Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me Kim John Payne and this third in a four-part series called The Four Kinds of Love, which is based around how to frame a conversation with your kid, with a teenager, around sex and around sexual desire and friendships. And today we come to the third part which is Caritas or charity. And you might remember I'm reading from my book The Soul of Discipline and we're on page 199 in the hardback edition and I'll be reading from that today with with some commentary as well.
So Caritas. The word charity comes from the Greek term Caritas. Giving to someone freely without expecting anything in return is very telling act as well as a sign of emotional connection.
In the first epistle to the Corinthians, Paul speaks of hope, faith, charity as these three and adds, because the greatest of these is charity. Selfless giving is a high form of love. Maria asked her teenage son Scott, who was on the brink of taking it to another level, with Cara, his girlfriend of a couple of months.
She said, would you give Cara your most valued possession and expect nothing back? Would she do the same for you? I think this needs to be clear, Scott, before any couple considers having sex, because this is the level you are heading towards. Here Maria, the mother, defined the implications of the level her son was referring to, putting it into clear perspectives. Scott and Cara did eventually sleep together, but not until after they'd finished high school and then a year later.
Maria became close to Cara, who confided in her that she fell totally in love with Scott when he spoke to her about not having sex until they were very sure where they were going to be with each other in life. Boy, that would be a wonderful thing, as a parent. Like many parents, Maria had come to terms with the fact that her belief that sex should be a part of marriage only does not hold much sway, sometimes with younger generations.
But she was relieved and grateful that Cara and Scott deepened their relationship before committing to each other on a more intimate and physical level. It takes time to develop a profound relationship with a partner. It takes even more time to be certain that your potential sexual partner reciprocates your feelings and level of commitment.
When teens have been in a relationship for some time and the question of having sex arises, it usually springs from a strong feeling of mutual commitment. At this stage, parents can speak to their teens about the future prospects of a relationship. When sex is delayed, a broader base of mutual respect can be built, and the stronger the foundation, the more likely the relationship will last.
If your teen wants a relationship to succeed and you recommend that she wait, you are guiding her towards her goal, or his goal, rather than simply giving her a well-meaning moral advice piece which she is likely to react to negatively. This one piece now, as we leave the text, about caritas and the ability to be able to speak to a young person about this third layer, because often when this third layer comes of, I'm very, very committed here, or at least I can feel the commitment growing, this can then catapult young couples into having sex. My experience is this still is something that can potentially be quite premature, because this feeling of, yeah, I want to give of myself to this other person, to be able to answer very, very surely, does that other person feel that same gift of giving without expecting anything back whatsoever from me? That's the key question.
It's not about sex. It's about the act of letting boundaries down and giving with expecting nothing, nothing back. If you ask a teen to really walk around that question and really consider that question, it can, in my experience, very often lead to, yeah, I want to know this for sure, and if the conversation isn't a kind of a, has a sort of a backdrop of you trying to persuade a teen into anything, it's a genuine question, then I've found a lot of teens can come back wanting to delay, wanting to make sure, wanting to get closer in their relationship, as opposed to, you know, moving into a sexual relationship potentially too soon.
So there's the third installment of this four-part, is unusual actually, four-part series in the Simplicity Diaries. Okay, thanks.
