SPFPP 274: Disclosing is an Invitation for Intimacy

Our guest, Nina from episode 203: https://www.spfpp.org/podcast/spfpp-xx-identity-care-is-checking-in-vs-checking-out rejoins us on Something Positive for Positive People with the intention of speaking mostly about grief. While that was the original plan, we fanned out into a conversation that while unexpected, really put a pleasant perspective on disclosure. While the bulk of the burden of initiating a conversation about sexual health appears to be on the person who has herpes because they are expected to disclose their positive status, what we’re actually doing is initiating an attempt for intimacy. As a community, we may be one of the few kinds of people proactively combating commitment phobia, and the other secondary effects of hookup culture by initiating invites for the kind of intimacy that potentially follows a herpes disclosure. In this episode, we also discuss the word “relationship” and how potentially triggering that is in a dating sense. When we look at the definition of the word which is just a way we relate to others, what we see is that everyone has a relationship with everyone, even if there’s no relationship at all, that’s the relationship. Hookup culture teaches us to move further away from the discomfort of intimacy and emotional connection through vulnerability by us putting our efforts into defining things in ways that don’t invite closeness. Think about friends, and then think about friends with benefits. We’re not as close with our friends physically as we are to someone we have sex with, so we’re close but not too too close and that’s what’s safe because vulnerability is scary. We even go as far as calling a relationship a “situation” in order to save ourselves from emotionally being invested in the humanity of one another. We defer to “the situation” rather than having to communicate about what we want with one another and accept the outcome of whether or not we can meet each others’ actual needs which is more often than not, intimacy.