Personal Experience: Disclosing HIV in a relationship

My belief about HIV disclosure applies to dating too. I have a simple rule for myself - to disclose my HIV status from day one. Yes, it is that simple. You might feel different as our experiences are not the same. Here is my logic. I believe that by disclosing early you are removing the burden of worrying about, when she eventually finds out. I don’t believe you can hide being HIV positive forever, when in a long term relationship. What happens when you need to take your medication? Also, I believe that, it is better to be dumped early in the relationship than later- when you are already in love and emotionally invested in the relationship. Logic aside, getting rejected still stings!

Now here is my story. I recently got married to this gorgeous woman. Yes, she is gorgeous. I have the receipts. We met at work. Because I have always been open about my HIV status, I assumed she knew about it, since we worked in the same field. It turned I was wrong.

Let me back track a little. A few weeks after I kind of declared my intentions to her, I causally mentioned my status to her while we were talking on the phone. It was the long pause on her side that made me realise that there was a problem. I can’t remember exactly how it went - she will tell you - but I realised then that she didn’t know about my status till that moment. In fact, she didn’t know anything about me. Imagine!

I want to tell you more about how she felt, why she continued to date me and even went as far as marrying me, given what she knew. But I don’t want to misrepresent her. So here she is to tell you herself.

Hello everybody! Finally, I get invited as a guest on the DiaryofPR, I’m truly honoured. Without boring you with the details of how we met, I’ll get straight into the part where he disclosed his HIV status. It was definitely not a conventional way of disclosing, as he just mentioned it in passing on one of our long phone conversation. I just remember hearing, “because of my HIV status” and I was like “wait, what did you just say?” I’m actually not sure if I said this out loud but my mind started trying to remember if he had told me this before because it’d be a shame if he did and I missed it. It turns out he hadn’t told me anything about his status, in fact HIV had never been part of our many conversations.

A bit of a background. By the time Pholo and I met, I had been working in the HIV field for over 3 years and had started focusing on HIV related stigma. Even with all the experience and knowledge about HIV, no one prepares you for the moment the your love prospect tells you about his HIV positive status. Especially, if no one close to you, lives openly with HIV.

“Wait, You didn’t know?” he followed up, “okay now I’m concerned, exactly how much do you know about me, you mean you have never googled me?”, He continued. I must admit, though I knew him as this down to earth person, that question sounded a bit arrogant. That’s when I realised that googling him had never even crossed my mind. Besides, I really liked how things were unfolding, a natural process of getting to know each other at our own pace, without some information being injected by google. From that point on , all I could think about is ending the call and going straight to google. Law and be hold, dude was all over the net, he even wrote the entire book about it.

At this point, I was dealing with mixed emotions, asking myself how the h*ll, did he conveniently forget to mention this huge part of his life. On the other hand, I felt a bit embarrassed about my ignorance. How could I have missed all of this, mind you, we had gone on a date and had been talking for weeks straight. Prior to that, we’d met at workshops, sat together for work lunches and dinners. I clearly did not know much about this person but there’s was minor issue, I had fallen for the simple, kind gentleman, he had presented to me. There was nothing more authentic than that, he had presented me with himself, his character, his hopes and dreams, and it had felt like we were connecting on a deeper level, like we had crossed paths for something bigger than us. I was already hooked… and his status.. a non issue.

I am back. You got that right?

So the moral of the story here is that, you must take whatever lesson relevant to you in this blog. LoL. On a serious note, don’t assume people have googled you or think, the longer you keep your secrets, the better it will get. The truth has a funny way of coming out. It is important to let your other half in.

And if you have given up on love – I urge you to reconsider COMRADE!

#lifebeyond #diaryofpr #pholoramothwala