Once you decide to enter into sexual relationships, your whole life changes.  You open the door to a form of deep intimacy that gives you the opportunity to know another person on a different level than you’ve experienced before.  But such a relationship is equal parts risk and reward.  Although you can experience the true love that writers, artists, and musicians have spent centuries trying to adequately express, you will almost certainly have to deal with a loss of that love at some point, complete with a broken heart.  But aside from the emotional issues at play, there are also physical drawbacks to consider.

For one thing, you need to take precautions to stop unwanted pregnancy and/or the spread of sexually transmitted diseases like genital herpes, gonorrhea, syphilis, and HIV (just to name a few).  Some of them are merely annoying, but others can be life-threatening.  For example, nearly one in six adults has genital herpes (which never goes away) and they can pass along the disease even when they have no visible signs of an outbreak.  And although there are now many medical treatments available to manage HIV, it is still considered a deadly disease, especially once it develops into AIDS.  And these are just a few of the many STDs you could catch from having unprotected sex.

Of course, even with protection you might suffer mishaps.  There’s a reason why the effectiveness for most forms of birth control is listed at 99% instead of 100% (and that’s only when used according to directions).  For one thing, there is the small problem of human error.  Raise your hand if you didn’t know that antibiotics can mess with the effectiveness of oral contraceptives (the birth control pill).  It’s surprising how many women find this out the hard way simply because their doctors assume they already know and fail to mention it.  And then there are times when a woman misses a pill and poof!  Suddenly she’s pregnant.  Oops.  Abstinence is, in truth, the only form of birth control that is 100% guaranteed to work (apparently they decided not to factor in Immaculate Conception, although plenty of girls have tried that excuse).

Keep in mind though that most forms of birth control, while fairly effective at stopping pregnancy, are no deterrent to the spread of disease.  And unless you trust that your partners are 1) disease-free, and 2) not having sexual relations with others, you don’t really know what they might be passing along.  In fact, without testing, you don’t know what you might be passing on before symptoms show up.  And while you can certainly ask your partners to provide medical documentation before you get busy, you have no way of knowing if it is currently accurate.

So your best bet is to use condoms all the time, at least until you enter into a long-term, monogamous relationship.  And since even that may not be enough, start going in for annual exams with a gynecologist or urologist and getting regular STD tests (pap, Western Blot Reagents exams, and so on) to ensure that you are in optimal health, or begin treatment if you aren’t.

Carol Montrose is a contributing writer for Western Blot Reagents which offers STD and other related health testing.

Image: healingdream / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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