by Vince Coyner, American Thinker:
I was about 15 the first time I fell in love. It wasn’t until 25 years later that I finally got married. It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried to get married before because I had. I asked someone to marry me when I was 17. She said no. I asked three more girls over the next decade; same result! The funny thing is, in each of those torpedoed proposals, the girl was right. It would have been a disaster. Sure, I was in love, but it’s clear to me today that things would never have worked out. That impetuosity and irrationality are what youth is all about—and it’s why it’s wicked to have a society that pressures children into mutilating their bodies in the name of “gender.”
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Every one of those relationships and others involved a roller coaster of emotions. The heart-pounding that’s associated with anticipation, the satisfaction of landing that first date, the joy of that first kiss, the awkwardness of a rejection, or the heartache of a breakup.
Indeed, my hormones were usually racing ahead of me and, once, caused me to do something so out of character that I cringe about it today. To my great shame, I once obliquely threatened to kill a man because my girlfriend lied and claimed he’d raped her. By the grace of God, I discovered the truth long before anything terrible happened, but it’s a demonstration of how hormones and emotions can cause some of us to do things that we might later regret.
Most of this heart-driven chaos happened when I was ostensibly an adult. Part of the reason I’m convinced that things would never have worked out with those other girls was that I had zero idea of what I wanted to do in my life. Not in college. Not in the Army. Not even as an entrepreneur. I was all over the map, from managing at a superstore to bartending to moving boxes in a warehouse. I was a living embodiment of what today they call ADHD or what we called hyperactive when I was a kid.
Image: First date by Kevin Dooley. CC BY 2.0.
Eventually, I smartened up and decided to jump and, thankfully, the greatest woman I know was there to catch me when I did. But here’s the thing…it took me, a relatively average guy, almost four decades to make what is arguably the most important decision in my life. I had to go through the chaos of life’s ups and downs, its light and shadows, before I figured out what I wanted. I had to go through chaos in my professional life, my friendships, my leisure activities, and even my faith before I figured things out. And then, when I was finally ready to jump, I always knew in the back of my mind there was an escape hatch… If things somehow went sideways, I could always get a divorce and start again.
One thing that was clear, however, during all this inevitable life chaos, was that I was 100% straight. Never was there a single moment when I thought I might not be. I see a beautiful woman, and there’s a physiological reaction that simply doesn’t happen when I see dudes. I can’t imagine what would have been going on in my head if I hadn’t had that anchor.
All of this to say, I was a mess at 25; never mind at 15, 12, or 17. I wasn’t ready to make what is supposed to be a lifelong commitment to a single person, even though I was 100% certain about the sex to which I was attracted, and there was an escape hatch available if I blew it.
But in America today, there are those who think that children are not only able to make life-changing decisions, but they are also able to make body-altering decisions from which there is no return.
Youth is a time of extraordinary angst. Not only are children being introduced to people and influences beyond their families, but they’re also learning the real-world application of concepts that are fundamental to the core of our society, such as responsibility, choices, and consequences, as well as things as varied as private property, cooperation, risk/reward, and privacy—all of this while learning how to read, write, and do math, as well as make the varsity team, get a learner’s permit, and take a phalanx of college prep classes.
And as if all of that were not enough, add into the mix peer pressure. Not the kind many adults experienced in the past, such as getting picked on at school and then going home to lick your wounds and regroup for the next day. Today’s peer pressure is unrelenting, and there is virtually no sanctuary. Kids today live on their phones, and have no place to which they can retreat. Only the rare child with the fortitude to turn off the phone gets a break.
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