“Can’t we just skip it tonight?”
It was the fourth time he’d used that excuse, and what he pulled from his wallet wasn’t a condom but a crumpled subway ticket—Seoul to Suwon, orange digits still legible.
“Let’s feel everything tonight. Just skin on skin.”
When I hesitated, he brushed his lips against my forehead and whispered:
“I’ll take care of contraception. Don’t worry.”
The Vanishing Wall
The instant the transparent barrier disappeared, I sensed more than a change in temperature. A welcoming humidity pressed into the center of my body, carrying with it the seductive illusion: We are no longer strangers.
In truth, he never once took responsibility for birth control.
Jin-woo’s Drawer
Jin-woo, a salaryman two years into marriage, began reciting the mantra “condoms kill the feeling” from the day they met. His wife Su-jin shook her head at first, but by their fourth time she reluctantly gave in. From then on, Jin-woo treated no condom as proof of love.
A year later, when Su-jin’s period was three weeks late, Jin-woo said coolly:
“I’d be upset if it weren’t my kid.”
At the clinic, when she learned she was pregnant, she searched his face for any flicker of emotion. Instead she found quiet triumph.
Yuna’s Discovery
Yuna had been dating Min-ho for nine months. Hypnotized by the cachet of a man who claimed he’d “only gone without with someone special,” she never refused him. One Saturday, she opened his laptop and stumbled upon a hidden Google Drive folder labeled
Confronted, Min-ho shrugged:
“Everyone does it. It’s proof of the real thing.”
Why Do We Yearn to Slip It Off?
Psychologists call it invitation anxiety—the mistaken belief that if we can just peel away one more layer, we’ll banish the suspicion that the other hasn’t fully accepted us.
Condomless sex is less a tactile craving than a colossal claim of possession: Claim me completely. The irrational urge to leave one’s DNA inside another. When that urge becomes pregnancy, desire mutates into duty, and duty breeds fresh obsession.
When Did It Begin for You?
If you have ever whispered—or heard—“Let’s try it without,” ask yourself:
In that moment, did you truly crave their body, or was it the desire to erase every last option but your own?