Last updated on September 13, 2020
Question:
Well, I’m a guy. I’m 19, but I think I had a late puberty. I experienced my first wet dream at age 17, but I have masturbated since I was 12 years old. When I asked my dad, he had wet dreams at 15. So when does my puberty start and end?
I don’t know my sexual orientation because I never had sex with a girl or a boy. I just like being alone, seeing myself sexy, and then masturbating. Is that wrong?
Why do my male friends keep talking about girls, and how they admire the female’s body a lot? Well, I think girls are beautiful but not in a sexual way. But my friends keep talking about having sex with a girl and such. It annoys me because I don’t think that much about sex and what they are talking about is always sex and girls. So I don’t know what to do. Please tell me what I should do.
Answer:
Technically puberty is the point in time when the hormones rise causing a person to change from a child into an adult. The period of change is called adolescents. For males, the initial signs that puberty has been reached are subtle. It is generally not until obvious signs, such as pubic hair at the base of the penis, spontaneous erections, or ejaculations occur that a boy wakes up to the fact that he is changing.
I can’t tell you from what you said whether you are a late bloomer or not. You can take the Tanner Stage Calculator and see what result you get.
Adolescence ends when you stop changing. Most people mark it as when you stop growing in height, though changes actually continue past that point.
There is a popular myth that a person’s preferred sexual partners are determined by their genes. It has never been proven, though the myth has been repeated many times. People like the myth because it removes responsibility from their actions. What God teaches is that you act in accordance with your choices.
Right now, you are fascinated with your own body and its responses. This is not unusual if you just recently started ejaculating. But most guys soon focus on things outside of themselves as objects of their sexual desires. The difficulty is that like you, the guys are actually more interested in their body’s responses and feelings. Guys who talk endlessly about girls and sex almost always are focused on the physical aspects. They don’t see the person they want to have sex with as a person. It usually takes a while for a guy to get past this stage and realize that women are people. Some guys seem like they never get to this view.
In other words, guys who focus on someone’s physical attributes and talk about their sexual exploits or their dreams of sexual exploits are all immature. So where your body might be behind in developing, your mind might actually be ahead. I wouldn’t worry about it. But one thing you should not do is look to have sex outside of marriage; that is a sin. See Waiting for the Proper Time.
Eventually, you’re going to meet a woman whom you’ll have a hard time keeping out of your thoughts. I hope that it will be because of who she is and how you like being around her.