All My Children

In the later teens—at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen—a majority of young people will have lost enough of their shyness and gained enough experience so that they can mix socially with pleasure. Those who are in love will be in love on a more realistic basis than when they were younger—in the sense that they will have got to know the beloved before allowing themselves to become infatuated, and in the sense that they are seeing each other fairly regularly in real life situations, not just dreaming of each other at a distance. Others will not be emotionally ready yet to fall seriously in love, but they are drawn to certain members of the opposite sex and are having regular or occasional dates. Continue Reading »

In past times there have always been a small number of young lovers who for economic, educational, family or ideological reasons were not married but lived together more or less secretly. An American domestic relations court judge shocked most people by recommending ‘Companionate Marriage’, trial marriages without children, as a way of attempting to reduce the number of later divorces that are so hard on the children of the family Continue Reading »