Dear Concerned,
Your friend could get herpes from putting that bare penis in any one of her lovemaking holes; the ass is not at exceptional risk. What you’re also implying is that you know for certain she is having reckless unprotected intercourse with this fellow and he with her, as opposed to knowing when he is particularly infectious and using protection at this time.
If the former is the case, you are ill-advised in imagining that I have some supernatural ability to stop people in love from being dumb fucking cunts and that I myself have never been one nor do I carry on, now in my 40s, occasionally behaving like a DFC. (I will resist going into the details of a drinking game I was playing just last week but know that it was almost certainly cooked up at a frat party.) For the record, I have never been able to stop any of my own friends from making DFC decisions around love and sex, nor they me. That is not your job as a friend. Your job is to mop up after those decisions have wreaked the predictable havoc.
Let me clue you in to a galling fact: your friend, though probably not actively courting it, isn’t particularly worried about getting herpes. After all, what could bring her closer to her latest infatuation than sharing a forever virus? It’s so beautiful! They’re meant to be together and they’ll be even more meant to be together if she shares his stigma, which of course isn’t a stigma, as she is proving by having unprotected sex with him, more than likely without any of the realistic discussion that hurts his ego. She has found true love and true love is the perfect remedy for starchy old common sense. Maddening, isn’t it, how love so often manifests as the exact opposite of itself? Indifference—indifference to one’s own health, one’s own needs, one’s own dignity. It just makes me want to barf and then throw the barf at people.
Bottom line? I’m afraid I can’t do anything for your friend until she e-mails me looking for herpes resources and complaining about the sociopath who gave it to her, but I can do a few things for you. One is to look at why this particular situation has you in such a knot. What about all your friends who smoke or drink excessively—are they getting the gears the same way or do you just hate the idea that this guy is sticking his herpes dick up your friend’s ass like, “Fuck you, I’m not just going to fuck you in the ass, I’m going to use my weeping sores as lube” and that she is pathetically complicit in his selfishness and denial? In this, I can only tell you to remember Joe Jackson’s words as you are seething: Fools in love, they think they’re heroes, ’cause they get to feel no pain.
I’m also going to suggest an autobiography called Love Junkie by Rachel Resnick (www.rachelresnick.com), even though I have mixed feelings about it. I dislike it in the way that I often dislike things I get some clarity around years later (like Leonard Cohen) which means there is an uncomfortable truth to it I’m not ready to embrace. Resnick’s naked desperation is both admirable and repellent and her writing style mirrors this, so it’s a bit difficult to swallow at times. Read it yourself, and have it around at the ready when the shit hits the fan.
