If you are like most people, your whole life, including your sex life and your experiences with love, will have its ups and downs, its great joys, and its sorrows and regrets. Much depends on how you take what life brings to you and the values by which you make your decisions. I am talking about both your life now, in adolescence, and about your life later as an adult, whether or not you marry, And, by the way, I hope you will not let yourself be hurried into marriage too soon. There are many people who benefit by waiting to get married; and there are many who probably should never marry at all, or who have never found a person as pleasing to them as the rewards of living singly or in a group.

An attractive, loving, lovable, older Quaker lady, a member of my Friends meeting, smilingly said to a friend when she was asked why she had never married: 'Well, thee knows, it takes a mighty good husband to be better than none.' We all know also unmarried people sho live full, satisfying lives because they have found that the deep and rewarding demands of a career are more important than the satisfactions of marriage, which might prevent the fullest accomplishment in a career.

Questions about career, marriage, and having or not having children, about the conduct of your sexlife, are questions you will be deciding for yourself. All through your life, but especially during your adolescence, you will be searching for your own set of values to guide you, and one of the signs of being mature is to have developed a sound set of values, even though the search of values shoud never stop. I want to end this articles by suggesting six values which may help to guide you as you make decisions about love and sex and life. Some of them, as you will see, I've already spoken about, but they bear re-emphasizing here. The first is the value of information. Correct information - the facts - is better than ignorance or rumour. Sound information makes it possible for you to act responsibly. Ignorance may get you into trouble. The second value is responsibility. If you are a responsible person, you undertake the actions of your life keeping in mind what the results, the consequences, of your action will be - the consquences for yourself and for all the others involved, both now and in the future.