Should Married Couples Get an Annual Test for HIV/AIDS and Other STDs?

Around this time last year, I took a poll on a newspaper's Web site asking readers how many of them had been tested for HIV and AIDS. I was hoping I wouldn't get many no's, and unfortunately around 75 percent of the people who voted said they'd never been tested. I had a conversation with a married man about how discouraged I was by the results, and his response was that a lot of the readers are older and are probably married. I asked, "What does that have to do with anything? HIV and AIDS are not a young people's disease or a single people's disease."

He responded by saying that he was married, had never been tested and was not cheating on his wife. I knew he wasn't going to like my question, but I asked anyway. "How do you know she's not cheating on you?" He scowled and said, "She better not be."

I've run into this state of denial while speaking to married people before. While doing a book signing at a Chicago South Side church, I started talking about the importance of being tested after speaking about my second novel, "Round Trip" that focused on a Black male character who was spreading HIV on a college campus. People were smiling and listening intently before I started in on this subject, but as soon as I did, you could hear a pin drop. The interviewer changed the subject quickly. I wasn't ready to change the subject and went right back to it. She changed it again. I nodded and went with the program, but I took note of it. (Side note: To this day, my first novel "Change for a Twenty" outsells "Round Trip" in triple amounts, and a buddy of mine told me flat out, "I liked the first book better because I don't want to read about HIV. It's depressing" even though both books involved the same characters.)

People usually get divorces for two reasons, money disputes or infidelity. And with so much cheating going on, why are people so quick to deny that they should be safe? Is it blind love for a mate? Is it simply because marriage vows should be sacred so neither spouse feels comfortable asking the other to be tested?

While volunteering with BEHIV, I found out about a woman who ended up with HIV because her husband got a faulty blood transfusion (sex isn't the only way to get HIV and AIDS-take into consideration dirty needles from drug use and tattoos as well). In a January 2009 study, Medical News Today reported that 85,000 Ugandan individuals (13 percent) would contract the HIV virus because of unknowingly living with infected sexual partners. There are sexual partners who are infected not just in Africa but America too, so why not get an HIV/AIDS test?

And if you want to get tested but your partner doesn't, that should not stop you from practicing safe sex until he or she has a change of heart. It also doesn't stop you from getting tested anyway. But to get tested together and have the confidence to know neither partner has anything to worry about should be the motive. If President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama can proudly say on the radio that they've been tested for HIV/AIDS, why won't other married couples do the same?