Sex, Dating, and Relationships: A Fresh Approach

Sexuality is fundamental to many close human relationships. Marriage endorses it to form healthy social and cultural foundation of a family and society. But it is to be found in other such relationships as dating, and other committed romantic relationships (Gerald & Thomas, pp.160). As a generic term, it specifies dimorphic reality of human reproductiveness and biological maleness and femaleness as two behavioral modes of being in the world (1). As a theoretical, aesthetic, and practical moral problem, it is associated with the rise of modern secular culture that had its foundation in the decline of religious world view, and the rise and the rise of a western society devoted to the production of goods and knowledge (Hellerman, pp.47).

Sexuality as a matter of fact is psycho-biological process/phenomenon related directly to human sustenance in individual, family and society and associated with human reproduction/reproductive processes. Sex itself as a biological activity as explained above contains multiple aspects from pleasure to pain, and from ravishment to conjugal bliss; thus having the normal and abnormal elements (Gerald & Thomas, pp.160).. It is a primary source of reproduction carrying pleasure/orgasm or pain element in the process. Healthy sexual activities engender orgasmic responses (pleasure) and nurture human growth along healthy lines. Its derangement, however, may cause numerous psycho-biological regressions that may in turn engender psycho-biological regressivity. Recent studies in the field of abnormal psychology provide expert analysis of sex related disorders like 'sexual addiction" "sexual dependence", "compulsive sexual behavior (for example compulsive promiscuity, or masturbation"), "pornography dependence" etc. Such disorders are treated like substance -use disorders (Gerald & Thomas, pp.160).. The resultant impact of such disorders is naturally and clinically that neurasthenia. Eugene O'Neill is primarily a dramatist of human emotions and is deeply concerned with dramatizing extremes of human behavioral tendencies. His treatment of human sexuality is an illustration of his dramatizing extremes of emotive and psychological states (Kennedy, pp.89).

Here he owes a lot to Freud's psychoanalytic exploration of human consciousness and his theoretical stance on infantile psycho-sexual development in familial context. Therefore one comes across a persistent mode of incest in familial relation in his plays of different periods. The existing scholarship on O'Neill substantiates the Freudian oedipal dynamics of his personas relation with the mother and the repetitive conflict between the sons and the fathers in O'Neill's plays or the fraternal rivalry/conflict for the same desired object (mother) equally establish this oedipal nature of the relationship in the family (2) (Kranendonk, pp.68). The study, however, highlights such other areas of human sexuality as marital sexuality, male sexual abstinence/wastefulness, female heterosexuality, prostitution, and neurasthenia with reference to selected plays of different dramatic career to emphasize that there is predominant pattern of regressivity in all these areas of human sexuality that has its negative bearing on human behavioral pattern and conduct (Gerald & Thomas, pp.160)..

Directed to the Christian man seeking a mate, this book can serve a wider audience. Its psychology, values, and wit will appeal to men ...