Why the Committed Still Need Protection
How much do you trust your boyfriend or girlfriend? Enough to let them drive your car? Meet your parents? Tell them your e-mail password?
The question of when to trust a new person in your life is even more important when it comes to sex – where decisions can have life-changing results, such as pregnancy or disease. Yet more and more college couples choose to push condoms aside and rely on just hormonal birth control, or the whim of the gods. After they have sex with a person for a few months, they drop their guard.
“I hate them, it just kills the sensation,” University at Buffalo student Eric Thill says of condoms. “The condom dries up and gets uncomfortable.”
“Why bother?” UB student Chrisiant Bracken says of condoms. “I was only worried about getting pregnant, and I was on birth control.”
While pregnancy can usually be avoided by using condoms, stopping condom use in a stable relationship can still lead to problems says Ellen Christensen, director of Sub Board I’s Health Education and Human Services at the University at Buffalo. Without testing to make sure their partners aren’t infected, that show of trust could lead directly to infection, she said. When regular partners infect each other, “what I’ve seen most is either genital warts or herpes,” she said, naming two infections that don’t always have obvious warning signs.
When asked if they took tests before ending their condom use, Bracken said, “No, I did not get tested because he was a virgin, and I had only had sex with other virgins so I wasn’t concerned.”
But as Christensen pointed, out, many viruses are asymptomatic. That means you probably don’t even know you are infected. As many as 85 percent of chlamydia infections in women, and 40 percent of infections in men are asymptomatic, according to WebMD. Early-stage gonorrhea is asymptomatic about 80 percent of the time.
Other asymptomatic sexual infections are hepatitis B and human papilloma virus (HPV, which produces genital warts), according to WebMD. Also some early stages of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, have no symptoms – and even though medical advances have led to more treatments for HIV, it can be fatal, especially if left untreated.
On a less serious note, yeast infections happen as well. They make a woman’s vagina itchy and uncomfortable. She may feel a burning sensation, and experience unusual discharge. Without condoms, these infections can be passed to men, who can pass it back to her, after she has been treated.
And how much can you really trust your partner? You may love someone and know their deepest secrets, but you can’t control their actions. Perhaps your girlfriend is home for break and has met up with her ex-boyfriend, “just as friends,” or that girl he lusts after who sits in from of him in class has finally come around.
Perhaps they love you so much nothing happens, but you aren’t there and you cannot control their actions. If something did happen, you’d be glad later you never stopped using condoms.
The usual complaints about condoms go something like, well, condoms just don’t feel good, or they always break. Some couples complain that they dry up too early or it ruins the moment. Any way you slice it, condoms are just no fun. But to make regular condom use a habit, it helps to learn ways to make putting it on more enjoyable and wearing it more comfortable, advises Christensen.
“Putting it on with your mouth is fun… the female putting on the condom on… learning how to do it in the dark, using toppings like whipped cream or Hershey’s syrup,” said Christensen. “Make it fun. If it’s a fun thing, you’re more likely to use it on a regular basis.”
More suggestions Christensen had were to use flavored condoms so they are tastier to suck on and to use ribbed or studded condoms to enhance the woman’s pleasure. You can also put some water-based lubricant inside and outside of the condom before you put it on.
If buying condoms are embarrassing, you can pick up four for $1 at HEHS in Hayes Annex C (on South Campus) or order a whole heap from the internet. Christensen would like to see both partners taking responsibility for birth control and protection. As she says, you should never assume your partner is being responsible. You have to protect yourself.
