Melys said her openness had also brought online abuse and misogynistic comments blaming her for contracting the virus, but added speaking out about it was important to her.
“Hardly anyone speaks about having herpes,” she said.
“When I first got it, there was almost nothing online except scary Google searches and Reddit posts.
“So if I can be that person that I needed back then, then something good has come from it.”
Marian Nicholson, director of the Herpes Viruses Association, has lived with herpes for more than three decades and said public understanding had failed to keep pace with medical knowledge.
“There is an awful lot of unnecessary fear,” she said.
She said she believes stigma dating back to public health campaigns in the 1980s , externalcontinues to shape attitudes today.
“People think it’s a punishment – it isn’t.”
She said many people were unaware that cold sores and genital herpes are caused by the herpes simplex virus, and that oral sex is a common route of transmission.
“The virus doesn’t know where it is. If somebody has a cold sore and gives oral sex, the virus can be passed to the genitals.”
She said genital herpes is a manageable skin condition for most people.
Many people never develop symptoms at all, while those in recurrent outbreaks can often control them with antiviral medication and lifestyle changes.
“Only one person in three is going to notice that they’ve caught it. Two out of three people catch it so mildly they just don’t realise.”
Dr Olwen Williams, chair of HIV charity Fast Track Cymru and a former consultant in sexual health and HIV, said people with genital herpes should be able to have sexual relationships, but were advised not to have sex while they were having an active attack.
She said: “Actually it’s quite uncomfortable to have sex at that point, but also there is a risk of onward transmission due to the shedding of the virus then.”