In retrospect.

Recently I did some impromptu couples counseling for two guys I know who are a serodiscordant couple. That means that one of them is HIV-positive, and the other one isn't. The one who's positive (I'll call him Alex) is a close friend, one of my first friends in Chicago. Last summer, he suddenly found this fantastic new boyfriend (I'll call him Ben) who was perfect for him in every way, and they were on the fast track to getting serious. And then suddenly something terrible happened. Alex met me one afternoon to tell me about it in person.

It turned out that Alex had already known about his HIV status, and he'd waited longer than he should have before telling his new beau. He thought he'd be rejected, one way or another, perhaps abruptly, perhaps delicately. And he didn't tell his other friends either, such as me, until after the whole thing blew up and Ben had been scared out of his wits and run away. In addition, Alex didn't tell Ben about his status in a particularly optimal way: he put it in an email.

Neither one of them, it turns out, has many people they can talk to about the difficulty of their relationship. Alex doesn't really have any friends who are HIV-positive (or, at least, openly so), which I have told him many times is a problem. It means that he doesn't have people who've gone through what he's gone through, with whom he can talk about his experiences and worries, and about how hard it genuinely is to disclose his status to others and to make decisions about when and how to do so. And he also hasn't had the experience of meeting guys in settings where there's no fear of disclosure (like the positive singles nights that take place at various gay bars in town).

I ended up trying to convey to Alex the importance of the fact that as they were doing their initial sexual decision-making, Ben had not had the maximum possible information, whereas Alex had. Yes, one has to assume that any new sexual partner might have HIV, knowingly or unknowingly. But, as I've said to Alex over and over, if he has sex with someone without disclosing his status - any kind of sex really, regardless of what the definition of "is" is - then he automatically makes it much more difficult for himself, and increases the likelihood of rejection, especially if he ends up wanting to get serious about that person.

Ben doesn't have many people to talk to, either. He's totally in love with Alex, but he's also still pretty deeply hurt by the way that Alex told him about his status. He's also scared about his own status, even though objectively he doesn't really have very much reason to worry. He finds himself dwelling on Alex's sexual past, wondering about his partners, even feeling like there is a whole unfamiliar side of him. Of course, this sort of feeling must be a natural consequence of [being negative and] hearing from someone you've fallen in love with that they're positive.

I told Ben that he needs to try to separate in his mind Alex's sexual past and the fact that he has HIV. The fact is, you can get HIV in ways other than having sex, and you can also have lots of sex and not get HIV. Sure, there is a relationship between the two. But what you do with your partners matters most.

(This problem is made even more difficult by the fact that for a significant proportion of gay men, it's not all that unusual for decisions like whether to go on a date to be made after two people have already had sex. Because he's never really had anyone to talk through these issues with, and perhaps for other reasons, which are still not clear to me, this wasn't very obvious to Alex.)

Today, the two of them are back together, visibly and desperately head over heels in love---and here's where it gets interesting. Because, after all was said and done, Ben did come back. Yes, it involved three weeks of rage and avoidance and extremely intense arguments, three weeks in which Alex was pretty tough to console. Yes, he might not have come back. But he did. And I find myself having to reevaluate a critical piece of my objection to Alex's handling of the situation.

Recall what I told Alex early on:

- that by disclosing his status early on, he "automatically makes it much more difficult for himself, and increases the likelihood of rejection, especially if he ends up wanting to get serious about that person." But from a longer-range perspective, it's hard to say what would have happened if Alex had done what I suggested. Because the fact is, when a gay guy who has HIV discloses their status to a gay guy who doesn't, it automatically creates distance. There is no way around it. Yes, the negative person is likely to try to take in the information without seeming surprised, but it's actually only a very tiny minority of HIV-negative people who would not have serious reservations even about a first or second date with someone who's positive. I can only think of a couple of HIV-negative people in my life who I'm pretty sure would be really comfortable with it. Rejection is subtle.

- Honesty is the best policy. Yes, morally. And yes, by waiting until they were in love, Alex made the imposition-of-distance that comes with disclosure far more catastrophic than it would've been on a first meeting. And yet it meant that the shock and the resentment came between intimates rather than acquaintances; it meant, in short, that Ben had someone and something to come back to, once he'd come to grips with his shock and anger. So that from a perfectly rational perspective (which of course one never actually adopts in real life), if Ben really was worth getting serious about, waiting to tell him just might have increased Alex's chances of ending up with him for good.

- But he put Ben in danger. But if safer sex practices were followed, did he put him in any more serious danger than Ben might very well put himself in, say, going home with someone from a bar after a night of bar-hopping in Boystown? Even, given the circumstances of several unsolved murders of gay men in Chicago, perhaps considerably less danger? As The Onion put it in Dance-Club Bathroom Left Out of Gay Couple's Meeting Story: "'Oh, we met at The Gay '90s,' Robertson said, making no mention of the fellatio Ledger performed on him in the second-floor restroom."

(And note this, too, when you ask yourself who's responsible for stopping the spread of HIV: the Bush administration has been widely criticized by AIDS activists for capitulating to the religious right in cutting educational campaigns targeting the general population and expanding campaigns that target positive people with ad campaigns such as HIV stops with me. These ads, with their upbeat, anti-stigma veneer, conceal - much like the Swift Boat ads - the real reason why they have been promoted. And that reason is because the Family Research Council doesn't want the government telling the general public to use condoms.)

It's complicated. At this point, my initial judgment about the morality of Alex's actions is clouded by my enthusiasm - and theirs - for their having gotten back together. But after spending time counseling both of them about this difficulty, I can't help but feel that these two people have a pretty intense grasp of the precariousness of building a relationship, of what's at stake - the kind of grasp that you get after spending years together. Ben's going to spend Christmas with Alex's family this year. I've hardly ever seen two people more profoundly happy to have found each other.

There remain serious complexities for any serodiscordant couple, and they will have to face those together for as long as they remain together. Epidemiologists study serodiscordant couples closely, because they're one of the few cases, in the universe of sex between men, in which they have a fighting chance of getting reliable empirical evidence to try to figure out what increases or decreases the chances of transmission. There remains a profound difference between them, and even, now, a fairly burdensome history. I told them at the end of our counseling session that they both need to understand that Ben will always contend with the possibility of a chance in his HIV status, whereas Alex is not facing that possibility. When I said that, they looked at each other. Alex said, "It's true. My status isn't going to change - I mean, unless there's a medical breakthrough." Ben said, "I know. And I'm hoping for that one day. I really am."