Question: How do you feel about premarital sex? Explain.

Maybe it�s because I came of age during the sexual revolution in the seventies, but it never even occurred to me to reserve sex for after marriage. I lost my virginity at 15 to a guy I dated kind of casually, and had a couple more casual sexual relationships after that before I married for the first time at the age of 16.

I can�t say as I regret it, either. If I had it to do over I�d be more careful about protection and hopefully I�d choose a little better caliber of partner, but I still see no real reason to wait until marriage.

I don�t think sex is diminished in any way by not reserving it for marriage, any more than love is. There are many different kinds of love in addition to the special love you feel for your marriage partner. You can love your best friend, you can love other boy/girlfriends, you can love your dog, you can love guacamole�all without diminishing the love you�ll eventually feel for the person you marry. It�s the same with sex. You can have sex with your best friend, with other boy/girlfriends, with your d... well, maybe that�s not a great analogy after all. Guacamole will stain your sheets something awful.

As long as you want the experience and are responsible about protecting yourself, premarital sex can be a positive and rewarding experience. Besides simply adding pleasure and gratification to your life, exposure to a variety of lovers will (hopefully) introduce you to many different sexual techniques, which can give you valuable knowledge in regard to your own sexual response as well as teaching you a wide repertoire of skills with which to please subsequent partners.

Learning to separate sexual activity from love, when appropriate, can make you more appreciative of the act of sex for its own sake, as something done for physical and sensual pleasure and not only about expressing romantic feelings and emotional attachment. There can be a whole new dimension of uninhibited eroticism and earthy physicality in sex with someone when you don�t have the perception lurking in the back of your mind that the success or failure of a love relationship depends on your maintaining a good impression. Sometimes it can be easier to let go and be more adventurous with someone when you know you�re not going to be staring at them across the breakfast table for the next 40 years.

And if, after having had some premarital sexual experience, you DO decide to marry someone eventually, you�ll never have to wonder what it would be like to have sex with someone other than your spouse. And you�ll also know how your spouse's skill in the sack measures up to the skills of at least a few other people. If he/she is better than your previous partners then you�ll feel lucky; if he/she happens to be worse, well, at least you�ll have some idea of what needs to improve for your sex life to be more satisfying. It�s no fun being in a sexual relationship that you know is unsatisfying but having no real idea how things could be different.

Personally, I wouldn�t dream of marrying someone I hadn�t already spent time building a sexual relationship with. It�s not so much that I worry about getting stuck with a partner who is sexually unskilled. Skills and experience are great, but they can be taught to a partner who is willing to learn. What having sex does reveal about a person is their attitude toward sex. Are they playful about sex, open-minded, generous about giving and enthusiastic about receiving pleasure? Or do their actions in the bedroom reveal selfishness, laziness, prudery, and lack of imagination? For me, this is information I need to know BEFORE the wedding night. Forever is a long time to put up with a lousy sex life, and divorce is expensive.

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