Recent events in my life[1. I have moved this post over from my other blog, and I will even­tu­ally move Part 2 here as well. This way, when I finally get around to writ­ing Parts 3 and 4, they will all be in the same place. I see each post in this series as one sec­tion of a sin­gle piece of writ­ing, not as a dis­crete essay unto itself. As a result, while each sec­tion may con­tain its own argu­ment, it is not really pos­si­ble to know whether an issue that you feel is impor­tant will or will not be left out of the argu­ment made by the entire piece if you’ve only read a part of the series. I cer­tainly do not mean this caveat to be, in any way, an inoc­u­la­tion against cri­tique, but given the mod­u­lar nature of post­ing to blogs and of how blogs are read, it is a caveat I’d like you to keep in mind if you find your­self won­der­ing, and com­ment­ing on, why I have not addressed some­thing you feel needs to be addressed. Thanks. Also, to pro­tect the pri­vacy of the indi­vid­u­als involved, some names have been changed and some iden­ti­fy­ing details have been fic­tion­al­ized.] have started me think­ing deeply, for the first time in many years, about con­doms and what it means to use them. Not that I have failed to take con­doms seri­ously. I have worn them when I needed to, refused to have inter­course when they were not avail­able, and I have a ten-year-old son who knows what con­doms are and why, all else being equal, every­one who has sex should use them. I am, though, also old enough to remem­ber (and boy does it feel strange to use that expres­sion) when safe sex was pretty much exclu­sively about birth con­trol. I might have learned that using con­doms would help keep me from catch­ing or trans­mit­ting gon­or­rhea or syphilis, the only two STDs I knew about at the time, but I’m not sure. Instead, the focus in my sex­ual edu­ca­tion when I reached puberty was on the need for a young cou­ple plan­ning to have non-procreational sex to do every­thing they could to pre­vent the woman from becom­ing preg­nant, and that meant, for men, being will­ing to wear a con­dom unless the woman was on the pill, using a diaphragm or had an IUD.

It did not occur to me that there might be more to pre-AIDS male het­ero­sex­ual respon­si­bil­ity than sim­ply keep­ing a bar­rier between my semen and the body of the woman in whom I would oth­er­wise have left it until I was hav­ing sex reg­u­larly with a woman I thought I was falling in love with – we were each in our early 20s and using only con­doms – and I real­ized I did not know what she would do, or even what she thought she would do, if she became preg­nant. Con­doms, after all, do fail. I was as cer­tain as I could be that I did not want to become a father, but I was also cer­tain that the ulti­mate choice of what to do if she did become preg­nant was hers. So, if a con­dom did fail, it sud­denly occurred to me, and she decided not to have an abor­tion, I would be a father whether I wanted to or not. I knew I’d do my best to live up to the respon­si­bil­i­ties that father­hood would bring with it, but I did not think my rela­tion­ship with that woman would sur­vive. Not only would I have resented her for hav­ing made the deci­sion that made me a father, but I did not yet know if the love I was begin­ning to feel for her was, as they say, a love that would last, and hav­ing to be par­ents to a child – for­get whether or not we would have, or could have, got­ten mar­ried – was not the cir­cum­stance under which I wanted to find out.

I will not retell here the story of what hap­pened when I tried to talk to my girl­friend about my con­cerns, except to say that I was com­pletely unpre­pared for her to tell me she had no idea what she would do if she got preg­nant. It wasn’t that I expected her to know with 100% cer­tainty what action she would take, or that I was look­ing for some kind of con­trac­tual agree­ment that would insu­late me if she at first said she would have an abor­tion and then changed her mind; nor was I think­ing that the only answer accept­able to me was the one I hoped she would give, i.e., that she would have an abor­tion. What I wanted, first and fore­most, was that we should talk, openly and hon­estly, and then, once each of us knew where the other stood, we could make a deci­sion about what we should do in response. It had never entered my mind, though, that the per­son who would be preg­nant if preg­nancy hap­pened would even think about start­ing to have sex with­out some sense of what she would do.

Given that my girl­friend had not thought about this, or at the very least was unwill­ing to tell me what she thought about this, I did not see how we could con­tinue hav­ing sex, or, to be more pre­cise, how I could con­tinue hav­ing sex, know­ing first that our fuck­ing put me at risk of becom­ing an unwill­ing father and, sec­ond, that if I did become an unwill­ing father, it would prob­a­bly mean the end of our rela­tion­ship. I’d been very happy with the sex we were hav­ing before we started fuck­ing; I assumed my girl­friend felt the same way; and I saw noth­ing wrong with rolling things back to our pre-intercourse days until we were able to talk about this. I wanted to be with her, plain and sim­ple, and that desire far out­weighed for me the plea­sures of putting my latex-covered penis in her vagina. So, more or less – at my insis­tence, not hers – we stopped fucking.

That “more or less,” of course, is impor­tant. Some­times I was the one who ini­ti­ated the sex we had, and some­times she was; and I hon­estly don’t remem­ber how many times “some­times” actu­ally means, but I am sure it was not a lot, at least not rel­a­tive to how often we’d been fuck­ing before we had this con­ver­sa­tion. I also remem­ber noth­ing of what we said to each other after these instances of “falling off the wagon,” though I am pretty sure that nei­ther of us reproached the other. I do remem­ber, though, that after each of those times I would tell myself it was the last one, and that I was dis­ap­pointed in myself when that proved not to be the case.

Even­tu­ally – I don’t remem­ber how much time passed exactly – my girl­friend told me she’d decided that if she got preg­nant she would have an abor­tion, and we started hav­ing inter­course reg­u­larly again. Years later, how­ever, in the fourth or fifth year of our rela­tion­ship, in one of those let’s-talk-about-our-history-together con­ver­sa­tions, she told me that she’d lied to me, that she’d always known she would not have an abor­tion if she got preg­nant, and that she’d thought my plan had been to with­hold inter­course as a way of pres­sur­ing her into hav­ing sex with no strings attached. She’d only said she would have an abor­tion, she explained, because she’d been con­vinced I was going to leave her if she did not even­tu­ally give me what she thought I wanted. She then went on to tell me that she’d real­ized a while back that she’d been wrong, that I had in fact been sin­cere in every­thing I told her, even if I had not always prac­ticed what I’d been preach­ing. Indeed, given my behav­ior (I was not then, and I am not now, par­tic­u­larly proud of the “more or less” at the end of the para­graph before last) it’s hard to blame her for think­ing the way she did. It didn’t, and doesn’t mat­ter that I was not the only one who ini­ti­ated the fuck­ing we did when we were sup­posed to be abstain­ing. Every time I allowed it to hap­pen, I was act­ing like the manip­u­la­tive hyp­ocrite she ini­tially thought I was.

My girl­friend was right about one thing, though. I really wanted to mean what I said when I told her that it was more impor­tant to me not to put our rela­tion­ship unnec­es­sar­ily at risk than it was for me to have inter­course with her, and I really wanted to mean it when I said that step­ping back from the fuck­ing we were doing would not dimin­ish either the plea­sure or the mean­ing­ful­ness of the sex we had. I was not a man who saw fuck­ing as a way of accu­mu­lat­ing notches on my belt; I did not, or at least I thought I did not, feel the con­nec­tion between fuck­ing and man­hood that so many of my friends seemed to feel, whether they were out get­ting laid as often as they could or involved in a seri­ous rela­tion­ship. Sex, I thought I believed, was sim­ply sex, a way of touch­ing, of giv­ing and tak­ing plea­sure in my own body and the body of my lover; and while gen­i­tal fuck­ing might be one aspect of that plea­sure, it cer­tainly wasn’t the only, or even the main way in which that plea­sure could be shared. This, at least, was what I wanted my per­spec­tive on sex to be. Yet it very clearly was not, for I had been per­fectly will­ing to put at risk a rela­tion­ship I thought might develop into a real future so that I could fuck the woman I was in that rela­tion­ship with. It didn’t mat­ter who ini­ti­ated it or that it was always con­sen­sual. It didn’t mat­ter that when we did fuck it was a very rare excep­tion to the rule of absti­nence I had wanted us to fol­low; and , per­haps most impor­tant, in these terms, it didn’t mat­ter that I wore a con­dom each and every time we did it.