**Names have been changed for anonymity purposes**
Getting an STI is like losing your suitcase. You go on holiday expecting everything to be smooth sailing; you may even put an AirTag in your case, but sometimes, no matter how careful you are, it still ends up missing.
It can feel like the end of the world in the moment. In the case of bacterial STIs like chlamydia, gonorrhoea, and syphilis, once you take the medication, you get your luggage back.
With viral STIs like herpes, HPV, and HIV, it’s more like getting a voucher to replace all your stuff. You go out and buy all the same items you had before, but you know it’s new.
Like everything in this world, people tend to make a bigger deal than necessary about things they’re unfamiliar with or simply uneducated about.
Having an STI isn’t a death sentence, and it certainly isn’t something to be ashamed about. Sure, you’re more likely to lose your luggage the more you travel, but you can still lose it on the first flight you ever take.
My friend Lizzie** knows that better than most.
“I’d only ever slept with one person”
I was chatting to her recently about STIs and the ridiculous amount of stigma still attached to them.
It was one of those conversations that starts off as a general rant about something and then suddenly becomes much more personal.
We were talking about how strange it is that, for all our generation’s supposed openness around sex, mention an STI and people still squirm. We’ll happily discuss who we’re sleeping with, how many people we’ve slept with and our most unhinged dating stories, but we often leave out the other side.
Then Lizzie casually tore up these societal norms and told me she has genital herpes.
I was surprised. Not because I thought there was any particular “type” of person who gets herpes, but because I’d known her for years and had absolutely no idea.
“I was 17 when I found out,” she told me. “And I’d only ever slept with one person.”
Lizzie had gotten into her first relationship at 16 and describes it now as “pretty toxic from the beginning”.
Two weeks before her 17th birthday, they had sex. “I don’t know how ready I was,” she said. “But I was happy I got to keep my boyfriend for another while. I knew there was no chance he’d stay with me if I didn’t have sex with him.”
A feeling many women are all too familiar with, sadly.
Will things ever return to normal…
Seven months later, she woke up feeling horrendous.
“I felt really feverish and sick – sicker than I’d ever felt before. My whole body was aching, and I fainted at one point,” she told me.
It was excruciating to go to the toilet and eventually, thinking she might have cut herself shaving, she grabbed a compact mirror.
“I will never forget the shock I got when I looked,” she said.
There were sores.
She was eventually diagnosed with genital herpes.
“I felt so disgusting,” she told me. “I didn’t even know if my vagina would ever return to normal.”
It did, of course. The physical symptoms eventually passed and, as the years went on, herpes became a surprisingly insignificant part of her life.
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The part about herpes we weren’t expecting
Although the STI itself didn’t affect her life whatsoever (bar the bi-annual reappearances that were closer to a shaving cut than anything else) the shame did.
And that’s where our conversation stopped really being about herpes.
Because Lizzie told me something I hadn’t expected: she thinks having an STI contributed to her staying in a shitty relationship.
“What if I met someone new I really liked and then had to tell them? What if they didn’t want me after that? What if they told people?” she anxiously pondered.
The relationship wasn’t making her happy. She knew there were things she shouldn’t have been putting up with. But leaving also meant facing something she’d managed to avoid: telling another person about her diagnosis.
So she stayed. Not solely because she had herpes, obviously. Relationships are rarely that simple. But looking back, she can see how much the stigma surrounding her diagnosis had chipped away at what she thought she deserved.
And isn’t that the particularly cruel thing about sexual shame?
The virus itself wasn’t making Lizzie miserable. The belief that it made her less desirable was.
You don’t get a medal
Years later, she met her current boyfriend.
And despite all that time passing, she was still terrified to tell him.
She built the conversation up in her head. She wondered whether he’d see her differently. Whether he’d suddenly be put off. Whether something that had barely affected her life for years would be enough to make him walk away.
Then she told him. “He literally didn’t care,” she laughed.
They talked about it, he asked what he needed to know and life carried on.
No dramatic rejection. No disgust. No treating her like she’d just confessed to some terrible secret.
“It’s not a thing in our relationship,” she said. “And I think that’s when I realised I should never have felt like somebody deserved a medal for wanting to be with me when I have herpes.”
That, to me, is the part of the STI conversation we don’t have enough.
A diagnosis doesn’t mean deserving less
We rightly talk about testing, protection, symptoms and telling sexual partners. But there is another consequence of the stigma that can’t be treated with medication: what it can do to someone’s self-worth.
Lizzie was 17 years old with one sexual partner when she was diagnosed, yet she spent years carrying around the idea that an STI said something about the kind of person she was, even though it didn’t.
Having herpes didn’t make her dirty. It didn’t make her promiscuous. It didn’t make her irresponsible. And it certainly didn’t mean she had to be grateful to any man willing to date her.
“I wish I could go back and tell myself that it wasn’t going to ruin my life,” she said. “I think that’s what I was terrified of. I thought nobody else would want me.”
The saddest part of Lizzie’s story isn’t that she got herpes at 17; it’s the fact that a diagnosis made her feel she deserved less.
Sometimes the stigma surrounding an STI can do far more damage than the STI itself.
“I don’t feel ashamed of it anymore,” she told me. “It’s such a tiny part of my life.”
Read more columns in the Between Us series, here.
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