Stop searching for perfect mate, urges expert

Press, 12 May 1984, Page 26

Stop searching for perfect mate, urges expert

PA Auckland People should stop striving for perfect sex or searching for the “right” partner in life, the New Zealand Society on Sexology has been told. An executive member of the society, Mr Pierre Beautrais, said that people should concentrate instead on being better people and find some spiritual anchor to their lives. “We should not try to marry the right person but be the right person,” he said. Addressing a course on human sexuality, Mr Beautrais said that society had become too self-centred and pre-occupied with sex. Sex had become like a “pelvic morphine,” drug that people took to give them a burst of hormones as they entered the “empty” cycle of finding the right partner in life. “It was a very competitive environment, like a horse race, but we are getting a bit more realistic now.” The answer no longer lay in the “if it feels good then do it” approach of the past, or in trying to make perfect sex or find the right partner. People needed to improve their own sense of wellbeing and commitment to life and living. In order to

be happy people needec some purpose for living — a spiritual anchor — and some commitment to life, such as an interest in ecology, or greater involvement in the community and what was happening about them. Mr Beautrais said that people should be thankful and think of others instead of being self-orientated and self-involved. He told his audience of doctors, psychologists, urinologists, surgeons, and social and educational administrators, that what was needed was a greater orientation towards life rather than the rules of sex and sexism. He said that the sexual freedom of the 1960 s and 1970 s had helped erode marriage as an institution. In the last two years 22,000 marriages ended in divorce in New Zealand. Based on overseas studies, this would probably result in about 30 per cent of the children still being profoundly disturbed even five years after the separation, he said. “There is a place for marriage, we cannot get away from it because it provides stability in a world of great stress and future shock and a good practice ground for dealing with people and for healing.”