I am glad you put it as "explaining sunrise to a blind person". I can move forward from that understanding.

I agree about the pain of rejection leading to horrible stress. We used to have a very simple, though not very kind, solution to the pent-up energy: military drafts. You thin the herd a slight amount, but you also channel the energy of young people and give them structures for adulthood. The closest we have to this now is working fast food jobs.

However there is something else implicit in your last statement: pain from not getting someone else's body. This suggests sex is a zero-sum game: one person gains from sex while the other loses. This is not how it should work. Instead the process of maturing in sex teaches how each partner gains pleasure.

Thinking about that led me to some other concepts. One is that many of us develop our feelings about sex early in puberty, when we're at a terrible point of self-awareness. one thing stands out above the horror of high school and the pain of growing up: the intense pleasure from giving oneself an orgasm for the first time.

If someone gets that strong a feeling from another event, then that event would make sex far less important. If someone had a religious revelation or found deep enjoyment in public performance, then the stress would transfer.

In my youth that I was hung up on words and music, math and history. So I groused about not understanding the opposite sex, but I was more keen to listen to new bands and read more challenging non-fiction. I was not ready to deal with the opposite sex in a mature way until I was halfway through university.

The sunrise is light piercing the darkness, a strong note becoming a chord and then an orchestral crescendo against the quiet of an opera house. It's not impossible to get enough of an analogy to appreciate, to synchronize an emotional response. It's also not everything -- by 11 am, you're wishing that ball of light would hide in a rain cloud.