“I ALWAYS PRACTICE SAFE SEX,” “I’VE NEVER BEEN PROMISCUOUS.” “I JUST HAD AN AIDS TEST SIX WEEKS AGO.” “DON’T WORRY, I’M ON THE PILL.”
ACCORDING TO RECENT STUDY, YOUR SEX PARTNER MAY BE TELLING YOU THESE HEALTH-THREATENING LIES JUST TO HAVE SEX WITH YOU.
“I ALWAYS PRACTICE SAFE SEX,” “I’VE NEVER BEEN PROMISCUOUS.” “I JUST HAD AN AIDS TEST SIX WEEKS AGO.” “DON’T WORRY, I’M ON THE PILL.”
ACCORDING TO RECENT STUDY, YOUR SEX PARTNER MAY BE TELLING YOU THESE HEALTH-THREATENING LIES JUST TO HAVE SEX WITH YOU.
Even more surprising is the fact that people who tell such lies believe that their behavior is unacceptable.
Sunyna Williams, Ph.D., a community health assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, observed that many people use sexual history-taking as a safer-sex technique. That is why she decided to survey 166 sexually active students to test their perceptions about the of sexual lies. They were asked to answer several closed-end questions about perceptions of their sexual lies. Later they were asked to describe an event where they had lied their sex partner. Open-ended questioning allowed research assistants to code lies as risk-relevant (such as lying about sexual history) or risk-irrelevant (such as lying about sexual pleasure). It allowed them to determine if the lying was self-protective or other-protective in nature.
Findings were presented recently to the American Public Health Association. They revealed that risk-relevant lies tended to be self-protective, while risk-irrelevant lies tended to be other-protective. People told risk-irrelevant lies to protect the feelings of their partner, who they tended to like. Those with a history of infidelity, however, told more risk-relevant, self-protective lies, and they tended to like their partners less at the same time. They also considered their behavior to be less acceptable and more serious than the risk-irrelevant, other-protective group’s behavior.
“It does give you some hope in terms of how you can intervene,” says Williams. “If these people didn’t care, it would be a little scary.”
