“What about your first boyfriend?”
My first boyfriend was someone I dated for literally a week, also when I was 18. We didn’t have sex. I wanted him to go down on me once, but he was also very young and wasn’t comfortable with doing that yet. I ended up scaring him off before anything could happen. Definitely wasn’t him either.
“Well there’s no way you could’ve got it from me.”
I implored him to look at the statistics. My ex was a borderline nymphomaniac. He was extremely sexually active, having had sex with almost thirty people before he dated me. He would have unprotected sex with both men and women, and even persuaded me into letting him not wear a condom. He persuaded me into a lot of things, actually.
Dejected, my ex angrily hung up the phone. I got back in the car and told my friends what happened. “I never liked him anyway,” said one of them.
There was no way it couldn’t have been him. A few months after we started dating he cheated on me.
Finally, he decided to get tested. I knew and he knew that there is no HPV test for men, but he insisted anyway. No surprise, the next day he told me he was clean. He insisted that his doctor said he didn’t have it, and continued to gaslight me.
It took me a long time to stop talking to him. Still vulnerable, when I came back to the state he lived in, we immediately had sex. I insisted on him wearing a condom if he “didn’t have” HPV, but he still didn’t. This time he gave me bedbugs. At this point I decided it was time to cut him off.
After a year the HPV cleared up. I went to a new gyno and they called me a few days after my appointment, telling me the news. I was so relieved. I was excited at the prospect of being able to have sex without prefacing every act with “I have HPV”. As common as it was, it was annoying and difficult to live with, and being constantly invalidated by the guy who gave it to me just added to my fear. Gaslighting in sexual situations is a very real thing.
Before having sex with a partner, be sure to get tested immediately. And if they cheat on you, get tested again. A partner in denial is them refusing to admit their own mistakes, and it can make it seem like you are at fault for your misfortune. Stay safe. And, perhaps more importantly, stay strong.