The number of people you've been sexually exposed to could be a lot higher than the number of people you've actually slept with.
The average Brit has had sex with nine people, but according to researchers at LloydsPharmacy, that also means that the average Brit has been sexually exposed to a whopping 3,917,918 people - that's the population of Latvia twice over.
The researchers created an online test, called The Sex Degrees of Separation, which estimates how many indirect sexual partners you may have links to.
The tool, which has now crashed due to the sheer number of Brits wanting to calculate their partners, was created to coincide with Sexual Health Week.
It aims to highlight how exposed you can be to STIs without even realising it, and how this risk increases with each new partner.
The Sex Degrees of Separation calculator is based on the theory of "Six Degrees of Separation" – the sociological idea that we are all connected to each other by only six connections.
Using this principle, the tool takes the number of partners you’ve had and what age they were when you last slept together.
It then multiplies this by the number of partners they are statistically likely to have had, and by the partners of those partners, and the partners of those partners (and so on) by six degrees, to estimate how many indirect partners you could have been exposed to sexually.
The researchers asked 6,000 sexually active Brits about their sex habits in order to collate the figures behind the calculator.
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As well as discovering that the average adult has had nine sexual partners, the researchers found that the UK is in dire need of some educating when it comes to sexual health.
One in six people have never had an STI test because "they don’t see the point" and the results indicate that the older you are, the less likely you are to have been tested.
The survey also revealed that we’re not always particularly honest when it comes to our sexual history. One in 10 men and women lie about the number of their sexual partners they’ve had, some saying higher and some lower than the reality.
What’s more worrying, is that one in five people who have had STIs did not tell their previous partners. This of course could mean that individuals may be unknowingly spreading STIs to numerous partners.
If you’re concerned about your sexual health, you can either talk to your local GP, visit a GUM clinic, or order a discreet test via LloydsPharmacy’s Online Doctor service.
Try the Sex Degrees Of Separation test here.
