Love & Passion Quote by Kerry Thornley

Thornley takes the era's most clinical phrase, "safe sex", and spikes it with absurdist overkill: condom, rubber gloves, wet suit. The joke is not just prudishness; it's an escalation that exposes how safety talk can become a fantasy of total control. If you keep adding layers, you can keep pretending you're managing risk. Then he flips the premise: the real hazard isn't infection or pregnancy, it's attachment.

That punchline works because it weaponizes a mismatch in registers. Public health messaging treats sex as a behavior to be managed; romance treats it as a story you fall into. Thornley pits the hygienic, procedural vocabulary of "safe" against the old, unruly verb "fall". Falling is involuntary. You can plan latex; you can't plan the moment you start rearranging your life around someone.

The subtext is classic Thornley: skepticism toward systems that promise security, especially when they smuggle in moral judgment. The wet suit gag is a wink at the way sexual culture oscillates between liberation and paranoia: permission, but with disclaimers. It also nods to a late-20th-century context where "safe sex" became a near-liturgical term under the shadow of HIV/AIDS; the body became a site of legitimate fear and bureaucratic instruction. Thornley doesn't mock the need for protection so much as the illusion that technique can neutralize the most destabilizing part of intimacy.

The line lands as a cynical little truth: we can engineer barriers against biology, but not against meaning. The heart remains the one unregulated exposure.