The thirteenth key to super marital sex is to teach and learn, to teach and learn with each other as husband and wife and as a family. The thirteenth key is the most important of all the keys, and the one that has seldom been discussed from the first three perspectives. The focus has been an individual focus, an adult focus, when in fact sexuality is a lifelong process that begins in the uterus and affects the entire family every day. The thirteenth key is a family sexual orientation, an openness and specificity of sexual discussion to prevent the tragedy of abortion, sexually transmissible disease, sexual problems, even the emotional trauma that results in drug abuse and an alarming rise in adolescent suicide. Our children are, and we have been, looking for love in all the wrong places and in the wrong ways, seldom benefiting from a strong and supportive
sexual and loving education from within our family, educational, and religious institutions.
This chapter is about sex education in the United States. In spite of all of the talk and writing about sex education, there are very few programs that are successfully teaching the combination of love, sensuality, morality, and responsibility. With few exceptions, we continue to teach mechanics and the first three perspectives with their genital and energy-release focus. We are not offering love education, not talking about the purpose behind the struggle of the young people in the story you have just read. We are teaching “preventive sexuality,” a way of preventing disease and pregnancy rather than an enhancing intimacy that can bring the joy of closeness with another person.
Think about your sex and love education. Where and how did you learn about sexuality? Have you really learned enough to teach it yourself? There will never be a school- or church-based sex-education course that will do the job that needs to be done, the job of telling the whys and hows of making love and not just the mechanics of procreation and contraception. As long as sex remains a dirty joke in our schools and a mystery in our homes, we will continue to suffer in a sexually stagnant society. There has never been a sexual revolution at all, but a sexual involution, a turning in to a mechanical, pleasure-oriented sex rather than a looking forward to loving, fulfilling, long-lasting sexual relationships in a daily living context. We will never really be able to have super marital sex by looking only for super sex. You have read throughout this book that sex and love, and all the learning that each requires, cannot be separated from each other. This is the connection that can be opened with the thirteenth key, the key of lifelong learning.
Teaching sex will never be enough. We have to role-model love and caring, talk about everything sexual with everyone in our home, and continue to learn about sexuality and intimacy throughout life. We cannot leave our children to struggle blindly in parked cars. We will have to talk about the snaps on bras and the zippers on jeans. We will have to help them find a safe place and a safe way to be sexual, and not tease them with the joys of sex, then try to hide sex from them. They will always find it. They have already found it. They were born with it and born doing it. Do we want them to suffer without our help? If that happens, what they find will never be super marital sex. We have to put the love, the real snap of sex, back into sexuality.
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