Challenging Stigma: The Complexities of Herpes-Exclusive Dating Environments
Educators, advocates, and partners—listen up!
Most efforts at creating inclusive and normalized dating environments for folks with herpes further exclude, shame, and stigmatize the very population which these environments aim to protect.
This is exemplified through herpes-exclusive dating websites, dating filters for folks with STIs, and, further, herpes-exclusive coaches.
While there are discussions to normalize positive STI results by listing them in dating bios, we need to extend conversations and advocacy efforts toward the inclusion of sex positive, comprehensive sex education around STIs.
Dating bio disclosures certainly engage curiosity and those impactful, smaller-scale conversations, however, they also may serve as a way to avoid rejection and disclosures with potential partners (which is stigma at work).
While STI-exclusive dating apps *seem* to alleviate the issues at hand, simply joining the app is a disclosure in and of itself. There is no need to communicate or discuss, because everyone knows why you’re there.
By their very nature, these apps remove the fantasy many hold about instantaneous sex. The type of sex where you meet someone and before you know it you’re more educated and aware of how their body moves and responds than their sexual history.
Society romanticizes unsafe sex, and it upholds monogamy as the norm, too. STI exclusive dating apps perpetuate and support stigma. STI exclusive dating apps tell this population that they’re limited to a dating pool of people who share their diagnosis.
STI exclusive dating apps prey on this population’s vulnerabilities fears. STI exclusive dating apps tell this population that they not only need a partner to live a happy life with their diagnosis, but only a certain type of partner who shares in that diagnosis.
Dating apps are only the beginning, especially as herpes education advocacy becomes more commonplace. Oftentimes, the best thing you can do as educators and advocates to truly normalize these conversations and diagnosis is to talk about them within your current domain.