Hello Doctors. First, thank you so very much for everything you do. I have a pretty bad case of guilt-OCD and the work you do has helped me through it greatly. I have a question on the ethics of testing.  I am routinely tested for HIV, chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis (and sometimes Hepatitis B). However, I have never been tested for herpes due to a lack of symptoms. I have a normal-ish sexual history for a 25 year old male - However in college I did have a year long sexual relationship with a woman who had many many previous partners, and we were most often unprotected (stupidly enough), though she also never had herpes symptoms. I didn't think about herpes much until recently -when  I had a one night stand, a few weeks after being tested negatively for the above STDs. We used a condom at her suggestion, but started without it (at my suggestion, in order to help me overcome horrible performance anxiety). We did this a couple times. I suddenly got horribly worried that maybe I gave her herpes and ruined her life because of my suggestion to start without protection, and herpes wasn't included in my recent testing. So first of all - if you were in my situation (or if i was your son, for example), would you recommend herpes testing despite a lack of symptoms. Part of me wants to know and part of me is worried that my dating life will be completely derailed if I am indeed positive. Secondly - in terms of transmission rates, I had read from Dr. Hook and Dr. Handsfield that HSV2 transmission is something like 1 in 1000 exposures. However, I had read elsewhere that the study that provided may have been flawed since the partners in the study had been together for mean 2 years, and that the median number of exposures before transmission is more like 40 - which is a more scary number! I'm just so scared that I potentially hurt someone with my thoughtlessness. And my guilt ocd only exacerbates the problem. Once again, I am so grateful for the work you do to keep us all safe. 

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Thanks so much for responding, it made me feel much better. As a follow up question, I suppose I would ask - is there anything to this idea that testing transmission rates on long-standing couples is possibly inaccurate due to some sort of immunity that develops with frequent long-term exposure? Or is that somewhat bogus? I keep reading these studies saying that the transmission rate is very low, but in the "comments" section they talk about how these numbers might be skewed low due to testing long-term couples. For the sake of my OCD, I definitely need to stop reading (and badly interpreting) scholarly articles, since I ultimately know nothing and you all are the experts. Thanks again (this will be my final follow up).  

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Sorry I should clarify misleading wording in my last response. I meant that there is a hypothesis out there saying that testing transmission rates on long-term couples is perhaps useless , because if partner 1 ( seronegative) somehow doesn't catch hsv2 from partner 2 (seropositive) after a few months, then partner 1 has essentially built up a partial immunity to the virus, making it hard to ever catch it - I guess there was a study saying the following : 

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