Here’s your chance to get your worries off your chest. If you’re having difficulties with relationships, family, work or any other aspect of your life, help is at hand.
For over twenty years our agony aunt Anne Nicholls has been guiding people towards finding solutions. She is a humanistic counsellor with an established practice in the Midlands.
Dear Anne
For a couple of months now my auntie and I have been flirting. We have already been kissing passionately and feeling each other up�for most of this time, but recently she has suggested that I come round and have sex. I haven’t answered her yet because kissing and touching is different from sex and I don’t know what I should do. I am really tempted to. I almost said yes yesterday but instead I said that I will tell her in a couple of days or next week. What do you think I should do?
Mark
Dear Mark
Thank you for your letter. I’m not sure how old you are, which has a bearing on this. Quite a few teenage lads who haven’t yet had sex are eager to try it, and find the idea of being initiated by an experienced older woman appealing. You say that kissing and touching are different from sex, but please realise this is only a difference of degree. The intent is still sexual. Here’s where the age thing might come in: the law doesn’t look kindly upon older people having sex with people who are much younger than they are. Nor does society accept incest, for very practical reasons as well as moral ones.
Before you make your decision, have you asked yourself what would be the reaction of the parent whose sister or sister-in-law she is? And her partner or children, if she has any? It may well be possible for you to hide your affair, at least for a while, but what about the repercussions if it should become known? Don’t you risk the whole family splitting over this? And how will you handle things at future family gatherings? Won’t you feel awkward, to say the least, if you do pursue your sexual adventure? Wouldn’t your family find your actions distasteful and your aunt’s behaviour repellent? Wouldn’t they think it abhorrent that your aunt, presumably an adult, abused the trust that is supposed to exist in a family?
There’s one bright note in your letter. The very fact that you’ve written in shows you have some doubts about your course of action. I hope you will listen to your doubts and make sure you’re never alone with your aunt again. Wouldn’t it be better for you to find a girlfriend who’s of legal age (16 +), build up a good relationship, and then have consensual sex in a safe way which doesn’t place you outside the pale in society?
But what you do is your choice. If you’re still young enough to think this is an exciting secret you could hug to yourself, you might decide to go ahead anyway. I do hope not. You have to live with yourself for a very long time.
Source and © Ask Anne
