Genital HSV1???

StripedSocks

Both myself, and the guy I'm seeing were recently diagnosed with hsv1, genitally. Neither of us have ever had any cold sores/herpes of the mouth. I'm assuming one of us must've slept with someone who had it genitally, and passed it to us genitally, obviously. but it had to have been laying dormant in one of us, because we both got the symptoms at the same time, and had our first breakout at the same time, etc. it was very strange...

trace7

my bf has oral HSV1 and i now have genital HSV1 i am confused too as to why i got it there as we have only ever had oral sex once and he didnt have an ob at the time, so i must b very un-lucky, because he must have been shedding, so why didnt i get it in my mouth as well then frm when he kissed me? and now that i have the antibodies does that mean i am safe from getting it orally now?

Audrey-B

When i spoke to a doctor at a sexual health clinic after being diagnosed with genital type 2, she went on to explain that as i have oral herpes type 1 since i was a child and even if i dont have a cold sore or symptoms of one i can still pass oral type 1 onto a partner if doing oral. Just b/c there is no visual sign of a cold sore doesn't mean it can't be passed on. She did say it's harder to pass on when there are no symptoms but that there is no 100% guarantee of not passing it on.

Its scary when you think about it b/c with my ex husband he never seemed to catch my oral herpes even with me doing oral and having no symptoms, but i have read of it happening on these boards, unless the people who have caught the type 1 did so via another partner from some previous time.

This virus isn't really clear cut so what happens to one person will not necessarily happen to another. It depends on so many things from when you had sex/oral, what stage the herpes carrier was in, whether the one or both parties had ever caught the virus off somebody else and simply never shown obvious signs of herpes. Some people can carry herpes for a long time and never show up with an actual o/b and all they will have is slight redness or a bit of an itch which girls put down to a yeast infection or guys think is jock itch.