Dear Cary,
I am writing to you to get advice about a friend of mine who has some rather troubling issues that I fear may one day turn into very serious issues that will affect her entire life, and not just for the short term. My friend, whom I will call Jan, has been my friend for 13 years. We went to high school together. Jan rooms with another mutual friend from high school, whom I will call Lisa. All three of us are 26.
To make a very long story short, Jan went out one night with one of her friends (whom I don't know very well), and got really, really drunk -- so drunk in fact that Jan and her friend decided to go to a hotel room with a bunch of Marines that they had just met that very night. Lisa and I were up until 5 a.m. trying to find Jan, who had been drunken-dialing us with worrisome messages like, "I lost my friend, I can't find her! I'm in a hotel room. Come and find me!" CLICK.
We did find Jan and her friend and brought Jan home, and immediately I knew something wasn't right with her. Lisa got the full story from Jan's friend, who then went home. As it turns out, Jan had consensual, unprotected sex with one of the Marines.
This is not the first time something like this has happened. Jan is notorious for having dangerous (unprotected), drunken liaisons with boyfriends and strangers alike. This happens frequently enough that Lisa has unwittingly become a "guardian" figure to Jan, having to rescue her on many occasions. Jan acknowledges, when sober, she has a problem, but refuses to take any steps to solve the problem. Rather, she blames everyone else ("You and she didn't come with me to the bar!") or tries to avoid the subject altogether ("I know, I know! Can we not talk about it right now?"). Lisa, for how kind and absolutely fantastic she is, is just too averse to confrontation to put down her foot and say, "Enough is enough! You need real help, and I am not going to come to your rescue at 5 a.m. anymore."
Now, the kicker is that Jan is continuing to have sex with her long-term boyfriend, and she absolutely refuses to tell him about her encounter. (She hasn't gotten the results of her STD tests back yet, either.) I personally don't know Jan's boyfriend well enough to talk to him about it, and even if I did, I'm not sure if it would be my place to do so. However, I worry that Jan is putting her boyfriend in jeopardy by risking infecting him with any STDs she may have. Lisa, on the other hand, knows Jan's boyfriend really well, but she doesn't feel it's her place to get involved and is uncomfortably passive about the situation. I equate this situation to Jan's pointing a strange, unknown firearm at her boyfriend and pulling the trigger, not knowing if it will fire blanks or a bullet.
My respect for Jan has waned so much that I fear I may not be able to look her in the eye and consider her a friend. She is a 26-year-old woman, handling adult problems like a child. Worse yet, she is possibly endangering the life of someone she claims to love. (She has been with her boyfriend for eight years.) Her fear is that he will leave her, and he very well might, but doesn't he have the right to know and make an informed decision, at the very least to ensure he uses protection when having sex with her?
Do you have any advice for how we should handle this situation? In your opinion, it is our responsibility to confront Jan's boyfriend with this issue if Jan won't? Also, do you think that Lisa should continue to be Jan's guardian figure, or do you think that she is unwittingly enabling Jan by always being there to bail her out?
Concerned Friend
Dear Concerned Friend,
The boyfriend has a right to know that he may have been exposed to a sexually transmitted disease.
If the test comes back clean, that proves nothing. She is engaging in a pattern of behavior that may result in infection at any time.
She doesn't need to tell him that she got drunk and went to a hotel room with a bunch of Marines. She just needs to tell him that because of her behavior he may have been exposed to an STD.
Informing him carries certain risks. The most likely risk is that they'll break up. That would be unpleasant but probably for the best. There may be a risk of physical violence as well. Has he ever threatened her or her friends with violence? Some people respond violently to traumatic or upsetting news. If he is violent, she should be protected when she tells him. There should be someone capable of controlling him there -- a friend or a police officer.
If she won't tell him, someone else will have to tell him. Who will that be? Health department policies on partner notification differ widely from state to state and county to county. If she won't do it, then you and your friends have to figure out a way to make sure it gets done.
Tell her that he has to be told and he is going to be told. Don't let her talk you out of it. Instead, use the fact that he is going to be told as a way of persuading her to tell him herself. Maybe she will reason that if he's going to be told anyway, she should do it first.
Then fill her purse with condoms.
Really. I mean, if she's going to keep on like this -- and she shows no sign of stopping soon -- then she has to start putting condoms on the men she has sex with. Otherwise she's a public health risk. She may be too out of control to actually be sure that her partners wear condoms, but put them in her purse just the same. Future partners may choose to wear a condom if one is available.
Remember: It isn't just about her and him. It's about those Marines, too, and about anybody else who might cross her path -- or her boyfriend's path, because we don't know what he's doing, either.
There is a limited amount of useful information on the Web; InSpot.org is a good place to start. See also this discussion and this article that discusses a survey of American doctors on the question of partner notification.
As I read over your letter, I keep coming back to the phrase "consensual, unprotected sex." You say she had "consensual, unprotected sex" -- while drunk, in a hotel room full of Marines. The sex was with a Marine and it was consensual. OK. She had just the Marine -- while drinking. OK. Maybe they were both drunk. We don't know. And there were a bunch of Marines. She was drunk in a hotel room full of Marines. Marines are strong young men trained to kill. OK. They are also trained to be gentlemen. OK. And, well, it may have started out fun, but at one point she was dialing her friends on her cellphone, crying out for help, calling for rescue, crying out that she had been abandoned. She was drunk and afraid. It does not sound like an episode of "The Love Boat." That's not to say she was raped. But perhaps we could say she had sex with a Marine under conditions of traumatic fear blunted by drunkenness. That's not good.
I picture that hotel room full of Marines and your friend, drunk, abandoned by her friend and hungry for something, seeking something, vaguely aware that once she starts drinking she often can't stop or control what she does next, vaguely aware that whatever has been happening to her lately is happening again, and every time it happens it seems to get a little more out of control. When I picture that hotel room and what went on there -- maybe with just one Marine but maybe more than one, given that her shame may be overwhelming and her memory incomplete -- when I picture her desperation and her hunger for whatever it is she was seeking at the end of the night, and then I hear the phrase "consensual, unprotected sex," I marvel at the gulf between the language and the event. Perhaps this language indicates the gulf between your world and hers as well, and between the full horror of what happened and our willingness to imagine the full horror of what happened.
So I wonder what she says to herself about it. I doubt she says to herself, "Well, I went and had unprotected consensual sex with a Marine again, darn it!" I wonder what she would say if she could speak freely, with deep emotion, to someone she completely trusted. I wonder how it seems to her -- that she was abandoned by her friends and ended up being taken advantage of? That they were nice guys but things just got out of control? That it would have been great if she and the one Marine could have just gotten off alone by themselves? And did she, in her heart of hearts, do it to get back at her boyfriend for some slight real or imagined?
I also wonder in what sense it was truly consensual. We are animals and we feel fear. Drunk, we do things to survive. We can feel when there is a killer in the room. We can feel when a killer's reflexes have been trained. We can feel when it would be unwise to resist. Given our animal nature, the instincts that drive us when we are drunk and incapable of rational choice, given our desperate pretense in the face of implied danger, to say that it was "consensual" is to say what? What does the phrase "drunken 26-year-old woman in a hotel room full of Marines" say to you? Does that say the same thing as "consensual, unprotected sex"?
The more I imagine what went on in that room, the more I wonder if you and your good friends have come to terms with, or admitted to consciousness, the full terror of the event. No one probably knows for sure what really happened in that hotel room. Has anyone uttered the word "trauma" in relation to these events? Imagine the trauma to her roommate. Imagine her own traumatic shame when she woke up. And where did she wake up, or come out of a partial blackout? In the hotel room with the Marines, or in her car, or on the street, or in her own bed? Shame and degradation hide behind the phrase "consensual, unprotected sex."
So beyond the public health issue of notifying the boyfriend, the emotional trauma of the event needs to be acknowledged, and she needs to get some help. I am convinced, having been out of control at times in my 20s, that we do not just go out of control for no reason. It happens in context. It happens because of feelings, because of our inability to control our response to alcohol, because we are hurt, cut off from friends and family, fearful about survival, unable to process and admit to ourselves our feelings about other things, and it snowballs. It escalates. One out-of-control incident leads to shame and humiliation and fuck it all, who the fuck cares now, might as well get out of control again because my friends did not rescue me the first time, so fuck them too, they must not care about me, and since they don't care about me I must be pretty worthless, and if I'm worthless you're worthless too, you shit, we're all worthless, so what if I give my fucking boyfriend an STD, he should have been there to protect me from those Marines and protect me from myself, too. So fuck him. Fuck you. Fuck it all.
This is the way we end up dead. It snowballs. We stop caring. We enter into a spiral of shame and anger and humiliation, hopelessness, betrayal and self-betrayal, abandonment and apathy. We shut off. It's too much to feel. We go dead. We shut off by drinking more and by abandoning ourselves, by giving ourselves away in pieces like a car parted out to thieves.
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