It's Sexual Health Week. The theme is connection. Here's the one conversation nobody's having.

It's Sexual Health Week. Fourteenth to the twentieth of September, every year, run by Brook, who have been doing the hard, unglamorous work of talking to young people about sex since before most of us were born.

This year's theme is Let's Connect. Their argument, roughly: we scroll more and talk less, and it's making friendship, romance and sex thinner than they should be. Connection is the thing sexual health is actually made of.

They're right. And we'd like to add one small, specific, mildly embarrassing connection to the list.

The ten-second conversation

Here's a connection almost nobody makes. Two people, about to sleep together, one of them thinking "I should ask if he's been tested", and then not.

We've written about why nobody asks. Short version: the question announces you're planning to have sex (apparently not allowed) and implies he might have something (apparently rude). It arrives at the door, in the dark, or halfway through. There is no script. So the most connected generation in history, with three group chats open and a location shared with four friends, goes quiet at exactly the moment that matters.

Then spends a fortnight quietly panicking and calling it "being fine".

What the numbers say this week

The UK Health Security Agency published last year's figures in June. Diagnoses in England fell a bit, which is good. Two things didn't:

• 119,033 of the 334,151 new STI diagnoses in 2025 were in 15 to 24 year olds. More than a third, again.
• Chlamydia tests among young women fell 9.4% in a year. Fewer tests, mostly because fewer people ordered them online. The infections didn't fall that fast.

So the free, postal, ten-minute test that took decades of public health work to build is being used less by exactly the people it was built for. Not because it's hard. Because nothing in their week nudges them towards it.

Connection, the awkward kind

Brook's framing is generous: connect more, talk more, be braver. We agree. We also think it's fair to admit that some conversations are never going to happen at 1am in a taxi, no matter how brave you are, and that it's fine to design around that instead of pretending.

That's what a green tick is for. You get tested, once every three months, through the free services that already exist. You upload the result. Now the conversation has already happened, quietly, with yourself. If the person you're seeing has done the same, you can see that. If they haven't, you see nothing, and nothing means nothing.

Nobody has to ask anybody anything. Nobody knows you looked. The connection still happens. It just happens before the door, not at it.

Three things to do this week

1. Order a kit. Free in most of the UK, plain envelope, results by text. Find yours here. It's the whole point of the week.
2. Send this to the group chat. Not the app, the kit. If four of you order one tonight, that's four people who'll never have to have the conversation at the door.
3. Go first. If you do want to say it out loud, say it with your clothes on, over a drink, as a rule rather than a judgement: "I get tested every few months, all clear last time." Watch how fast he says "same".

To Brook, and everyone else working this week

Thank you. The reason a free postal kit exists, the reason a 19-year-old can get a result by text without telling a GP, the reason nobody makes a face at a clinic anymore, is you. We built a small thing that tries to make people use what you built more often. If we've got it wrong, we would genuinely like you to tell us. That's the connection we're after.

Take the test. Check the text. Enjoy the sex.