Were we stupid? Obviously. Were we normal? Unfortunately, yes. A few months ago, I chatted with another American HIV educator about the situation here in Africa. "They know to use condoms,” she complained, "and they have the condoms! I just don't get it!” "I agree that it's incomprehensible," I said, "but hey, I haven't always been 100% careful, and I'm a sex educator." She glanced at me, then away. "Yeah, I haven't either," she admitted. There was a gloomy pause, and then we couldn't help it -- we cracked up. "I hate love," she said when the giggles subsided. She shook her head. "That shit fucks with you." Why didn't I use condoms with that ex? I still don't know! When you instruct people to use condoms as often as I do, you get accustomed to the arguments. I hear the same reasons we didn't use condoms -- because they don't feel as good, because they interrupt the moment, etc. etc. etc. -- I hear them, I smile and I tell the audience, "You gotta use ‘em anyway, folks." I'm a hypocrite, but what else can I say? And there are deeper-rooted objections to condoms -- objections that are both rarely stated in public, and harder to confront. One is trust, which I've been struggling with for a long time, since before I got to Africa. I don't think it's good for condom discussions to center on trust, and I wish I had more ideas about how to refocus them. "Use condoms because you can't trust anyone, not even your lover," is an ugly message to impart. Moreover, it only encourages the audience to view not using condoms as a gift, or a signifier of trust. In America, I tend to cast it like this: "Safer sex is normal. It's the baseline. Lots of people practice it. It's an assumption. Acct like it." Which, I hope, helps people simply default to safer sex without forcing direct questions about any given partner's integrity. Hopefully, it also distracts attention from seeing discarding condoms as a gift. But the truth is that condom usage isn't always an assumption even in America