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Wait, I thought genital herpes was really common and basically mostly benign. What's the deal with genital herpes?? Any input would be appreciated.
Asymptomatic transmission is extremely common; if you're in a relationship with someone that has it, you'll probably end up with it within five years. Behavioral mitigation and some medications can reduce that risk somewhat, but because flareups can be subtle and you can transmit the virus weeks before a flareup has visual symptoms, they're not very effective. At the least, there's at least potentially going to be additional times a year where vaginal sex will be something to skip, either for her sake or for yours.
That said, it's extremely common. About half of the population has HSV-1, and about one in five women have HSV-2; much of both groups are unaware, since you can have the virus and be either asymptomatic or have minimal symptoms that are hard to distinguish from non-viral problems.
What extent it matters depends a lot on the person. Cold sores of the mouth are unpleasant, can last a couple weeks (and flareups often come when you're already sick from flu/cold/whatever), and depending on career can be a big deal. Genital sores are less visible, but they're even more offputting when recognized and can be much more painful. Medication can reduce the length of a flareup, but it's pretty expensive from standard stores. There's not much good documentation on secondary negative effects -- there's some evidence of a link from HSV-1 to Alzheimers, for whatever weight you want to put on that -- but it's hard to tell whether that's because no such link exists or because it's just such a pain to study that we don't know.
There's also psychosexual components which I'll not get into more detail, but in short a lot of people have trouble with sex if they get distracted by stuff around it, and that's not great if sex is important for your relationship.
But it's mostly about impact looking forward: if this relationship doesn't work out, it's something that the throwaway may find themselves needing to disclose.
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Are you mixing up oral and genital herpes? Oral herpes infects something like 2/3rds of adults; genital herpes infects more like 1/6th of adults ... I actually didn't know it was so high before I looked it up for this reply; I guess "really common" is a matter of definitions? They're both "mostly benign" in the sense that it's very rare to get lethal complications of them, but they're both only partially treatable and not at all curable. Getting an oral-herpes cold sore every year or so is at least annoying, and having infectious lesions break out on your genitals four or five times a year for the rest of your life sounds like it would be pretty awful.
For HSV-2 in the U.S., the rate varies a lot by race, from 3.8% for Asian to 34.6% (!) for black.
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