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Hello everyone! I wanted to do a nice long update with you all, because as I've stated before, I think this thread is really important for us single men out there. But I spent my whole beautiful Sunday afternoon on post here. Darn. So sorry if what's below is rushed. I've been off this site for a while and have not kept up with the discussion above. Why? Because I'm loving life, leading a normal life, and having more casual sex than I've ever had before. So @hippyherpy was not lying or bragging with his successes. They are indeed possible. And he is 100% right that the herpes diagnosis can be an opportunity to up your game. After dozens of girlfriends tried to get me to have a better fashion sense, it's the H that's done it, for example. I'm so happy. As physicist I wanted to give you a run down of the numbers, but again, there's no time. Suffice to say I've slept with six different women since my horrible breakup in February. That's about a different girl per month on average, which is about what I was doing pre-diagnosis. But things have sped up considerably lately, as my confidence is fully back and I don't really worry about the disclosure anymore. If a girl says no (rare), I'll just move on, so that really helps your confidence. By speed up I mean I have slept with three new girls in the past two weeks, and now firmly have five women on rotation, meaning I have sex literally whenever I want it. That does not include a former fling who lives in a different country. I have disclosed to her but she still wants me to book a flight to see her. So while the deal is not in the bag, it's good news. Rejections: I think I remember two. The first was my first disclosure, which totally sent me back into depression. Poor timing! The second wasn't really a rejection. I told her because we were moving really fast - it was our second date and we found ourselves in bed quickly becoming naked. So I told her, and she whined and said "awww! I'm so horny and I don't think I can control myself with you." So I stopped it. A few days later she told me she didn't think it was worth the risk unless we were in a serious relationship. We ended up doing oral that night, but the relationship didn't last. So I don't see that as a rejection so much as a failed relationship. What's my disclosure? I've largely taken @hippyherpy's advice and kept it super simple. For random hookups I wait until clothing starts coming off (so many times I thought I was going to have sex with a girl only for something to get in the way, so there's no need to disclose until it really looks like it is going to happen), and then I slow it down. "Wait," I say, "I have something I want to tell you." "Sex is an intimate act and deserves full transparency..." A couple of times the girl has interjected and said "I don't want to have sex tonight," or "I'm on my period" or something, at which point I can find something else to talk about. But if not... "I have herpes." Sometimes I see a look of "who gives a shit" in the girls eyes, at which point we hop in the sack. But if there's any hesitation I say: "Most girls I've told don't care, but if it is a deal-breaker I understand. I've also done hundreds of hours of reading on it, so if you have any questions just let me know." At this point it's anyone's guess. I'm either going to have a five minute discussion where I state the facts (I suppose no longer will I say "the chances of transmission are really small but nonzero" or "the chances are less than one percent" - see the post I wrote today on the other thread, linked above), we slow things down, go to sleep, and she looks it up herself, or she goes "okay" and we continue. I basically have the same script for non-one-night-stands, but I bring it up a date before I plan on making moves. I've only done this once (plus the international one, but that hasn't been executed yet), and we talked a lot but in the end the woman did not care. I really, really like the woman that lives in a different country, i.e. she may be marriage material. So it's nice to report that in those cases - where I have a deep, long relationship with someone - I am 1 for 1. However, we slept together before my diagnosis. I don't know what will happen if I date someone now and really, really like her. Perhaps I'll wait many dates before trying anything, and we will test the success of disclosure while pondering a long-term relationship. My guess is the success rate in that case is much higher. Most women these days know it is common and not a big deal. If not, I think it is important to let people know the facts, more importantly for their education than for you getting some. This chart and this table are good ones to get some numbers from. Seeing as my partners are in their twenties or thirties, that's where I'll focus: Overall, 20% of women in the US have HSV-2. If she's black: ~40% of black females 20-29, ~60% 30-39, have it! If she's slept with a black guy: ~20% of black men 20-29, ~40% 30-39 have it. If you are with a girl that has been with more then 10 guys, there's a 37% that she has it. Other things to have on your fingertips: 80% of people who have HSV-2 don't have noticeable symptoms (like me). It's not on your standard STD screen, so even if you think you are "clean," unless you've specifically asked (and paid) for it, you don't know. I'm on the medication, which decreases the risk of transmission by about half. (Updated from my other post today) Just knowing and disclosing is the best way to reduce the risk of transmission. Those who disclose before the first sex act have about a third the chance of transmitting than those who don't. I'd like to say: "Condom use reduces the risk of transmission from men to women by about 92%!" (see other post), but I'll wait for discussion to bubble up on that other post before feel confident in that number.

Hello everyone, I've been off this site for months now - a good sign showing that I've just been living my life. But I just logged on for a bit an found this in my inbox: I recently encountered your post on single-exposure HSV transmission probabilities, and while agree with your calculations that led you to the 1% number. Unfortunately, the paper "Knowledge of Partners’ Genital Herpes Protects against Herpes Simplex Virus Type 2 Acquisition", by Wald et al., empirically measures some of the quantities you compute, and they are substantially less optimistic. (For example, they measure the median sexual relationship length before transmission as 3.5 months, or ~40 exposures.) I suspect the discrepancy between your calculated results and those of the paper are a result of sample bias: The transmission rates are between couples who have been together long enough to participate in a couples' study, yet for whom HSV transmission has not occurred. This is very different from transmission rates in a new relationship, as the cited paper demonstrates. (This casts doubt on the 'independently distributed' assumption.) Indeed, this underscores the caveats I put in the preceding posts, but makes them even more stark. The independent assumption is certainly false, and we as a community should not be citing hard numbers during our disclosure talks. I'll try to dicsuss my updated disclosure talk to the Ladies Man Disclosure Success Thread by @hippyherpy in a bit. As the emailer above stated, the problem with the numbers we have been using is that they use "serodiscordant" couples - that is, couples where one person has HSV-2 and the other does not. There likely is some sample bias in using those statistics, because those couples by definition have not transmitted, so there could be something different happening with them (the HSV+ person has unusually low shedding, the HSV- person as a particularly well adapted innate immune system, etc.). But the Wald et. al. paper also has a bias! Their sample pool was "patients presenting to the University of Washington Virology Research Clinic or Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) clinic in Seattle with a first episode of genital lesions consistent with herpes." That is, they had an outbreak! We know that the probability of transmission goes down with time, and is much lower when you do not have an outbreak or prodrome. Indeed, I wrote the preceeding before getting to the discussion section, in which they state: Another corollary of our study design is that only persons with symptomatic genital herpes were enrolled, because we relied on clinical presentation for the initial diagnosis. A minority of newly acquired genital HSV-2 and HSV-1 infections result in a diagnosis at the time of acquisition, and the factors that distinguish between persons with symptomatic and asymptomatic HSV acquisition are poorly understood [23]. However, the enrollment of persons identified as seroconverting to HSV without clinical evidence of infection would necessitate prospective monitoring, obviating the possibility of this study design So for the 80% of us who have not had symptoms (like me), I would say the risks are all much, much lower. But that is not a scientific statement. This paper states that the hazard ratio of having lesions vs. not having lesions is 2.01, though it has the same "serodiscordant couple" sample bias as the original emailer stated. Still, this indicates that you reduce the probability of transmission by about half if you abstain from sex when you have a lesion (this is a relative risk. The 10% number cited in the worksheet is an absolute risk). Further, as the authors state in the discussion section, they only studied people who acquired herpes. So they have the opposite bias! As they state, they can only cite relative risks - hazard ratios, i.e. the amount a particular intervention changes the risk - and not absolute transmission rates. Note that hazard ratios measure instantaneous risk, so there's no need to discuss "per year" or "per act" probabilities. A few notes from the Wald et. al. paper: "Condom use was infrequent, with 50% reporting condom use the first time they had sexual intercourse with the transmitting partner and 20% reporting condom use the last time they had sexual intercourse." Am I the only one that always uses condoms, unless I'm in a committed relationship where we have both been tested? As they state in the discussion section, "consistent condom use was unusual among our participants, which potentially suggests that those persons who use condoms regularly are protected against HSV-2 acquisition and, thus, could not become participants." This paper states an incredible 0.085 hazard ratio for transmission to a women when a man uses a condom 25% of the time vs. less than 25% of the time! It also seems there is no signficant difference between using an not using a condom for female-to-male transmission! "The median time to HSV-2 acquisition was greater in participants whose partners informed them that they had genital herpes than in those whose partners did not (270 vs. 60 days, respectively; P=.03, log-rank test)." This really brings home the point that disclosing is the right thing to do. If you disclose, you are increasing the average time of transmission from two months to nine. Even more rigorous is the discussion of the hazard ratio, which indicates that the risk of transmission for those who disclose is 48% of those who do not. If you tell before the first time you have sex with the partner, that number goes to a wonderful 34%. Confused? So am I. The biases, limitations, and conflicting results of all these studies really muddy the waters here. I really wish I had participated in the discussion with Dr. Peter Leone through this site. He or some other academic with more expertise in this area than I should write a review article with a "plain English" section. And there should be attempts to reconcile, or disregard, some of the numbers. What will I do? I don't know. I have moved on with my life, had more success sexually than ever, and can proudly say I've always disclosed before the initial sex act. Further, I'm not burdened by guilt, and I now have perspective and know that, even if I do transmit to someone, their life will not be significantly affected. As the nurse-practitioner in the STD clinic told me, while pointing at the list of tests they perform there "diabetes is worse than any one of these diseases." So that should give some perspective. I have taken @hippyherpy's advice - my disclosures are simple: "I have herpes." Sometimes I get a look like "who gives a shit", at which point we just jump in the sack, and sometimes I have to go a bit further. I'll discuss more on his "Ladies Man Disclosure Success Thread." I think the only thing I'll change is, if we get into real numbers, instead of saying the probabilities are less than 1%, I'll cite the nine-month vs. two month statistic, and further state that that was without rigorous condom use and suppressive therapy. I usually suggest the person go home and do their own research, which almost never happens, but that's the best I can do. I've spent way more on this than I intended to. It's a beautiful Sunday! Oh well. I look forward to the discussion.

Wow. I'm super jealous that you are in Brazil. That is one of my favorite places that I've visited. For some reason I was under the impression that Brazil had higher herpes rates. I'll paste the relevant text from this paper below, which seems to indicate Brazil has around the same HSV2 frequency as the US, but again, it's complicated. My experience in Brazil is that people are very warm, friendly, and laid back. I had not been tested for the H when I visited, so I can't specifically advise you on disclosure there. But I did not have a problem meeting women, so if that converts, like @hippyherpy said, I'd anticipate your disclosure success rate would be higher. But it's just a guess. Let us know! Note: US HSV2 rates are here: http://www.cdc.gov/std/stats14/figures/54.htm

Thanks @Herpeppotomus for joining in on this thing. As I said before but perhaps in another way - this forum is full of so many people helping each other, but one place that's lacking is those younger men discussing how herpes has affected what younger men normally do. Now we have three on here, and we should be proud that we definitely will help people in similar situations in the future. I guess I'm still new to this thing, so time will tell if I ever fall to the temptation of not disclosing. I will say that months ago, before I had joined this forum or anything else, I had a phone discussion with a leader in the herpes community of a large city, and he told me "almost every one slips up. So don't beat yourself up once it happens. Just move on, recognize your human, and try not to do it again." I replied "it is my goal to never not disclose." And think there's a lot to that. Sure, you don't have to disclose. No one will probably ever know. But you will. And it doesn't look like you are having too much trouble. 5/6 are some great stats. As I stated in my above post, I'm 0/1 in "would be partners (none in the moment)," so if I "revert to the mean" of you and @hippyherpy, I have a lot to look forward to. And at least where I sit now, I think we can have our cake and eat it too. If you have a reasonable amount of "game," which it's clear you do, you can have sex somewhat regularly while still disclosing. I know this is a judgement free zone, but the hell with it - this makes you better than the average dude. Not disclosing at best makes you like every other guy with his dick in his hand at the bar. Regarding the risk, remember that the 10% number is per year, assuming no condoms, no medications, sex twice a week, but also avoiding outbreaks. The 5% you are giving is probably all that with condoms, and then we get to about 2% with antivirals. But there are huge differences that can really change the numbers. I'm no expert on this exact disease, but a good example is if you get really kinky in your one night stands, that's probably more rough than what a couple who is having sex twice a week is doing, and therefore the per-exposure risk goes up. Likewise, if you have sex multiple times in one night (I don't know about you, but I still got it!), chances are you are chafing and again increasing the risk. I know it's tough to hear, but I'm fairly confident one-night-stand sex is higher risk than what a couple who's been together for ten years has (I shudder at how non-scientific I've become in this conversation. What's needed is a hazard ratio with a p-value. But once again, no matter).

Hello everyone. After my May 25 call to action, I'd be remiss not to share an update. Friday I went out with many friends to a bar. The night went on and on, but as my friend circle started to wane, my roommate and I invited the few who were left back to our house to continue drinking. After many hours of lively discussions, it was time for bed. But one girl who was there - a friend of a friend whom I'd never met before - was certainly interested in me. Pre-H this would have been a no-brainer. So we walk away from the others and start making out. I invite her in to my room. After a few more kisses I disclose. And here's where I'd like to make a plea for others to quote exactly what they said. I know, I know, every situation is different. But if people can share their scripts, adaptations and all, it could serve useful for others in the future. I'm surprised, actually, that with all the thousands of pages of disclosure discussions on here, people don't do that more often. But I digress. I told her "I just want to let you know that the chances of transmission are very low, especially since I am on medication, but I have tested positive for genital herpes. I'm not having an outbreak now. Actually, I've never had one." She didn't have any reaction, just like I had told her my back ached or something like that. But she did reply "okay. I don't think I'm ready for sex anyway," which I think she would have said regardless of the H. We continued making out, jumped in the sack, and did "manual stimulation" (yes, I was careful not to touch my penis and then her vagina). About an hour later we woke up and did it again. Then she asked me "if we were to have sex, how would you do it?" (it a way more vulgar way than that but this is actually a bit embarrassing, even for the internet!). About three sentences in of me explaining what I'd do to her, she told me to put on a condom. So success! After four long months of wondering if I'd ever have sex again, it's clear to me that I will, almost as much as I want. And for those concerned because we were both drunk: the next morning, as she was leaving, I said "we should do that again some time." She said "definitely." And we are still in text contact. If you've seen my other posts you'll know I'm a quantitative person, so here's my score sheet: Girlfriend disclosures: 1/1 (100% success rate) Third-date disclosures: 1/0 (0% success rate) One-night stand disclosures: 1/1 (100% success rate) Hopefully I'll be able to update more soon, so we can start getting actual numbers. Another thing @hippyherpy has mentioned that I think is important for those in our situation: yes, your chances may be lower. Yes, you may get fewer "yes's." But that can be rectified by just trying more often. For me this has taken the form of dating multiple women at once. Yes, it is exhausting. Yes, I'd prefer to pick one and really try to make it work. But unfortunately, I think you need to keep the next one on the back-burner so that if the one you really like can't get past the disclosure, there are others to look forward to and you don't suffer an emotional setback. So for me at this point I have four women I'm going out on dates with per week. They are all really great and if I didn't have the H I'd actually be worried about having to pick one. So in some weird positive on this whole thing, it's likely that the H will do some picking for me. I'll be sure to send an update as this story develops.

Thanks again @hippyherpy for this thread. I think a lot of men are comforted by it. One call to action: are there any other guys out there with successful one-night stand disclosure stories? Can you post them here? As some may know from my other thread, I did not have so much success on my first try and am still majorly down about it. I've been searching through this site for other guys' stories, and I'm sad to say I don't see any! Not that I'm not going to keep using @hippyherpy's inspiration to keep me going, but it sure would be better if others had the same success. There are plenty of posts where women did fine with one-night stand disclosures. But we all know men are much more, ahem, suggestible when it comes to carnal pleasures.

What about even longer term than a year. Two years? Three, five, ten, etc.? Does the risk of transmitting to your partner increase as you add more years? Does it bottom out at some point to a percent and not get bigger from there? To answer this let's stay away from the per-act conversation and rely on the more reputable annual numbers. If there is a 10% chance of giving someone herpes in a year, what's the chance of not giving it to them in a year? 90%. In two years what's the chance of not giving it to them? 0.9 * 0.9 = 0.81. Thus the chances of giving someone herpes in two years is 19%, again assuming sex twice a week. To get geeky, the % transmission is: T = 1-(Q^N) Where Q is the chance of *not* transmitting in a year (1-the annual chance of transmission), and T is the overall chance of transmission in N years. If you were to draw that it would be a curve that is always increasing ("monotonic upward"), but with the slope decreasing ("negative concavity"). It "asymptotically" reaches 100%, that is, there is never a 100% chance of giving your partner herpes, unless you live (and have sex with them) forever. However, there is a 99% chance you will give it to them in 44 years (N = log(1-T)/log(Q), Q=90%). Yes, I am not using the continuous distribution calculations, but I don't think there will be a large difference here. I'm happy to re-work all the numbers if people can tell what distribution they used (Poisson?). So, using the numbers in my original post here are the 1-year, 2-year, 5-year, 10-year, and 30-year probabilities: Male-to-female: Avoid outbreaks only: 10%, 19%, 41%, 65% Suppressive therapy: 5%, 10%, 23%, 41% Suppressive therapy + condoms: 3-4%, 5-7%, 12-17%, 23-31% Female-to-male: Avoid outbreaks only: 4%, 8%, 18%, 34% Suppressive therapy: 2%, 4%, 10%, 18% Suppressive therapy + condoms: 1%, 2-3%, 5-7%, 10-13%

Sorry for my absence. It has been a wild ride since my last post. I did my first real disclosure on Friday night - third date, girl takes me back to her place and jumps on me. Thanks to @hippyherpy and his ladies man's posts, I assumed it would go fine. I stated things in total confidence, and was in an Uber, crushed, within the hour. I've been pretty depressed ever since. I shall rise again, but not yet. But that is a post for a different forum. I have also been chewed out by an epidemiologist I work with, after a few-hours long conversation that recapitulates much of what is on this thread. It was dangerous for me to do the per-exposure calculation because people will just take that with them (even though I warn them not to), and use it as an excuse to not disclose. On the other hand, I saw it as a chance to try to answer a question everyone was asking, and maybe teach people some probability theory along the way. The take away from this post and my other conversation is, however, that the per-exposure risk can swing drastically. It can be orders of magnitude more or less depending on the person - their diet, immune system, random chance, etc. I thought the "much less than 1%" number balanced those things, and I stand by that, but we should all realize that for any given particular act the odds can be much higher than 1%. So why am I still comfortable telling a girl the chances are much lower than 1% (if I ever have the chance again :( )? Because life is probabilistic. Whenever you do anything you run the risk of getting hurt, and in our minds we call make the calculation of risk vs. reward. But we should know that those aggregate risks (e.g. 0.04% of transmission, or 0.01% chance of dying in a car crash) are indeed aggregate. There will be times when the risks are much greater and you just don't know. All we can do is disclose as much of the known risk as we can, hope that others understand the risks and how they are aggregate, and go about living our lives. In this case, by saying the risk is "much less than 1%" (maybe we should take out "much"), we are actually multiplying the aggregate risk by 25. So I think that is safe and cautious to our partners, but would love to hear others' thoughts. I think everyone has struggled with the disclosure question. Goodness knows, all I need is a rebound right now so I can move on instead of thinking about how my cheating ex-GF is doing fine and in a relationship, and that has proven difficult. If I had just not disclosed Friday night my life would be so much better and the girl would probably never have known. But at the end of the day I want to be able to call myself a good person, an honest, open, and moral person. And that oftentimes requires courage, perseverance, and sacrifice. @hippyherpy's successes hearten me that the sacrifice will not be too severe, that one can have his cake (sex) and eat it too (the peace that comes with disclosure). We shall see.

Thank you all for making this very friendly and supportive community. I'm new and it has helped a lot. I'm a physicist who now works in infectious disease research (irony!), and one thing I've been reading about is the single-exposure probability calculation present in many posts, most comprehensively here. Though they get to the right answer eventually, I'd like to try my shot at consolidating and simplifying the problem. I think the clear take away from all the analysis is that you can feel comfortable stating the following - anything more or less is over or understating it: "The chances of transmitting genital herpes (HSV2) from a single sex act is much lower than 1%." PLEASE do not state anything more than this. I'll do the calculations below, and they will shock you. But please resist the temptation to cite the actual results that arise from them. I'll go into details at the end. I think the more pedagogical way to do this is to assume the transmission rate is 1% and prove it is wrong ("rejecting the null hypothesis"). This is equivalent to saying we have a 100-sided die, and we roll it twice a week for a year (I assume Friday and Saturday nights!). What are the chances you never roll a 69? The first time you roll it you have a 1 in 100 chance of rolling a 69. The next time you roll it, what are the chances of rolling a 69? You guessed it - 1 in 100. You can say this because each roll is an independent event (a huge assumption that we will discuss later and I believe the reason why health professionals don't share these calculations). During the two rolls, how many total combinations of rolls could we have had? We have 100 possibilities for the first roll and 100 for the second, so the total number of combinations is 100*100 = 10,000. How many of them have at least one 69 in them? Well, if we first roll a 69 then it doesn't matter what we roll next - all one hundred possibilities will give us a case in which there was at least one 69 rolled. Conversely, if we roll a 69 on the second roll, it didn't matter what we rolled in the first roll. Thus the probability is 200/10,000 = 1/50. (Yes, we did double-count the case in which you roll two 69s, so the true probability is 199/10,000). An easier way to do this is to ask, what is the probability of rolling no 69s in two rolls. There is a 99 in 100 chance, per roll, that you will not roll a 69. So the probability of not rolling any 69s in two rolls is the chance of not rolling it in the first roll times the chance of not rolling in the second role, or 99/100 * 99/100 = 9801/10,000 = 0.9801. So you have a 98% chance of not getting a 69 in either of two rolls. How about if you roll this die twice a week for a year? That's 104 times. So the probability of not rolling any 69s in a year is (99/100)^104 = 0.35. What's the probability you will roll at least one 69 in that year? Well, it is 100% minus the probability you will not roll any. 100%-35% = 65%. So let's get back to the H. The calculation I just did states that, if the chances of a single-exposure transmission were 1%, the annual transmission rate would be 65%. But the number from Adrial's handout is 10% for male-to-female transmission with avoidance of outbreaks (Adrial - it is crucial that you change "Unprotected Transmission Rates" to "Annual Unprotected Transmission Rates" in your handout. I'd also add the "sex twice a week" to the "assumes the following" section). So we can do the reverse calculation. What is the per-exposure probability (I'll call this value x) given the annual transmission rate is 10%? x^104 = 0.9 This makes x = 0.999. There's a 99.9% chance we won't transmit during a one-night stand. What's the probability of transmission? You guessed it, 1-0.999 = 0.001. There's 0.1% chance of transmitting. Now, we know condoms and suppressive therapy reduces the annual rates, and they are likely multiplicative in their effect. So here are the numbers in that case, using the numbers in Adrial's handout: Male-to-female: Avoid outbreaks only: Annual, 10%, per-exposure, 0.1% Suppressive therapy: 48% reduction. Annual, 5.2%, per-exposure, 0.05% Suppressive therapy + condoms: An additional 30-50% reduction. Annual, 2.6-3.6%, per-exposure 0.03-0.04% Female-to-male: Avoid outbreaks only: Annual, 4%, per-exposure, 0.04% Suppressive therapy: 48% reduction. Annual, 2%, per-exposure, 0.02% Suppressive therapy + condoms: An additional 30-50% reduction. Annual, 1-1.4%, per-exposure 0.01% Why not to cite these exact numbers: Here I assumed every roll is the same. Every die is the same. In the statistics parlance we assumed each roll was "independent and independently distributed." But we know this is not the case with the H. Rough sex may open micro-tears and increase your chances. Your shedding rate varies over time and so each sex act is a roll with a completely different die. People are different and not "independently distributed." So just go with it and tell your partner the chances for tonight are "much less than 1%." Besides, I'm not sure putting on your spectacles, speaking like Urkel, and stating "there is a zero point zero four percent chance I will give you herpes in this encounter" would have the desired effect anyway. (But hey, if that's your thing, run with it. If you are courting a super nerd you may even want to amp it up to "given an aggregate annual transmission rate of 3.6% assuming two sex acts per week, condom use, suppressive therapy, and avoidance of outbreaks, our per-act transmission probability, assuming it is independent and independently distributed, is 3 times 10 to the negative fourth power. The expectation value of the number of sex acts we will have before transmission is 2805.3.") Is this justification to not disclose? There's so much about this on this forum (e.g. here and here), so I doubt I can add anything new to that subject. I will say it's been 3.5 months since I've had sex - since leaving a lying, cheating girlfriend that I stayed with for 3 months too long because of this stupid disease - and the temptation for me is large. I've had at least three chances to have my "rebound," and this is important because not only do I need to get over the trauma of the H diagnosis, but also the trauma of being so unbelievably deceived, cheated on, and lied to. But have stayed strong and not done it, for I pride myself on being a moral person who struggles to always better myself. Not disclosing would be a betrayal to myself. Another note, I really love @hippyherpy 's thread entitled "The Ladies' Man's Disclosure Success Thread." It has, at least temporarily, snapped me out of the depression of thinking I'll never have sex again (or at least I have to wait for love to have it again). His work was the real inspiration for me to write this, and to hopefully have my first real disclosure this weekend (besides to the cheating GF who probably had it anyway). We shall see. Well, this was a monster first post. Apologies for the tome - I suppose it was a bit of a catharsis. But thank you all once again, especially Adrial, for creating such a supportive and informative group. If people have questions, concerns, corrections, or comments, I'd love to hear them.

Hello everyone. I'd love an H buddy. If there is any male who has gone through his mid-thirties, single, with H, I would love to talk to you. I'd prefer if you are in the Seattle area, in case we hit it off we can meet up! As is probably the case with most people here, I'd like to talk about your experiences dating, meeting women, giving "the talk" (I think I will have to do my first real one next week), and finding happiness. Please let me know if you are available. Thanks.