Dan Savage lauds the story and applies its underlying moral to another incurable STI:
I’ve said this for years to my friends with HIV: When you disclose your HIV status you’re telling the dude one thing he needs to know about you—and the way the dude reacts tells you everything you need to know about him. Disclosing an STI can help a person find good, kind, considerate and thoughtful partners in a pile that includes so many unkind, paranoid, irrational and phobic assholes. It’s a superpower.
A reader shares his own experience with herpes:
In 1977 I began dating a woman who told me she had had some virus infection but that it was cured. As a horny young dude I paid little attention, as I was clearly more interested in getting laid than worrying about her health, or my own. And besides, having gone through the earlier ’70s with Clap and Crabs, catching something else was just an inconvenience – or so I thought at the time. My first outbreak made me sicker than hell.
I went to the emergency room, and when the doctor had me pull down my pants and he looked at my genitals covered with sores, he recoiled. He had not seen such a thing before. I was devastated when I learned there was no “cure” and thought my life, or at least my sex life, was over. In the pre-HIV days, of course, this was the worst thing that had come along (though I am not suggesting any type of equivalence).
I remember having an outbreak at least once a month, probably spurred on by the fact that once I had it I continued to have sex with the same woman, and I think we kept trigger outbreaks with each other (though I don’t know if that was a medical fact or my own perception).
Over time, the number of outbreaks reduced, but it became part of my “life” as far as dating was concerned. Shamefully, I wouldn’t tell someone who was a one-night stand, but I fessed up to any woman who appeared to possibly be a long-term love interest. No one ever said go away, but my own shame and fear of rejection simply changed my relationships and sure put a crimp in my lifestyle.
One woman whom I dated caught the disease from me, and although I had told her, I still felt like I let her down, and she did too. I went through two marriage since then, not because of herpes, and my current wife of 13 years knows, and knew about before I put her at risk, and she has not caught it. I have learned that there are symptoms that occur just prior to the sores.
I still get a couple of outbreaks a year, which seem related to stress, and we just don’t do it while I’m active, though I realize that that is no guarantee, and so does she. Love conquers all things, I suppose. At times I still wonder what I missed out on as a result, because there were times when things might have happened that I didn’t let happen, and so forth.
So yes, one learns to live with herpes, and I’m sure there are a lot of people who have had to do that. But as one doctor told me, because it isn’t life threatening, there has been less interest in finding a real cure. Compared to what you live with, Andrew, it is a nothing-burger, but devastating nonetheless.
The Dish 