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Hello, folks. I’m going to assume that you have just been told the news that your wife, girlfriend, spouse, poly partner, or whatever else, has received an HPV positive diagnosis if you’re typing ‘Where did my wife get HPV?’ into a search engine today. Don’t worry, though; I’m going to tell you everything you need to know – the good, the bad, and the ugly. No holds barred. That’s my brand, you see: brutal honesty with a side plate of bad humour.
Are you ready for it?
HPV Isn’t Just Warts
There are more than 200 known strains of HPV. They all do slightly different things, and they usually affect the genital areas, anus, throat, and mouth. This is if they do anything at all, because many strains of HPV cause no issues or symptoms. In many cases, the body clears the virus without anyone ever knowing it was even there in the first place.
Fit and healthy immune systems usually clear the virus within two years of infection.
Some people suffer from a persistent HPV infection, which results in positive HPV tests for years after that two-year clearing expectation. A quick look on Reddit and other forums will reveal plenty of people who have been HPV positive for decades, too.
Low/High Risk
The 100+ strains of HPV are put into brackets according to severity, from low-risk to high-risk.
HPV types 16 and 18 are high-risk, and they can sometimes turn into cervical cancer.
The New Zealand HPV Project says:
“Types 16 and HPV 18 are most commonly associated with development of cancer, together accounting for about 70% of invasive cervical cancers… HPV 16 is strongly associated with anal cancer and throat cancer.”
Other high-risk strains of HPV include:
- 31
- 33
- 35
- 39
- 45
- 51
- 52
- 56
- 58
- 59
- 66
- 68
Low-risk HPV types include strains 6 and 11. They rarely cause cancer; instead, they cause up to ninety percent of all genital warts cases.
Low-risk types such as HPV 2 and HPV 4 commonly cause the warts that appear on fingers or elsewhere on the hands.
HPV types 2 and 4 can also cause warts on the feet (verrucae,) alongside HPV 1.
I have gone into more details on the various strains of HPV and what they do right here: HPV Strains List (And What They Do.)
Now, I can’t speak for your wife, but I didn’t find out which particular strain of HPV I contracted until I paid for a private test to do so. As far as I’m aware, the NHS doesn’t routinely tell patients which strain of HPV they have. I have never been told that information, and I’ve never been able to find out that information. I only knew that I didn’t have warts, or at least a breakout of warts, because I got my coochie out at an STI clinic. My GP couldn’t see the exact HPV strain(s) either, apparently. That’s why I decided to go down the private lab route.
Ways Your Wife Might’ve Got HPV
Now that we’ve gotten the [correct] information about HPV out of the way, let’s get into exactly how your wife might’ve contracted HPV. I’ve compiled a list for you.
Previous Partner(s)
Women are usually only tested for HPV during a routine smear, which is done every three years in England, starting from the age of 25, all the way up to 64.
Cancer Research UK states:
“Cervical screening is free for anyone with a cervix from age 25 to 64. This includes women and some trans men and non-binary people assigned female at birth.”
The cervical smear test (also known as a pap smear or just smear,) checks for HPV, plus cell changes in the cervix and other related medical issues, and is known as “screening.” It ensures that any potential changes are caught early and treated, to prevent active cervical cancer.
Anyway, if a smear comes back with a result of HPV positive, they are then performed more frequently, usually yearly or six-monthly instead of every three years. These tests don’t look for anything other than the presence of the virus; not how long it has been there, where it came from, or anything else that might help you work out where your wife got HPV.
Infections can disappear for a while, resulting in a negative HPV result, before then coming back to life, causing a positive HPV result even when you’ve had no sexual contact whatsoever. It is believed that the following can make this happen:
- High stress
- Immune system changes and weaknesses
- Hormone changes (i.e. peri/menopause)
This exact thing (HPV dormant, then awake) has happened to me. You can read about that here: A Negatively Positive Experience.
There’s a chance that your wife had HPV when you met and just didn’t know about it, or had an infection from a previous partner that fell dormant for a while, then reemerged/awoke.
Estimates show that at least eighty percent of all sexually active people have contracted at least one strain of HPV, at least one time in their lives.
It is virtually impossible to pinpoint the exact person that your wife contracted HPV from, and when, which actually leads me nicely to the next item on the list…
You
Men are not routinely tested for HPV. Getting an HPV test as a man is considerably more difficult than you’d think. The STI tests that you get at the clinic or with at-home services don’t test for HPV. An STI clinic can only tell you about a current breakout of warts (caused by HPV,) or evidence left behind from a previous breakout.
You would need to go out of your way and hunt hard to find an HPV test for men; that’s all I’m saying.
Plus, have you ever even thought to look for an HPV test for yourself? No, I didn’t think so. Considering it’s one of the most popular STIs in the UK, it’s amazing how little is known about it. Thankfully, I’m here to educate you fine folks.
Technically, when you tell someone that you have a “clean” bill of sexual health, you are only partially correct. You might’ve been tested for everything in the book, but you will probably not have been tested for HPV, which is a sexually transmitted infection. Despite being a sexually transmitted infection, though, medical professionals and experts class HPV as no worse than the common cold – like a “sex cold,” if you will. (I did warn you about the bad humour.)
As Cancer Research states:
“Labelling HPV as an STI isn’t particularly helpful in a lot of cases. It prompts questions like ‘where did I get it?’ or ‘who gave it to me?’, which in reality is not how it works and only adds to the reasons why we don’t want to talk about it.”
Working Out the Dates
You actually can’t tell exactly when you (or anyone else) got an HPV infection by working out dates, except in two exceptional circumstances, which also have caveats:
1: Your wife has never had sexual contact with anyone else (but you have,) then contracted HPV after having sex with you. In this case, you were infected first. You would’ve passed HPV to your wife.
2: You have never had sexual contact with anyone except for your wife (but she has been sexually active elsewhere) then you both contracted HPV after marriage. In this case, your wife was infected first. She would’ve passed HPV to you.
Those two exceptional circumstances can easily be discredited with the caveats that I’ve already mentioned, though. There have been rare-ish, but well documented cases of the HPV virus being passed from one person to another by way of sharing things like underwear or towels, via childbirth, and also through other non-sexual contact methods.
Not so sexually transmitted now, is it?
Trying to pinpoint exactly when and where you or your wife caught HPV would be like trying to guess which people in a bar have chlamydia from a glance at their face alone.
In other words: impossible.
Symptom Checking
The thing with HPV is, it’s a crafty little fucker. It somehow manages to outsmart even the smartest of immune systems, and it can even fall asleep and hide for a while. It can lie seemingly dormant in your cells for years, doing absolutely nothing… until one day, it does something. That can be many years down the line, though. During that whole time you likely won’t have had a single symptom.
The NHS UK website states:
“HPV does not usually cause any symptoms. Most people who have it do not realise and do not have any problems.”
If most forms of HPV don’t cause symptoms, you won’t know to get checked (which, again, is much more difficult for men.)
Even with the genital warts strain of HPV, which are physical symptoms, the virus can take weeks, months, and sometimes even years to cause physical warts. On average, it takes approximately three months to go from initial exposure to first wart, but it can take as long as almost two years.
If you can’t pinpoint the start of symptoms, you can’t work out which sexual partner was around at that time.
And if you can’t do that, you definitely can’t answer, “Where did my wife get HPV?”
Did My Wife Cheat If She Got HPV?
I can’t tell you whether or not your wife cheated on you because I am, unfortunately, not a mind reader. Life would be a lot easier if I were, let me tell you. What I can say, however, is that your wife doesn’t need to cheat on you to get a positive HPV result.
As we’ve already discussed, this virus isn’t like a cold. It doesn’t turn up, cause some snot, then bugger off when your immune system finally deals with it. HPV is a different type of virus, and it behaves differently – falling asleep, then waking up later; hiding so that it is virtually undetectable through screening; and sometimes doing absolutely nothing at all.
You could have given HPV to your wife, and there’s no way that you could rule that theory in or out.
She could have been HPV positive beforehand, but didn’t realise until she had a smear, and there’s no way to rule that theory in or out, either.
There are far more reasons to explain why your wife might have HPV than just cheating, though. In fact, I would go as far as to say that cheating is right at the bottom of the where-did-my-wife-get-HPV list.
What Should I Do if My Wife Has HPV?
First of all, you should absolutely not lose the plot if your wife has HPV, because you will be doing so for no reason whatsoever. Take a deep breath, come to your senses, and learn a little more about what this virus does to the body before you throw her and her suitcases out on the street.
The more information you know, the more you can protect both yourself and your wife in this scenario.
Here are some of the things you can do to make the process easier:
Reduce Stress
Reducing stress for you both is vital to boosting your wife’s immune system, so it can work to try and clear the virus from her body. This means not arguing every five minutes, making sure that you both get enough sleep, eating healthily, not smoking, and cutting down on the booze and/or recreational drugs. Exercise also helps.
Contraceptives
Condoms and dental dams are definitely an option, but you should know that they do not 100% protect you from the family of HPV viruses. Skin to skin contact during sexual activity is enough for viral transmission, and condoms aren’t helpful (or designed) to prevent this.
You can and might pass the HPV virus back and forth to each other if you’re still having sex. Most experts say that you do not need to abstain from sex with a long-term partner. They believe this ping-pong style of infection can actually help to prevent reinfection by boosting the immune system’s response to it.
HPV Vaccine
The HPV vaccine cannot cure an existing HPV infection (Gardasil 9,) but if you’re under the age of 45, you and your wife can get it to prevent further infections. As the name suggests it protects against nine strains. These include the high-risk ones that can cause cancer and the ones that cause genital warts.
The UK Gov website states this:
“The HPV vaccine is recommended and available free on the NHS to… gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men are at higher risk from HPV and can get vaccinated free at sexual health or HIV clinics up until their 46th birthday.”
Other groups of men can also get the HPV vaccine on the NHS, and these include:
- People living with HIV
- Sex workers
- Transgender people
Conclusion: Where Did My Wife Get HPV?
To conclude this blog post I’d just like to say, please don’t throw your wife out of the marital home because of an HPV positive result. It doesn’t mean she has cheated on you, nor you on her. It’s a virus, just like a cold in the winter… but for ‘down there.’
You can read all about my personal experience with smears and HPV below, but don’t be afraid to contact me and ask questions, or leave comments in the space below this blog post.
HPV is nothing to be ashamed of. If eighty percent of us have had it, it’s hardly a unique situation!
Thank you so much for stopping by and checking out my blog today! 🖤
You can find more information on sexual health testing, including HPV (and all the different ways to do it,) right here.
Got a question? You can contact me here, or ask me completely anonymously right here instead.
If you would like to know more about safe sex, STIs, or anything discussed in this blog post today, feel free to check out some of these: