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The following comes from LDS Living. To read the full article, click here.
The following is an excerpt from Letters to a Young Mormon, a series of letters written by philosophy professor Adam S. Miller that distills the knowledge he wants his own children and young members of the Church to know.
Dear S.,
Soon, you’ll be hungry not only to renew life but to make it. A hunger for sex will grow in you that is just as real, just as native, and just as pressing as your need for food and sleep. Remember that your hunger for intimacy, like all hungers, is a gift and not a punishment.
This new hunger is different from the others. You’ll die if you don’t eat and breathe, but you won’t die if you don’t have sex—though, to be honest, you may sometimes feel like you will. This new hunger is different because it is not just a hunger for food or air but for another person, and that person’s needs and feelings and fears are just as real and just as complicated as your own. And there is something else to always bear in mind. The intimacy you crave not only involves your responsibility to care for the needs of another person. It involves your responsibility to care for the fact that this intimacy can make a new person. Sex gives life.
This hunger for intimacy is like an ocean. It will come like a flood, and you will feel lost at sea. When you were a child, you walked on dry ground. In order to become an adult, you’ll have to learn how to swim. You are no more responsible for being at sea than you are for needing to breathe. And, though some may say different, you are not guilty because the ocean is wet. You did not choose this hunger. But, even if you had, the task would be the same: you must choose what to do with it.
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