Fuzzy, I certainly didn't intend to insult anyone younger than me... I was just expressing delight that I haven't yet "missed it all". The book makes the distinction between "Genital Prime" and "Sexual Prime". Genital Prime is what people generally refer to and understand as Sexual Prime, and it is expressed by the commonly-held notion that the sexual peak for men is before age 20, and for women it is in late 20's or early 30's. That is true in terms of genital peak, meaning peak physical functioning (as dicated by physical condition and hormone levels), but definitely NOT true about a person's ability to achieve a deep, meaningful and intimate connection with a long-term partner. That is not to say that young people can't or don't have meaningful sex, but it does imply that things get better as you get older (or at least they can). The book also states that nobody enters marriage "being ready for it" - marriage makes you ready for marriage. Marriage itself is a person-growing process, and the very act of remaining married for several decades creates a process whereby the two partners can (I repeat can) grow personally and achieve a deeper and more intimate level of contact as time goes by. Notice that because this is a process of growth, it is NOT something that can be short-circuited. That's what makes it useless to mourn "wasted years" when you could have "fixed the problem" and been "enjoying each other" - you can't short-circuit the process, so you can't move forward until you're ready for it. Not only that, but each person has to make the choice for themselves. If both people make the choice to stay together and grow together, THAT is when the best sexual years of all are possible.
One of the most surprising things the book says (but so true if you think about it) is that most of us can't handle real intimacy with our spouse, because that intimacy would force us to confront things about ourselves that we aren't ready to confront, so we develop elaborate defence mechanisms designed to allow us to get just close enough to get the level of intimacy we can handle, without allowing enough intimacy to make things really interesting. I.e. we ML in the dark, with our eyes closed, to avoid letting our partner "really see" us - that would be too scary. The focus of this book is how to move beyond that to create true intimacy, which requires "growing up" enough to be able to handle it. NOT the kind of stuff for teenagers, but then they wouldn't be developmentally able to process this stuff anyway... (again, not a slur, just a fact).
