Categories:
HIV/ AIDS
The Y. R. Gaitonde Centre for AIDS Research and Education, located in Chennai, India, is the largest HIV care and treatment center in south India. In 2001, an unmarried, HIV-infected engineer approached the director of YRG CARE, Dr. Suniti Solomon, for help. His parents were pressuring him to marry, but they didn’t know he was infected with HIV. “I passed on his details to many including a NGO working with HIV people in Mumbai. I vouched for the person,” Dr. Solomon said. “They sent us a photo and details of a pretty girl who was also infected with HIV.” The engineer flew to Mumbai to meet the girl, and they were soon married.
So began the YRG CARE matrimonial service. Dr. Solomon found that, like the young engineer, many of her clients wanted to get married, yet they did not want to pass their infection on to an uninfected individual. Modeled on the Indian arranged marriage system, the program operates by collecting pictures and profiles of interested individuals, then introducing potential matches to each other. To date, the matrimonial service has collected over 200 profiles of HIV-infected clients seeking relationships and has arranged over 20 matches.
As people living with HIV worldwide live longer and healthier lives thanks to increased access to antiretroviral therapy, services that introduce HIV-infected individuals to each other for dating or marriage are sprouting up in places as diverse as Ethiopia, the U.S., and South Africa. These services may help reduce the spread of HIV while providing a source of social support and companionship to people living with HIV; they may also carry risks of HIV superinfection or transmission of drug resistant virus. There is a thus a need for further exploration of the positive and negative aspects of such services, the role they play in the lives of HIV-infected clients, and how they can be adapted in different local cultural and epidemiological contexts.
