You may think that you know how many people you’ve had sex with, but a new study shows that you may be wrong.
Experts have today warned that despite a person’s average number of sexual partners being 9, you may have actually been ‘sexually exposed’ to millions of people - if you have sex without condoms.
Lloyds Pharmacy Online have developed a ‘Sex Degrees of Separation’ calculator, that estimates how many people you may have been sexually exposed to if you have sex without condoms.
Working on the Six Degrees of Separation theory – that we are all connected to each other through six other people – the tool was designed to warn people of STIs using the theory that if you sleep with someone without a condom, you’re also sleeping with everyone they’ve slept with, and everyone that they’ve slept with have slept with, etc, etc.
The calculator shows that if the average number of people you’ve slept with is nine, you may have a total of 3,917,918 indirect sexual connections.
While it's not a diagnostic tool, it can provide an estimate after looking at the ages and number of sexual partners you’ve had.
The researchers behind the tool surveryed 6,000 sexually active Brits in order to come up with the algorithm behind the calculator.
