Boomer men don’t like to wear condoms, but if you’re having a fling with one, here’s why you should insist.
An email from a MORE.com member coincided with a conversation I had with a longtime friend. In both the email and my conversation, the topic was HPV.Why are mature, middle age women talking about sexually transmitted diseases? Because it’s an issue of our times, for both married and single folks. Human papillomavirus (HPV) is a very common sexually transmitted disease and every year more people become infected, including the newly single middle age set and those who thought they were in monogamous relationships, like my longtime friend. A few years ago, her husband of almost thirty years got caught having a fling: his remedy for a midlife crisis. My friend forgave him. A year or so after his fling, she had an irregular PAP smear and then another. Finally her doctor asked the question my friend thought she’d never hear her doctor ask. “Could you have an STD?” On first impulse, she denied any possibility until she remembered what she was trying so hard to forget. Her Ob/Gyne’s suspicion was confirmed through a simple test done during a PAP smear. My friend has HPV, passed to her from her husband who contracted it from his paramour. He didn’t know he had it. Men tend to be symptom-free. He wouldn’t have known he was a carrier had his wife not delivered the bad news.
The husband did not use a condom, the only safeguard against contracting HPV, with his paramour. Why? Women dating again in midlife are likely to discover what I did: midlife men don’t like condoms. When I began dating after my marriage ended, I met several men who would not wear condoms. Unlike young men today, Boomer men weren’t schooled in condom use. Back in the day, the only STD scourge we even talked about was gonorrhea which was unsavory to discuss though easily treated with penicillin. Our guys used condoms, or ‘rubbers’ as we called them back then, to protect against pregnancy, a birth control that sometimes did and sometimes didn’t work.
Fast forward to today. While we no longer need condoms for pregnancy protection, we do need them to safeguard against real threats from the many STDs lurking out there that include HIV, herpes, and HPV. The young men we knew back then are older men today. For some, growing older means coming to grips with erectile dysfunction, also known as ED. Wearing a condom does not enhance sensation so it’s no surprise that middle age and older men don’t like wearing them. ED is a big issue among our male contemporaries, otherwise Viagra wouldn’t be a household name.
