Marital Investment under Uncertainty: Couples HIV Testing and Marital Stability

This paper examines how resolution about uncertainty of spousal HIV risk – through couples voluntary counseling and testing – affects marital stability. In high HIV prevalent areas marriage may not necessarily protect against infection if there is also a high rate of concurrent partnerships; protecting oneself may be even more difficult within a committed relationship. One coping strategy to protect oneself against infection is divorce. We compare marital outcomes among individuals who learned their HIV results either individually, or together as a couple. Using random assignment of individuals to testing as an individual or as a couple we find that couples who learned their HIV results together were 3.5 percentage points less likely to divorce two years after testing, a decrease of 250 percent. Moreover, couples testing significantly reduced worry about HIV risk and beliefs of HIV infection in the future as well as increased overall satisfaction of life.