Young people are having more sex with more partners, according to a recent survey, but is it making them any happier, asks Kate Holmquist
The younger we are, the more sexual partners we have, the more adventurous we are and the more risks we're willing to take. Is this making the young happier than their parents were? That's the great unanswered question in the Irish Study of Sexual Health and Relationships, published this week.
The survey does reveal a certain regret - the younger we are when we have sex for the first time, the more likely we are to be sorry. And the younger we are, the more likely we are to have a crisis pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease.
But fulfilment and satisfaction? The survey found that physical and emotional satisfaction were most likely in a committed relationship amongst people aged 25-44 years old. The younger men, aged 18-24, were the least emotionally satisfied with the sex they were having, even though they were having more of it. A quarter of women aged 18-24 wished they'd waited longer for their first sexual experience but most thought it was about the right time.
What will this liberalisation mean for relationships in the future, and will more sex with more people make us happier?
"There's misery in sexual repression but there's misery in sexual excess as well," comments John Sharry, therapist with the Mater Hospital's Child Mental Health clinic and author of parenting books.
"Young people are thinking, 'so what if it's not a healthy relationship, if the sex is good it's okay'," says Lisa O'Hara, couples counsellor with the Marriage and Relationships Counselling Service (MRCS).
"Sexuality is happening, but lasting relationships are not happening," says Lorraine McColgan, a therapist who regularly works with third-level students.
The potential "misery", as Sharry describes it, is staggering, emotionally and physically. The study revealed a four-fold increase in sexually transmitted diseases and an ignorance about HIV, with one-third of respondents getting simple questions about the virus wrong. It's a recipe for an epidemic.
Richard Layte, co-author of the report, says: "Ireland was protected in the past because no one wanted to come here. With open borders we have a sufficient mix of immigrants from areas where HIV is pandemic so we could quite easily see an epidemic of heterosexually transmitted HIV as the Irish have relationships with immigrants."
Having multiple partners adds to the risk. On average, people aged 18-24 years old first had sexual intercourse at age 17, and most will have multiple sexual partners in their lifetimes. One in five men aged 18-24 has already had 10 or more partners and a further 20 per cent have had at least five. The more partners someone had, the more likely they were to be sleeping with more than one person at the same time, increasing the risk of spreading STDs, the survey found.
Women aged 18-24 were more conservative, although 38 per cent reported having had at least three partners, including eight per cent who had had 10 or more.
"By the time they meet their life partners, they'll have a sexual history," says Hannah McGee, co-author of the report. In this environment, she says, young people need to negotiate "protection" against STDs, which will require a "frankness" that many have yet to learn, although experience is a teacher.
Being honest about what you like or don't like, want or don't want, isn't just a matter of sexual satisfaction, but life or death where HIV is concerned. Also, with rates of the STD chlamydiathe rapidly increasing, many young women who have not protected themselves risk infertility by the time they are married. Using contraception - which most 18-24-year-olds do - is not the same as being protected from STDs.
YET, WHILE KNOWLEDGEABLE about contraception, young people in their teens and 20s are increasingly fearful of intimacy and honest social interaction at the very time when they need them most, says McColgan. "This is the generation that took [ the drug] ecstasy and it's as though they expect in relationships that direct hit of loving feeling that ecstasy produces. They expect this to happen in relationships and if it doesn't, there's an intolerance of investing the time it takes to work things out," she says.
"This is a time of transmutation for Ireland: since the fall of the Catholic church due to the experience of abuses the state has lost a 'parental' figure that people had got their moral guidance from. We've gone very sharply from one extreme to the other - from a culture of obedience to moral anarchy," she believes.
In the midst of unprecedented wealth, as well as considerable confusion around sexuality, young people are less able to communicate because, ironically, all the communication tools at their disposal have both speeded communication and distanced them from other people, she says. "People are communicating through carefully worded texts to put a physical distance and often an emotional distance between themselves and other people.
"There's a loss of community and now that people are renting, there are no more neighbourhoods. Their only social contact is in situations where alcohol and drugs are used, and on the internet, and they're not the ideal forums for meeting others as they really are and as you really are."
The increased sexual activity and tolerance of one-night stands (only a quarter of 18-24-year-olds believe them to be always or mostly wrong) is showing a fear of intimacy and loss of connection with others, she thinks.
"There's a confusion about how to meet emotional needs [ and with the depleted influence of the church] no longer an ethos for communicating feelings and how to treat other people. Young people have a very ego-centric, self-serving view of relationships and it just does not work. It's not difficult to have sex, but to build a relationship of intimacy and vulnerability is a different matter entirely," she says.
This is a rare opportunity for Ireland to "grow up", she adds, but who will the teachers and role models be? McColgan believes that young people need to meet and hear "wise women" who have experienced life discuss these matters openly, perhaps through a TV series on sexuality and relationships.
According to McGee: "Young people will have more complex relationships, more complex family relationships, second families, step- relationships, and they'll have to deal with questions like the social etiquette of having a mother, father, step-parents and step-siblings at a wedding, and we don't have a background teaching us how to do this." Soap operas are providing "good role models" and opportunities for "observational learning" on these issues, she believes.
Teen magazines are good influences, says Layte. "As you move away from the influence of Catholic belief, it has to be replaced by another framework - an individual lifestyle perspective where decisions around sex become a lifestyle choice, like fashion," he says.
THE HOME IS the place for learning about sexuality, believes John Farrelly, director of counselling for marriage therapy service Accord, who thinks that teachers who have the "poisoned chalice" of teaching sex education foisted on them aren't necessarily the best people for the job.
In the survey, 90 per cent of people supported sex education in school and fewer - 80 per cent - in the home, with men, young people and the lower-educated more likely to want sex education in school only. Few respondents had learned about sex at home (21 per cent of men and 38 per cent of women in the 18-24 age group) and most young people were uneasy about talking to their parents about it.
Layte and McGee say: "More information and resources directed at parents might help them become more comfortable and give them the skills necessary to talk to their children about sex."
Of those who had sex education in school, only a third had been educated about contraception and safer sex, while only a quarter had received education on sexual feelings and relationships. Amongst the 18-24s, 42 per cent of men and 34 per cent of women found their sex education "unhelpful".
Farrelly says: "The human being is broader than the sexual act. We need to find a way to support parents in finding ways to inform their children while also making them aware of their humanity, of the emotional web that sexuality involves, or else we leave it to the media, which is prematurely sexualising our children." He suggests that we need to look again at the sex education being offered in schools to ensure that it's being provided by appropriately trained experts, ideally counsellors who have worked through their own sexual issues.
He argues that in order to teach young people about sensitivity, empathy, caring, respect, honesty and sincerity - all of which are required for a satisfying, committed relationship - then you need to have teachers with self-honesty, self-acceptance, self-awareness and self-respect.
Many teachers have these qualities, but communicating around the area of sex and relationships, which is fraught at the best of times, requires special training, in his view. In Northern Ireland, Accord provides a programme for both Catholic and Protestant schools, which involves students, teachers and parents, and Farrelly would like to see that model considered in the State.
With the best will in the world, however, parents and teachers are working in a hostile climate, bombarded by a media in which sex is cheap and offered as a consumer item, he also points out.
For teenagers entering the minefield of sexual relationships under the influence of a highly sexualised media, "there is a danger of confusing sex with love", says O'Hara, who believes that the values that put sex in the context of a loving relationship have been diluted: "The sex is coming first and, for teenagers, they are not necessarily in love with their sex partner. There is peer pressure to have the sex act without thinking about what they actually want from a relationship."
A third of women who had "first sex" under the age of 15 were not equally willing with their partner, the survey found. "Alcohol and recreational drugs go hand-in-hand with this and many teenagers are having sex while off their heads with no capacity to make a decision," says O'Hara. "The girls are easy targets for boys who are full of hormones and at their sexual peak."
The emotional harm can be long-lasting, she warns: "If you have a regret - and girls are more likely to have regrets, according to the survey - you are holding it in your head and it has an impact on how you feel about sex in the future. We live with very strong legacies of past sexual experiences."
WE LIVE WITH our parents' sexual experiences, too, which can make the home a potentially negative influence, says Sharry. He sees children and teenagers so wounded by their parents' adultery, that they are afraid to trust and lack the security of a moral compass. At the MRCS also, counsellors see teenagers who are hurt and confused by their experiences of separation, divorce and step-families.
"Step-families have complex problems that can take nine years to work through, which is one reason why second marriages, where partners have previous children, have a higher chance of break-up," says O'Hara. "The adults fall in love and think it's okay - but it can take up to nine years to work itself out. That's why a lot of those relationships fail . . . If the adults can't see the difficulties, how can you expect a teenager to see them? It's giving teenagers a hurdle that they didn't need in the first place."
So parents can be either a positive or negative influence on the way a young person handles the confusing world of sexuality, making sex education in schools only one component of the positive role modelling a young person needs to develop a healthy sexuality.
In the parents' age group, sexual attitudes aren't necessarily conservative, even though the survey did find a "generation gap", with younger people experimenting and having more partners than their parents' generation. About 60 per cent of women aged 45-54 think that one night stands are always wrong - with the rest more flexible on the issue. And those are the mothers talking. Amongst the fathers' generation, 35 per cent think they are always wrong, although whether the 65 per cent who totally approve or approve in certain circumstances would tell their sons this is unclear.
For young people learning about their own sexuality, the softening of attitudes towards homosexuality is welcome, O'Hara says. The MRCS sees many couples who married with either one or both of the partners unaware that one of them was homosexual. The increasing openness brings married couples in for counselling, but may also prevent such unhappy unions taking place at all.
The generation gap means that people old enough to be parents are more conservative in their attitudes, which may in itself be a "legacy" that will positively influence their children, O'Hara says. "I've begun to sound like a fuddy-duddy, just like my parents. But I'm beginning to realise that my parents were right."
A word from John Sharry for parents who doubt whether they have the right to be right: "Young people want boundaries and consistency. Parents and children need to talk about values, but at the same time we don't want to beat people up when they make a mistake. Spontaneity is an important part of sexuality. But the wise traditions advise people to know what they like and want first. The PC response is to say do what you like as long as you use a condom, but the more considered answer would be to be careful who you have sex with and do it in the context of a loving relationship."
Sharry, McColgan, O'Hara and Farrelly all make comments to the effect that they aren't prudes who want to return to the bad old days of repression, but they have seen the trend swing too far towards sexual anarchy and would like to see it move towards the centre. Perhaps, with age, wisdom and hindsight, they see almost too clearly the dangers of playing things too fast and loose in youth when hearts are so easily broken.