As mentioned in my previous article, How To Tell A Partner About Your Herpes Status, we want to start with understanding how we’re feeling about it ourselves. We know what that process looks like, and we also know that disclosing our herpes status is a small part of a much larger conversation which is also mentioned in the previous article on how to disclose your herpes status to a partner.
The question of when to disclose your herpes status brings up a few initial reactions. We need to describe the “when”. Is it when based on how long you’ve been messaging or knowing each other? Is it when in terms of how many dates you’ve been on together? Is it about when you’re meeting up for the first time? Or is it even when you’re expecting to attempt to initiate sex? What I’ve found is that when you wait for the perfect time to disclose your herpes status, many of us find ourselves in a position where it’s too late for us to have a consensual information exchange and be in our right minds to discuss and share an understanding of what this means for how sex looks between a partner who is HSV+ and a partner who is either negative or unaware of their HSV status.
Often times in person, the date has either reached a point where you don’t want to “kill the mood” by bringing up your herpes status, or alcohol is involved. Another thing that hinders the flow of disclosure is where blood flow happens to be circulating at the time of the discussion. I cannot tell you how many people I have spoken to who just haven’t disclosed because alcohol and genital engorgement were involved, so they didn’t want to disrupt the flow of what was to come.
The thing about the best time to disclose your herpes status is that it’s contingent on the natural flow of conversation between yourself and the person you are romantically interested in. I mentioned the STARS Talk in the previous article and think that the minute discussions begin about anything in that acronym is when you want to be prepared to disclose your status to your potential partner. If we’re talking about what turns us on and gets us excited, I think we allow this flow to continue as is, naturally. The minute the flow of conversation goes from “this is what I like and what I like done to me and what I like doing to partners” becomes “This is what I want to do with YOU,” I think that’s where we want to start guiding the discussion toward sexual health and STI testing.
The reason I advocate for this timing is because of what happens when we talk about sex with another person. It’s like we begin to create expectations about what sex will look like. That may not be verbally communicated, but the dirty talk and the sharing of what we want to do with each other is where we start to anticipate what’s to come using our imagination. Where people go wrong is by allowing these thoughts to go on without ever setting expectations. For example, if one person in the interaction is hearing that someone likes to be creampied, then that signals some things to the other partner, perhaps unintentionally, that may not apply to them. However, if birth control, pregnancy, desire for children or to not have them, and wearing barriers aren’t discussed, then there are assumptions on both ends that perhaps are mismatched.
So when the time comes to finally share your status, this person may already have an idea that you have to bring them back to reality about what sex with you is going to look like. Far too often, we unknowingly set expectations and DO NOT set them when we should be. When we begin talking about what we’re going to do to each other, we do a disservice to ourselves and our partners thinking they’ll just show up ready to accept this information against the expectations in their heads. Having this conversation at this point also makes it easier to gauge a person’s enthusiasm to continue, their willingness to have a vulnerable, important conversation about health, and most importantly, given how sexy communication is, we may know right away by how a person responds to this conversation if they’re going to be lovers who align with us or not.