Tainted Love

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, May 28, 2000

IT'S YOUR classic modern story. Boy meets girl. Boy likes girl. Boy becomes intimate with girl. Boy asks girl if she'll start taking birth control pills so that he can stop wearing a condom.

What's a girl to do? She likes him and agrees that sex is much more pleasurable and simple without that pesky prophylactic. Except that, while unplanned pregnancies may have once been the worst-case scenario from unprotected sex, they've hardly been the big bang in sexual gotchas in, say, the past 20 years. For those girls and boys who came of age in the past two decades, the devastation of disease and domestic disaster pose a far greater threat.

Though currently identified with the dot-com revolution, we twentysomethings have other, older claims to fame that shaped us far more profoundly than any amount of high-speed pointing and clicking.

The same young whizzes now often more comfortable in front of a computer screen than a live person learned about intimacy and interaction during childhoods marked by two significant shaping forces: AIDS and divorce.

I knew sex was dangerous before I knew it felt good. AIDS was on the news and magazine covers when I was in grade school, and I learned about safe sex as a foundational necessity comparable to seat belts while driving, helmets while riding, and forgoing smoking on airplanes. While older generations have had to adapt to these modifications, I learned them from scratch.

The silver lining, however, from seventh-grade health class on, was that safe sex was only necessary until you fell in love with someone you trusted, at which time you could peel away the protection and go at it au naturel. That is, if you could trust anyone. If relationships lasted, if people stayed true to each other, and if divorce didn't become, in the span of my primary through secondary years, the new national pastime. But if you grew up seeing what I saw, the broken marriages, custody battles, infidelity, broken promises, deadbeat parents, dissolved vows and utter domestic chaos, how readily would you trust a partner? How could you ever put yourself at risk just because another person once promised to love you?

Plus, if the swollen divorce rate wasn't enough to condition a young mind against the permanence of any trusting relationship, the mostly welcome dissolution of many social and gender barriers meant that boys and girls became platonic friends. Which meant I enjoyed access to sexual condor unavailable in earlier generations: And there was plenty going around.

First-hand knowledge of sexual promiscuity and infidelity did little to assuage concerns that risky extracurricular sexual encounters can mean life or death when brought back to the unprotected partner. So much for the romantic fantasy that a loving, committed spouse is one whose bodily fluids you can readily receive. But the paradox deepens. In a society whose obsession with sex only occasionally takes a backseat to greed and power, marriage, ironically, is still viewed as a noble institution and an inevitable goal. We still want to be in love, and, whether for the tax break or the genuine partnership, we still want to get married. (We think enough of marriage, in fact, to vote to protect its sanctity from any potentially weakening interpretations.)

And so there is our girl, weighing dangers and opportunities. Her short but poignant life experiences have taught her sex kills, marriages end, trust breaks and infidelities happen. Yet society, biology and ideology compel her to mate and partner. Just how does this informed, self-protective young person determine when, if ever, she is safe to pursue the physical intimacy of a committed relationship? And if she cannot avail herself physically, how much emotional intimacy can she muster? Would it please readers more, I wonder, if I reported that most twentysomethings I know want sexual and emotional intimacy and are willing to make the necessary leaps of faith to attain it? Or would the older populace be more comforted to know that a generation is sacrificing its base desires for closeness in a self-protective movement that will keep us wary but alive? In all honesty, I see both scenarios, and neither offers relief or a completely healthy model.

When my friends and I discuss this common girl's scenario, there is never a right answer. Whichever way we go, sacrifices are necessary, and danger is abundant. Intimacy -- on all levels -- might prove elusive for a generation that has grown up associating pain and danger with the very acts on which loving, trusting relationships were once built. Knowing what we know and seeing what we saw, I wonder everyday how can any of us trust enough to peel away the layers of protection -- the latex barrier on top, and the emotional ones that run much deeper.

--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001