Where people with an STI meet
Strip the question down and there are two lanes. The first is the general dating apps, the same ones everyone else is on. The pool there is enormous, and plenty of people with herpes, HPV or HIV meet partners in it. The cost is that the diagnosis stays yours to explain, at a moment you choose, to each new person who starts to matter.
The second lane is the STI-specific spaces: dating sites and communities built for people who already know. There, stating your status is part of making a profile, so the conversation everyone dreads is over before anyone says hello. The trade runs the other way too: less explaining, but a smaller pool.
And there is a third option that isn’t dating at all. Support communities exist for the stretch between the diagnosis and the day you want to meet anyone, when what you need is someone to talk to.
Support communities
A new diagnosis can be lonely in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t had one. ASHA doesn’t soften that: Herpes may raise strong emotional issues, especially in the first few weeks or months after a diagnosis.
It doesn’t leave it there either: The good news is that these emotions tend to fade away over time.
In between, talking to someone who already knows helps more than most people expect. ASHA’s own suggestion for anyone feeling isolated is simple: tell one close friend and ask them to keep it private, or find a local HELP group or ASHA’s online forum. HELP groups are in-person meetups for people with herpes, and the forum is the same idea online. Nobody is there to be asked out, which is exactly what makes it useful. You can say the thing out loud, hear how other people carry it, and leave it at that.
Some people go straight to dating and skip this entirely. Others need a room like this before they can imagine a first date. Both are ordinary.
STI-specific dating sites
These sites exist to remove one specific moment from dating: the disclosure. On PositiveSingles, the largest of them, stating your status is just part of signing up. The platform’s own guide describes the step: Specify your STD status, such as herpes(HSV1, HSV2), HIV, HPV, hepatitis, or others.
From then on, every profile you see has answered the same question, so you never have to work out when to raise it. The how-it-works page walks through the whole sign-up.
What largest means in practice: the Android app shows 500K+ downloads on Google Play, and the iOS listing carries 7,576 ratings on the App Store, both read September 22, 2026. It is a dating site first, but it also runs community features: member groups (743 of them on the Groups screen, read September 20, 2026), blogs, and an anonymous STD Q&A. Some members use it as much to talk as to match.
Now the trade-offs, because they’re real. Joining is free, and a free account can browse, send winks and reply to messages, but starting a conversation yourself needs a paid plan. The platform’s FAQ answers that in one word before explaining: No. Standard Members cannot start new conversations. However, you can reply to messages from a premium MEMBER at no additional cost. Messaging remains available as long as at least one person in the conversation has an active Premium membership.
Reviews are mixed too: 4.3 out of 5 on the App Store against 3.5 out of 5 on Google Play. Our review reads the recent complaints and praise in detail. If it sounds like the fit, you can join PositiveSingles free and look around before paying anything.
General dating apps
Worth saying plainly: many people with herpes use the same apps as everyone else, and it works. Nothing on a mainstream profile shows a diagnosis unless you put it there, and the pool is bigger by a wide margin.
The cost is the conversation. You pick the moment, find the words, and then do it again with the next person who matters. Some people find it gets easier each time; some would rather never have it, which is what the previous section is for. When the moment comes, how to tell a partner is its own guide.
How to choose
Whichever lane you pick, three checks are worth doing before you commit to any site.
- Real activity near you. Member counts are marketing; what matters is whether people within your distance are active. A free account lets you look first, and the free page lays out exactly what you can do without paying. Browse your own area before you spend anything.
- Privacy controls. Look for private photo albums and control over who sees you. On PositiveSingles, photos can sit in a private album shared only with members you choose:
Upload your photos to either your public album or private album. You can add them to private album and share them with selected members only if you’re not ready to make them public.
- Honesty about costs. Prices and what a free account can’t do should be easy to find before you pay, and recent reviews say more than an all-time average. If a site hides its prices until after you’ve handed over an email, that tells you something.
The real question
Underneath the where sits a quieter worry: whether there are enough people like you for any of this to be worth it. There are. The CDC states it without ceremony: Genital herpes is common in the United States (U.S.).
ASHA’s version is about what happens next: There are millions of couples in which one or both partners have this virus.
So meeting people was never the hard part. The people who would understand are already everywhere, on every app and in every city; the specific sites only make the first conversation easier. If you want the full numbers, how common herpes is has them from the primary sources.
One boundary worth naming: this page is general information, not medical advice, and anything about your own health belongs with a clinician who knows your history.
