Run free, little ovaries! Freeee!

I'm going off the Pill for now. I'm not having uncondomed sex with anyone anyway, I'm trying to lose weight, and I want my full enormous sex drive back. (Not that it ever got so low--I've heard horror stories about women on the Pill permanently losing the ability to orgasm, and I sure as hell haven't experienced anything like that and I'm still plenty horny... but I used to be even more.)

Also, before I went on the Pill I had a period roughly every three months, which, although it occasionally gave me pregnancy paranoia, was pretty awesome.

On the whole, it was cool to know that I was almost completely babyproofed, but there are too many negatives to make it worthwhile if I'm using condoms. I might go back on it sometime in the future if I actually have a relationship steady enough to do the unprotected thing, but that's probably a ways off.

And sadly, I feel like I'm getting to the point in terms of number of partners where I really shouldn't be going uncondomed with anyone until I've committed to monogamy and then been tested. I'm not sure how statistically/medically true this is, but once I cracked the double digits, I started to feel like I'm pretty much Typhoid Mary if I go unprotected. I haven't had anything symptomatic and I did pass an STD test clean (three men ago...) but I do worry about things like HPV. If 25% of people have it, and I've slept with about twelve... AP Statistics was a long time ago but I'm thinking the probability is basically "yes."

Or not. I've been good with condoms. I've only ever barebacked Alan and he'd never barebacked anyone else. It's hard for me to dissect the truth from the slut-shaming in the stories about what diseases you can get even with a condom. The happy little slut in me wants to believe the latex is a truly protective free ride, the paranoid media consumer in me worries that bugs crawl right around that thing, and the medical professional in me just doesn't know who to trust.