Early experience of sex excitations, of infatuations, caresses, and passions are very important in our personal pattern of feeling and making love. Human love is very complex and intricate. Sex intercourse is only one part, and even this one portion is not simple and identical in all persons. We learn to love as we learn to walk and to talk, developing our own gait and our own dialect. The language of love-making is defined by early sexual excitations and molded by any new practice and experience. Our present behavior in love is trained and developed by all our previous experiences.
It is indeed unfortunate that the relationship between man and woman is obstructed by so many disturbing childhood experiences. The growing generation has little opportunity to develop an adequate impression of love. Rarely do they find it in their environment. Even ardently affectionate mothers very often have so many selfish, demanding, possessive qualities that it seems unwarranted to classify maternal love as an example of true love. The first impressions of sex and love are decisive, and too many of us grow up with the wrong expectations. “True Stories” and erotic movies are no compensation for unhappy marriages.
On the contrary, they distort reality and inflame the mind with pictures of sex attraction, beauty, and love-making which can never be attained in real life. How much disappointment and resentment is caused by these illusions of sex love! We seem to be caught in a terrible vicious circle. We ourselves are brought up with all kinds of mistaken notions and when we marry and rear our own children, we have little better to offer them.
Few parents are aware of how much their own attitude toward sex influences the ideas of their children. The child both accepts his parents’ point of view or rebels and moves in the opposite direction. Surprisingly early in life, he develops a concept of love as a source of suffering or as an opportunity for mere pleasure and superficial gratification, or he learns that love and marriage provide the basis for human companionship. He can discover how much mutual help and stimulation can result from the cooperation of the sexes and can learn that love involves not only receiving but also, and primarily, giving.
Adolescence
The personal attitude of the growing child toward the sexes and toward his own sexual physiology determines the manner in which he later will approach love and marriage. It influences his choice of a mate and creates the particular conflicts which endanger or enhance his marital happiness. Any faultiness and distortion in this attitude becomes apparent during adolescence. This period of growing up is probably more troublesome today than in previous times. Parents tend to overprotect their children. They want to keep them dependent, partly because their own growing feeling of inadequacy makes them distrust the child’s ability to take care of himself, and partly because their dire need for prestige does not permit them to loosen their cherished domination and become merely older but equal friends of their children. Consequently, they frown upon any expression of self-reliance or independence in the child.
The resulting friction between parents and adolescent children is particularly unfortunate for the child, because it coincides with a period of tension and apprehension caused by his physical development. Youngsters experience new feelings when their sexual glands mature. It is as if they were put into a new world. People long familiar suddenly provoke new and embarrassing feelings as the adolescent becomes aware of their sexual qualities. Boys and girls appear in a different light. Everything changes as the youngsters grow. They become awkward in their movements and feel insecure in the changing proportions of their limbs and bodies. No wonder they are extremely irritable and easily disturbed. The final conceptions of their own sex and their emotional and ideological attitude toward the other sex are established and stabilized in wavering and confused experimenting.
It is our duty to help these young people in their distress. They are entitled to our assistance during this most difficult period of their lives. At a time of perplexing changes in human relationships, friendship is a most important guide through all this confusion. Co-education helps to avert or at least mitigate the crisis. In acquiring a deeper understanding through mutual activity, the child may easily come to regard members of the other sex as human companions, and the sexual difference then becomes less important, and future compatibility is facilitated. 
