I Got Scabies. Here's What Non-Monogamy Taught Me About Sexual Health.

Photo by Karina Ustiuzhanina

A few years into non-monogamy, I genuinely believed I had things figured out. Not in an arrogant way, more in the way you feel when you’ve done the reading, had the hard conversations, and started to understand yourself well enough to move through relationships with some grace. I’d done the emotional work. I knew how to sit with jealousy, how to communicate needs I’d previously swallowed, how to show up for multiple people without losing myself in the process.

I felt, honestly, pretty evolved.

And then I got scabies. And then, not long after, molluscum. And I found myself sitting with my phone, working out how to call people I cared about and say words I’d never imagined having to say, not because anyone had lied or had been careless in any deliberate sense, but because we had all been living in this comfortable vagueness that none of us had thought to question. We’d assumed. We’d trusted. We just hadn’t quite asked.

It turned out the gap between what we’d assumed and what we’d actually said out loud was bigger than any of us had realised.

The Kind of Naivety That Doesn’t Look Like Naivety

What I’ve come to understand is that there are two completely separate skill sets in non-monogamy, and most of us get very good at one of them while barely touching the other.

The emotional side (jealousy, communication, attachment, needs), gets enormous amounts of attention. There are books, podcasts, therapists, and whole online communities dedicated to working through it. And that work is real and important and genuinely hard.

The physical side gets much less. Not because people don’t care, but because the conversation is awkward in a different way. It requires a kind of clinical specificity that doesn’t fit neatly into the warm, emotionally fluent register that ENM people tend to operate in. Asking about someone’s recent STI history before you sleep with them feels like a different register entirely, more like a form than a feeling.

So a lot of us, myself included, stayed vague. Asked broad questions when they came up naturally. Told ourselves that being thoughtful and caring and honest was the same as being careful.

It isn’t, quite.

Scabies and molluscum are very uncomfortable, but neither of them is extremely dangerous. Both are invisible until they’re not, easy to carry without knowing, and easy to pass on in exactly the kind of trusting, comfortable non-monogamous network I was part of. The person who passed them to me almost certainly had no idea. That’s not a comforting thought so much as an important one, because it means that goodness and care and emotional intelligence, all the things I’d been cultivating, don’t actually protect you from biology. Having specific conversations does.

What Making Those Calls Taught Me

I won’t pretend the phone calls were easy. There’s a particular kind of mortification in delivering news like that, even when the news is medically minor, even when nobody is angry with you. You rehearse what to say. You dread the moment before you press call.

What I didn’t expect was how okay every conversation actually was once I was in it, honest and adult and, in one case, strangely connecting in a way I hadn’t anticipated. The dread was so much worse than the reality. All that time I’d spent unconsciously avoiding specificity to sidestep discomfort, and the actual discomfort of the conversation I’d avoided was nothing compared to the situation I ended up in.

That stayed with me. The thing I’d been treating as too awkward to say was, in practice, completely fine to say. I’d been inflating it in my head into something much larger than it was, and in doing so, I’d left everyone, including myself, with less protection than we deserved.

Why I Think of It Differently Now

The reframe that shifted things for me is this: I used to think of the sexual health conversation as a hurdle, the awkward formality you get through before anything good can begin.

Now I think of it as one of the first genuinely intimate things you can do with someone.

When a person tells you their recent history, when they ask about yours, when you have the specific, slightly clinical conversation before anything has happened; that’s someone saying you matter enough for me to be honest with you even when it’s uncomfortable. It’s care made concrete rather than just assumed.

In non-monogamy especially, where your choices have a ripple effect on more than one person, the stakes of that conversation extend beyond the two of you in the room. The people in your network (your partners, their partners) are all trusting that you’re being thoughtful, not just emotionally but physically. That’s worth taking seriously in the same way you take the emotional work seriously. Not as a burden, but as part of what it means to actually look after the people you love.

I get tested regularly now and know my results before I’m in a situation where they matter. I ask specific questions, not as an interrogation, just as a normal part of getting to know someone’s life. And I’ve stopped letting the slight awkwardness of the conversation be a reason to stay quiet, because I know now what being quiet can cost.

I’ve made those calls. I’d rather have the slightly uncomfortable conversation a hundred times over than make them again.

The emotional work of non-monogamy is deep and real and worth every bit of effort it demands. The physical conversation deserves the same honesty, the same directness, the same willingness to say the thing that feels slightly hard to say.

Your body is in this, too.

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This one felt important to write, and a little scary. If it resonated, or if you’ve been through something similar, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

xx, Luna Rose

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