143: I gave him herpes, now what? With Alexandra Harbushka

Life With Herpes

This is one of the scariest things that cross our minds when we’re first diagnosed with herpes. A typical thought that goes through our minds is how awful our diagnosis was and how we’d never want anyone to experience the physical pain of the outbreak. Sometimes we feel like the guilt of giving herpes to someone would be the worst thing too.

I get asked all the time in our Secret Society about how to deal with giving herpes to your partner. The truth is I’ve never touched on this because I’ve never passed herpes to my partners. I’ve only wanted to talk about experiences that I’ve personally had. But this is something that happens all the time so It’s something I’ve needed to talk about. I reached out to the Secret Society for thier stories so that as a community we could talk about this today.

Regardless of passing it or not we still have to have the conversation with our partner about having herpes. This is very hard to do but so worth it. If you wait until you’ve had sex or are in a relationship to tell them it will be harder and you face a couple of obstacles. Either the person won’t trust you or you could unknowingly pass herpes to them. Now you’re in a pickle. I talk about this in other episodes so you’ll have to check them out.

But back to giving him or her herpes.

Clearly, this is not our intention and people with herpes generally don’t want to go passing it along. In fact, this very thought keeps a lot of us from dating or becoming intimate with someone. And this is very sad to me.

Something that’s helped me is I’ve come to find comfort knowing that it’s really out of my hands. Yes, at first in my relationships I’d always freak out and think that I’m going to pass it. I can remember having anxiety attacks over it. So trust me I get it.

It really wasn't until my husband and at that time he was my boyfriend and I had a talk about it. And that talk clicked in my mind. He said to me that if I was worried about passing him herpes while we were having sex then we shouldn’t have sex. He said that he wasn’t worried about it and if that’s what I was thinking about then we need to stop. And if you think about it that’s really a great solution. This can be for anything really if you’re mind is not in it and you’re having an internal dialog with yourself about something completely different then it’s not fair to you or your partner to be having sex. It’s all about getting present in the situation.

But let’s get back to how to handle transmitting herpes to your partner. At the end of the day, you have to remember that it wasn’t up to you. If you’ve done these things then you’ve done everything you can to protect them.

Don't Feel Guilty About Herpes Transmission If You've Done These's 4 Things

1. Disclosed to partner you have herpes
2. You both agree on prevention method.
3. Sex was consensual
4. You’ve talked to you’re partner about your outbreaks and also let them know if you've just had one

In my opinion, if you’ve done this then you have to let the guilt go. You’re partner made the decision to have sex with you knowing the risk. I hate using the word risk but it’s true. He or she consciously knew that having sex could potentially transmit herpes and they decided to do it anyway.

Of course, there are the times when we forgot to tell our partner because we were in the heat of the moment or didn't feel comfortable having the conversation.

If your partner blames you or puts you down in any way it’s going to be up to you to stand up for yourself. You did nothing wrong and your partner made the decision.

This is such a hot topic and can be emotional, let me know your thoughts or your story.

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Xoxo,

Alexandra

Just in case…

Learn about the Herpes Outbreak Toolkit:

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