For the first time in my life, at the age of 29, I got tested for STDs. I think I actually got tested when I was getting married, as a legal requirement, but I didn’t pay any attention. I’m clean. I’m really clean and I have two batteries of tests to prove it.

Why did I wait so long? didn’t I know about STDs? Well, to be honest, no. In high school I had some sex education and the STD information I was given can be summarized like this:

There’s HIV and other STDs, use condoms and you’ll be fine.

It’s really pathetic and there are many problems with that. One is that condoms protect you, but not from everything. Fair enough. But the most important aspect is that HIV is a very serious illness. It’s so serious that it only happens to other people. It’s like cancer, it happens to other people but not to me.

Obviously that’s not true, but that’s what we think when there’s something so bad, so terrible, that we have trouble copping with it. Murder, plane crashes, cancer and HIV is something that happens to others. Which means… why should I get checked?

If someone taught be about herpes, chlamydia, gonorrea, hepatitis and showed me the stats of how many infected people are out there, how common it is. If someone explained me that you don’t get tested when something weird happens but instead every 6 months or so (when you are sexually active), I wouldn’t have waited so long. Getting tested for STDs would be part of my health check, like I do for other stuff to know that my diet is correct.

Only when I started researching into the poly and kinky life-style I learned about how a responsible adult should behave.

Also, nobody explained me how to ask for an STD test. The hospital I went to only advertised HIV. I had to ask for others and even then they were pretty limited. I went to a private clinic and I paid a lot to get tested and one of the doctors tried to convince me not to do it. In Switzerland it was so expensive, so stigmatized and it was so hard to get any information about it that I gave up completely until I moved to another country (only because I actually knew, from my activities, that I was clean).