Think of it as the Erotic Trolley Problem. Do you like someone enough to catch their sickness?
In the early stages of courtship, it’s easy to get fixated on questions of compatibility, potential red flags, and the all-encompassing risk of falling in love. But these questions tend to overshadow another vital, but usually overlooked, question: am I willing to get sick for this person?
Think of it as the Erotic Trolley Problem. You’ve been dating someone for two weeks. You like them. You like how they smell, you like kissing them outside of bars, you love how they laugh—and you have plans to see them this week. But the day you’re supposed to go out, they send you this text:
Hey, I know we have plans tonight, I’m super excited to see you, but I should let you know I’m getting over a cold and totally understand if you’d rather push to next week.
If you’re a responsible adult, you take a raincheck. You accept that you like this person, and feel secure in the knowledge you’ll have a much better time when neither of you are sick. Essentially, you pull the lever that routes the train onto the empty tracks, where it safely delivers its passengers to their destination unscathed.
But if you’re like me—and you want to keep seeing this person—you don’t even touch the lever. You sprint ahead of the train, tie yourself to the tracks, and await the crushing force of catching their cold.
Why would anyone do this? Why go out with a sniffling hottie at the risk of your immune system? Because sharing germs is incredibly hot.
I’m all for sharing the classic fluids. Cum, spit, the sweat that douses two people or more after an intense hour or two of fucking. But those are superficial exchanges of fluids. What’s hot about cum on a stomach is seeing cum on a stomach. What’s hot about spit hitting your molars is watching it leave a lover’s mouth. But the internal and the elusive are far more erotic. A virus doesn’t announce itself as obviously as other fluids. It doesn’t pool anywhere, as much as you might want it to. Like a classic Hollywood femme fatale, a virus seduces silently.
Here’s what happens when you make out with a sick lover. The virus leaps from their tongue onto yours; it flows down your throat like a palm over a thigh, eventually clutching a cell. The cell and the virus need to have chemistry for anything to progress—but most viruses are quite charismatic. If your lover’s virus is charming enough, your throat cells will open themselves and invite the virus back to their place, where it will proceed to make an illustrious mess. To paraphrase an explainer video on NPR: the virus bursts. The virus unloads all over the place.
Eventually, the virus sends a DNA template for making more viruses into the nucleus. Once the DNA strand is inside, it’s threaded through a molecule—in one hole and out the other, a kind of microbiological Eiffel Towering. The molecule makes copies of the virus, and the virus proceeds to the membrane of the cell where it entered, passes through with a wink and a smile, before it repeats this process across countless cells in your body.
A few days after making out with a sick lover, when I find myself pale and dreadfully bored, snowed in under mountains of mucousy tissues, I think fondly of my lover’s virus, and its imprint on my cells. It’s a moment of deep connection. I don’t want kids, and this co-created DNA is the closest I’ll ever come to creating a child with a lover. It's child-rearing without caretaking. Their virus, and the copies it made of itself, gradually alters what is inside me. Yes, I might be coughing, I might have a headache, but something deep inside my lover is now deep inside me. In my limited understanding of microbiology, here’s how I imagine the evolution of the infection. In time, your body fights off the cold. It absorbs the virus originally sent by your lover, breaks it down, and uses what it finds in the virus to create antibodies to fend off future infections. Your body merges with your new lover’s body, on a microscopic level. What could be more romantic than that?
I know this all sounds a bit codependent and domestic, as if three dates in your cells are now deciding what kind of china to keep in the cabinets. I prefer to think of it in terms of deepening intimacy. Just as you learn what a lover likes to watch when they’re sad, or where to take them out when they want to feel fancy, your cells build an understanding of how theirs operate.
And no matter what happens in the relationship, some small part of them will always be with you. It will be there when your next lover’s virus enters your body, or when you catch something from a stranger on the subway—and that antibody might be the very thing that makes you feel better.
In the aftermath of a crush, it can feel necessary to shake off the feeling, to pretend you weren’t really into them, or tell yourself you only fell so hard because it was a rebound thing. But the virus remembers. It’s a sign that something real actually happened: however fleeting, however disastrous. Isn’t it better to carry proof of an experience than to pretend it never occurred? Next time your new crush has a cold, and they ask you whether you want to postpone, think of the future, think of the gentle caress of a DNA strand on an unsuspecting nucleus, think of their virus traveling through you, searching for a welcoming home. Think of your lover (perhaps your future partner), immune to what they have given you, bending over the couch, lifting a spoonful of broth to your lips, before sliding closely behind you and starting the third movie of the day.
