The guy and his girlfriend

This friendly guy had a stable girlfriend. Yet he was having sex with other girls, unbeknownst to his partner, and he was still doing it. Without condoms too, because he didn’t have them around when the situation called. He had already made two women pregnant. He already had a few children around in the community. He confessed to me.

He came in when I was working in the aboriginal GP clinic in the Northern Territory, wanting to have a check up for sexually-transmitted diseases.

He had good intentions, if I dare say. I could sense his frustration at knowing what is right and not living it out — and don’t we all know the feeling well. Yet as I talked to him I came to know that he had already made some other changes in his life that was worth commending. Decided to stand up to peer pressure and cut down on alcohol consumption. Starting to pick up the discipline to exercise. “But I still don’t know how to control this sexual urge,” he said as-a-matter-of-factly, “I just can’t control it, y’know.”

He saw the tray of free condoms in the room and grabbed to store more than a few in his pocket, with some embarrassment. I never paid much attention to that tray — now I know how important it is to refill it!

“How would you feel if your partner did the same?” I asked.

“Oh I’ve heard that one before. … But I won’t do it when I get married, it’ll be different,” he answered.

“How do you know you can control yourself after you get married, when you can’t do it now?”

“Yeah,” he shook his shoulders. I was sure the question had crossed his mind before too.

I opened my mouth but I stumbled to take it much further. If I said anything more, I felt, I would have been a true hypocrite. It doesn’t have to be sexual dishonesty. My words would come back to bite me.

Some things we keep doing

We asked if she smoked. “No,” she answered flatly. “I stopped. A year ago.” A glint of pride in the accomplishment, it seemed, flashed across her face with that reply.

But it was too ironic.

She was definitely not alone. In fact, too many are just like her – smokers for all their lives, who suddenly (and finally), out of their own intentions, quit smoking, only to be hit by a diagnosis of lung cancer shortly after. We see this again and again. Why do so many smokers stop smoking just before they get lung cancer?

Not all admit when asked, but often it is because they could feel that something was going amiss, and so they stopped in alarm. It might be some blood specks coughed up, or some strange weight loss that had worsened – not enough to make them see a doctor immediately, but enough to scare them to think, “Gosh, all my cigarettes may actually kill me one day!!”

But it is already too late; and what is done is done.

It is easy to point at others, but there are some things too – small and big – that we – all of us – keep doing, despite knowing they are wrong. Of course we pay, in the end.