overseas.
I think the problem arises, for me and others, is that when you have the bumps in the road in the marriage, the drudgery and the mid-life crisis, you tend to look back on Vegas chick with a rosy sort of recollection: wow, that sex was great instead of the routine that the wife and I have fallen in.
But if you didn’t do that. If you had a personal code that you didn’t have sex with people like Vegas chick, then years later you would not be unfairly comparing your wife to her.
Hell, I could be wrong, though. It has worked out for you.
Possibly not. However, I would argue that sexual compatibility is an important factor in a happy, healthy marriage. All of the other things you listed in your post are, as well, but to go into a marriage making sure that you’re compatible in those other areas, and having no actual idea if you’re even remotely compatible in what you are looking for out of your sexual relationship, can certainly be problematic. If you went into a marriage having no idea of your spouse’s thoughts were on children, their hobbies and interests, etc., it’d cause conflict, and mis-matched sexual drives are a source of conflict, too.
“You work on the sex later” might have worked out for you and your friends (or, at least, you believe that it did), but maybe it didn’t – and unless you and your friends share a lot of personal details about your marriages, you might never know.
My wife and I didn’t live together before we got married; we’d dated for 2+ years before the wedding, and while we didn’t wait for the wedding night for sex, we didn’t sleep together very often before then, either (due, in part, to not actually seeing each other on a daily basis when we were dating). Also, I came into the relationship having been sexually active with two prior long-term girlfriends; she had not been.
And, after we got married, we discovered that, in truth, we weren’t particularly compatible in that regard – in what we like, and how often we like it, we are of very different minds (and that difference has just grown as we’ve gotten older). The incompatibility led to frequent frustration and disappointment for both of us.
Oh, there was no sex education taught in school. None. They had health class. Separately taught, boys had a coach for a teacher. And since home-ec was no longer offered the girls actually just went to study hall. This is the heart of the bible belt. Now you know why we rank so low, here in good ol’ Arkansas.
I agree 100%. My only point was that sexual compatibility can be “worked on,” perhaps not to the complete satisfaction of both parties, but those other things on the list cannot be dealt with in any meaningful sense. If you are content living in a small town, working 40 hours a week, having 2.4 kids, and going out to dinner once in a while, and she wants to travel the world living in Paris and London and never wanting to have kids, there is not much room there for compromise, even if you do have wonderfully awesome sex.
My main point was that when you are then working on that sexual compatibility, it does neither of you any service to wonder why she can’t be like that chick from 2004 who did those nasty, nasty things that you like so well. You are holding her up to some standard that is unfair.
I’ll just say that YMMV on this. My suspicion is that some mismatches in this regard are not so severe that they can’t be worked through, but a large number are severe enough that even a compromise will leave one or both partners unsatisfied and / or feeling used, damage the sense of shared intimacy, and thus leading to even deeper issues in a marriage.
My father was born during WWII to my 15 year old grandmother and her 18 year old GI boyfriend - then husband because you have to marry her son.
They divorced right after the war. He was from another state and wanted to live there, she wanted to stay with her family and not move in with strangers.
My grandmother eventually got remarried - she would have still been a teenager. The reason that she got married is that the man that became my grandfather took her on a “date” to a motel and couldn’t perform - so he assumed it was a sign from God and married her - like a good Catholic boy. (You get the most truthful stories from your grandparents as they go senile).
We believe that in addition to my father, my uncles have a half sibling in the Philippines - that’s where my grandfather was stationed and their were photos that indicate the stories he told about a Filipina girlfriend and leaving her behind pregnant were true - he would have been in his teens since he was discharged right after the war ended and that was before he turned 20.
I would actually give (and have given - although my son doesn’t listen and my daughter-ish is asexual and doesn’t need it) very different advice.
Lose your virginity to someone who is going to take good care of you during the experience - someone patient and kind - but god forbid don’t lose your virginity to someone you are “in love” with and “committed to.” That is a hell of a lot of baggage to add on top of sex and hormones - it isn’t fair to your partner, and its a good way to get hurt. You shouldn’t marry the first person you have sex with (or the second or third) - and that first one is going to carry so much baggage during the break up if you think you are “committed” and it doesn’t last forever.
How would that work in practice? Almost all teenagers approach the point of having sex with their first partner for the very reason that they feel strong feelings for the person.
I’m not being a smartass, but do you tell your daughter, “No, not him. You can keep dating him, but go find a friend, a buddy, and tell him you want to sleep with him.”? Does she tell the boyfriend that she is in love with that she plans on fucking another guy?
What happens when that boy (like boys will do) falls in love with your daughter? Dump him?
I’m all for not having your heart broken, but I engaged in a lot of premarital sex and still cried in my beer on many nights.
Respectfully, this seems completely bass-ackwards to me.
I can see both sides of the issue, teenagers are going to have sex, abortions have gone up, teen pregnancies have gone down.
People don’t like to have their behavior judged by others but it might still be a good idea not to be a slut or a man-whore as the trend for STD’s is that they’ve continued to rise and many are becoming highly antibiotic resistant.
Expectations about sex can differ as widely as the examples you give for preferences not related to sex. What do you do to “work on” the compatibility when the proper frequency for one of the partner is every day and for the other every other week? When a partner really like sex spiced up with BDSM play and the other isn’t simply uninterested but even find these kind of practices repulsive? You’re not going to find a solution that doesn’t leave at least one, but even probably both, partner(s) frustrated and unsatisfied. There’s no much room for compromise here, either. For instance, about frequency, any compromise will result in one of the partner having regularly sex when he doesn’t want to and the other still feeling frustrated, and presumably all sex sessions feeling awkward, not spontaneous and unsatisfying for both. It’s not anymore fixable than one absolutely wanting to live in Paris and the other being only happy in a small town.
My guess is that you and your wife happen, by chance, to have relatively compatible expectations about sex and so “working on” consisted on small adaptations satisfying for both. And/or that you both consider sex as a very secondary part of your life and any issue you might have wrt sex being very low in your list of concerns. But this would be more similar to one partner somehow preferring life in a rather large city and the other having a slight preference for smaller towns and neither thinking it’s very important, which can be worked on too. Or finally maybe think that even if you’re frustrated, that’s something that you can repress and ignore, but of course you can also repress and ignore your frustration over the fact that you don’t live in a big city.
I also vaguely remember (correct me if I’m wrong) you saying that having premarital sex isn’t a good idea because you might realize that your partner isn’t good at all in the sack and be frustrated while if you don’t have sex with others you won’t realize what you’re missing hence will feel more satisfied. But I find this “argument from ignorance” totally unconvincing. Generally speaking, you seem to think that comparing your partner with other wrt sexuality is unfair (and so the less comparison you’re able to do, the better). But it isn’t anymore unfair than comparing your partner, say, laziness, with other people work ethics, or your partner’s boring conversation with other people’s wit, and so on.
You seem to think that sex is, and should be, a very secondary consideration. I’m sure it works for you and your wife, but I’m not sure why you’re assuming that other people won’t have different priorities, that sex might be for other people more important than it is for you, for instance more important than the size of the town you live in. Plenty of people don’t care that much where they live, and plenty of people care a lot about not living in permanent frustration for the next 40 years.
What you describe also happens to lots of couples who DID have sex and/or live together prior to marriage.
I once knew a married couple who were both sex therapists, and the husband decided to do an impromptu survey of his clients. Over a period of time, he asked them, “How old were you the first time you had sex, and where did it happen?” The average age was consistent, but the location wasn’t.
After about 1970, the most common location was in the home of one or the others’ parents. Before about 1970, the most common location was church camp. Makes sense to me - lots of hiding places and no parents around.
I would add that there are on a regular basis, threads on this board started by people (men and women alike) saying that they’re very unhappy due to the absence of sex for a long time in their marriage, or to its poor quality, or to a lack of chemistry and lack of interest sometimes dating back to the first years or even months of marriage. This is a testament to the importance of sexual compatibility in couples. Most of the people starting these threads are considering divorce, which you would probably find a bad thing (even though I don’t), so you would probably advise them to keep trying to “work it out” (hence keep living in unhappiness in their sexless or frustrating marriage). I would argue that if these people had given proper consideration to the importance of sexual compatibility from the beginning instead of hoping for the best or thinking that they could “work on it” , they would have selected a different partner with whom they would have been happier and wouldn’t consider divorcing now.
People can change wrt their sexual aspirations. But then again, people can change about a lot of things.
But I still suspect that a lot of these couples realizing later that they were incompatible did in fact already know that this was a problem and decided nevertheless to ignore it, hope for the best, with the idea that it will “fix itself” somehow. Again, it’s not like people might not make the same bet with other causes of incompatibility, of course. But I keep thinking that despite sex being supposedly omnipresent, its importance keeps being sidelined and underestimated, with many people thinking that paying to much attention to sex and sexual compatibility is shallow, somewhat despicable and vile (or for some, sinful), hence tending to ignore signs that it might be a problem more readily than they would ignore signs of other kinds of incompatibility.
Do they, the first part? My experience is that most teenagers fall in love with a person because they want to have sex and are told that is only appropriate within the bounds of a committed relationship.
BTW, I lost my virginity at 17 - to one of three guys I’d been seeing. I picked not the Pre-med student (who was really cute), or the 22 year old college graduate that I’d known for a decade, who fell in love with me when I was fifteen and waited until his brother (who was my age) turned 18 to ask me out - but soon to be high school dropout who was not husband material at all (and is still a friend of mine). The first guy - “Ted” - I would have expected to marry me and been crushed when he didn’t - he had all the boxes - but there is a huge distance between us being Freshmen in college and being adults. The other guy - “Dan” would have wanted to marry me - since he was already at the settle down age and I wasn’t close. Too much baggage. (Ted I lost track of - he called my parents looking for me after I married though, so who knows - Dan ended up married to the woman he dated after me)
In this thread, I remarked that in Norway we have sex ed in school from the age of six, and its fairly common for boys and girls to start cohabiting in the house of one set of parents from the age of sixteen.
Our rate of abortions are to the decimal point the same as the US, although with slightly fewer of them in the “teen” age slots. On this basis I suspect that the OPs hypothesis of later debut age leading to less abortions is incorrect.
My husband and I waited until we were married to have sex. I do not recommend that strategy.
I agree with all of that, except we DID wait until the wedding night.
I’d rather my teen age son engage in sex than in football, given what I’ve learned about the risks of football. It’s not that hard to mitigate the risks of sex.
I did advise my kids to wait until they were of legal age in my state, because things can get ugly if you engage in underage sex and someone later wants to make trouble. But I’d endorse a lower age of consent, especially for near-to-same-age couples.
Uh, the laws changed. It was very hard to get divorced in the US prior to that, and there was an enormous backlog of miserable couples aching to be set free. They’ve declined since then in large part because of no more backlog. And probably also because kids are marrying later and with more experience.
My first sex was with someone I cared about and who cared about me, it was very positive… but it was NOT someone I was intending to spend the rest of my life with and indeed I didn’t. It was a good, two-year relationship that ended amicably. We had fun, we were friends, we cared about each other, but we weren’t claiming to be “soul mates” or in some sort of eternal love.
So yeah, you can have your first sex with someone you have strong feelings for without it involving a life-time commitment or promise of marriage.