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The first time Peter asked me if I had been tested for sexually transmitted diseases was over dinner, on our first date. He casually slid the question into conversation just as one might ask the name of your hometown or if your parents were still married. I can't even remember if he actually asked me or just mentioned it, so practiced was he at extracting the information. I only remember that I was soon admitting that I had been tested one month previously, and I was clean as a whistle — a whistle that had never been sucked or touched or placed in inappropriate locations.
    I did find it strange that he asked about it over dinner (a crab-cake sandwich for me, a hearty soup for him), but these are modern times, my friends, and we all wonder about a potential partner's baggage, both physical and emotional. Maybe it was even refreshing, I thought, his forthrightness. Usually those questions are asked in the moments before penetration, as a condom waits to be hurriedly stretched down the length of a penis. A whisper in the ear: "Are you clean?" "Are you healthy?" "Is there anything I should know?" These are all times when decision-making and truth-telling abilities are limited. But he was planning ahead. He was a planner. I could learn to like that.

    After dinner we went to a dot-com party, one of the approximately ninety being thrown on any given Thursday during the year 2000, and walked in together as some sort of semblance of a couple. Peter and I were both web producers, though on the opposite end of the spectrum: I worked on entertainment websites, and he worked for financial-planning institutions. We were both on the same party circuit, and we had little in common besides our workaholic tendencies. He was really into experimental jazz and enjoyed long and thoughtful discussions about politics; I liked Sleater-Kinney and making fun of strangers. He was well mannered and chivalrous and always went home alone. I drank a lot and was in a phase of my life (e.g. my twenties) where I fucked men as if the phrase "use it or lose it" had been invented specifically for my vagina. But time and again I had found myself talking to him at these parties. We both always stayed till the end, me to drink myself silly, and Peter, I suppose, to keep himself from feeling alone.
    A week before, we had made out after one of these same parties, hurriedly on a bench outside of a bar in Chelsea. He had blatantly stroked my breasts in full view of everyone walking by on the street, and it had felt so good I hadn't cared that I was a terrible, awful cliché. I could feel part of me moving outside of my body and seeing myself doing it, how I must have looked — that girl, getting felt up at two a.m. It was not a finer moment, but the attention had buoyed me, he had started it, and then, suddenly he stopped, and announced he was going to go home and jerk off. To my great surprise, he emailed me the next day and asked me to dinner. This was something new and fascinating: a guy who wanted to date me.
    And now here we were, this new version of us, different than the week before. He was gracious and attentive. He got me free drink after free drink from the open bar, and did the same for all of my friends who were there. He told his serious and sincere stories about his life and family and travels, and they suddenly seemed sparkling to me. We smiled at each other across the room when we thought no one was looking. I'm totally going to fuck him later, I thought.
    We went back to his apartment (spotless, unsurprisingly), and we sat and he asked me more questions about myself, my strengths, my weaknesses, my dreams. He rubbed my feet as we talked. There was the fiercest radiation between us. It felt like something was happening. And then he said, "So I think we're probably going to have sex at some point, so I have to ask you, have you been tested for sexually transmitted diseases?"
    Perhaps I hadn't been clear enough at dinner, I thought. Perhaps he wants more details. I launched into a longer explanation, and added in a funny

anecdote about my visit to the gynecologist (some sort of Vagina Monologues joke while she was investigating me with a speculum), just to reassure him that I was telling the truth.
    We commenced foreplay on the couch, and he soon informed me that he wouldn't be kissing me with tongue because he had a canker sore on the inside of his mouth. "Stress," he said. It felt weird kissing just on the lips, but I soon convinced myself it was more simple and pure that way, like high school. Or junior-high school. Another rule soon was established: I was not to bite him. "I just don't like it," he said. He then proceeded to pay a great deal of attention to getting my clothes off. His clothes remained for the most part intact, until finally he admitted he didn't like to take his shirt off in front of other people.
    Forty-five minutes later I was naked and wriggling on two of his fingers, while he wore a T-shirt and boxers. We finally made a move to the bed, and then he whispered, "Do you want to have sex?"
    "Yes," I said. I mean, of course I did. I always wanted to have sex. I wasn't quite sure what kind of sex I was going to have with him. I knew what kind of sex it wasn't going to be: sex with tongue, sex with biting, or sex with complete nudity — and, I was beginning to suspect, sex as equals. He wouldn't let me make him feel good. He just wanted to do things to me.
    "Do you have a condom?" he said.
    "I think so," I said.
    "Well then before we do it, I have to ask you something," he said. "Have you been tested for sexually transmitted diseases?"
    "Okay, what the fuck is going on here?" I said. I was pissed off — oh, that temper of mine — but also I was embarrassed. In that moment, for just a second, I felt like maybe he knew something I didn't know. That would be impossible, of course, but I couldn't figure out why he kept asking me the same question.
    "I just need to know the answer to the question," he said.
    "I have already answered you twice," I said.
    "I have a right to ask these questions," he said. "I shouldn't feel uncomfortable for asking them."
    "But I've already answered them."
    "This is what will make me feel comfortable," he said. "If you answer the question."
    I stood up and pulled on my pants and put on my bra. "I don't understand why you're treating me this way," I said. "This is complete bullshit."
    "I shouldn't feel uncomfortable," he said. And then I noticed that his voice had changed. It had become almost robotic, and his long frame seemed to shrink into him. He was curling up in an emotional ball. "I have a right to ask these questions," he said again.
    Something clicked in my head.
    "Is this like someone washing their hands a lot?" I said. I couldn't think of the word for it.
    He was silent. I grabbed my shirt and started to put it on.
    "Yes," he said. "I have OCD." He had given up on medication years ago, and this was the way he had decided to live his life.
    The constant questioning was a ritual he went through with every woman he dated, he explained. "It's a hurdle, but once you get over it, I promise you there's no other problems with sex," he said. "I like to have lots of sex."

    I softened a bit. This was language I understood. Soon my pants were off, but again, it was about him doing things to me, him touching my breasts, him whispering dirty words in my ear, him stroking me all over. And I wanted to do the same to him, I wanted us both to get off. That's what turned me on: a mutual exchange. I reached my hand toward his shorts, and he shoved it away.
    And that was it — that was the final blow. He had refused the gentle touch of my hand. I felt controlled, and not in a let's-play-some-sex-games sort of way. He was setting all the rules, and I knew one thing very clearly about myself: I was definitely not a rules girl.
    "You can only see what you want," I told him. "It's all about you."
    "I thought I was making you feel good," he said. "I thought we were having fun."
    And we were, but of course, we weren't. I was confused. I couldn't be mad at him for being chemically imbalanced. He had been kind to me, and I knew he was capable of being a good partner to someone. I felt like he needed someone weaker than me, someone more willing to be dependent on someone, because he felt so weak himself.
    We talked more that night, but eventually we passed out from exhaustion. In the morning he had to get up early (he was volunteering with the elderly, naturally, because he was just that nice of a guy), and when we said goodbye I got a little depressed. It was at that moment I realized I really was not a nice enough person to be with him. Someone could handle him, someone could work through everything, and in the end, they'd get a really good person. But not me.
    Later on, when I found out that he'd had similar interactions with other women, that he had gone through years in his life where he'd had no sex at all, and that he'd also gone through periods of extreme sexual binges, that his sexuality was so wrapped up in his mental illness that there was no way I could have ever sustained a meaningful relationship with him, even after knowing all of that, in the end I still felt this small sting of regret, or maybe failure. I know you shouldn't personalize someone else's disease; it'll get you nowhere. Call it my own romantic OCD, but I still think about it all the time, I still want to ask him: Why wouldn't you just fuck me?  n°