Jess never dreamed that she was going to get sick, nor did she consider what it would mean for her love life if she did. When she first started dating her boyfriend, they were both in their late 20s, living busy, active lives. “Sport was something we did a lot of and we did it together: we worked hard, played hard, we went for bike rides and went running and played golf together.”
But around a year into their relationship, all that stopped abruptly when Jess was diagnosed with long Covid, the poorly understood syndrome that in some people follows a Covid infection. For her, it meant “a general shutdown of my body: lungs, heart, stomach, really bad brain fog”. She went from being a sporty, independent 29-year-old with a successful career to sleeping all day and relying on her boyfriend for everything.
“I couldn’t leave the house, I couldn’t see my friends, so he became my emotional and physical support. I needed him to do everything around the house and bring me things when I couldn’t get out of bed, and he was also my social contact because I wasn’t seeing anyone else. It was an instant dynamic shift,” she says.
Three years on, Jess has recovered enough to return to work part-time, though she still struggles with chronic fatigue and spends much of her free time resting. What knocked her for six, however, is that, having nursed her through the worst of it, her boyfriend broke up with her just when she seemed to be getting better. Six weeks on from the split, Jess is still struggling to process what happened and why.
“One of my friends did say to me: ‘This is quite savage, but if I was one of his friends I’d be telling him to think twice before proposing to you, because if this lasts for ever then your relationship will be different for ever, and how will your health affect kids and the future? If you struggle to work, how will that affect the responsibility he might have to shoulder?’ It was tough but it’s true,” she says ruefully. “In the end there were a number of reasons for our breakup, but I think it’s hard to not trace almost all of them back to my illness.”
Though her friends reassure her that she will find someone else, Jess struggles to imagine how she would describe herself now on a dating app: suffering from a condition with no agreed cure and no settled prognosis, she simply can’t be sure what her future looks like. “Previously I’d say, ‘I love cycling, being outdoors’, but I haven’t been able to do these things for a while. Is it false advertising if I say those are my hobbies? My hobbies currently involve napping on the sofa.”
Tellingly, she knows other long Covid sufferers in similar situations. “You’re going round in circles and thinking: what if I hadn’t been ill? Would we actually have broken up sooner and realised we weren’t compatible? Or would we have lasted for ever?” But in the end, she says, it’s impossible to take illness out of the equation: it changes both of you.
Couples vow at the altar to stick together in sickness and in health, often at an age when the prospect of having to live up to that promise feels remote. Yet the reality can be considerably less romantic. Though some couples – married or unmarried – are brought closer by adversity and others muddle through well enough, buried in cancer support forums, anonymous Reddit groups and Mumsnet threads are entirely different stories: tales of rage and guilt, of getting dumped by text in the middle of chemotherapy, or cheated on at your lowest point, interspersed with tentative questions from spouses who were secretly planning to leave before their partners got ill and now feel morally obliged to stay. And what’s striking is how often someone will respond that it’s not only a common story but a gendered one, frequently citing the statistic that women are six times more likely than men to be abandoned when they get sick. But is it really that simple? The stereotype of heartless husbands and wronged wives obscures a much more complicated web of emotions running beneath the surface of relationships, including those that survive a diagnosis.
The idea that men are more likely to run away from caring responsibilities can be traced back to a 2009 US study of 515 people with cancer or multiple sclerosis. It was led by two oncologists who had noticed how often their female patients’ relationships seemed to crumble. Sure enough, their suspicions were confirmed by the finding that 20.8% of the female survivors ended up divorced or separated, while only 2.9% of the men did, though couples who had been married longer seemed more resilient. The authors speculated that women commit earlier than men to relationships, meaning they were quicker to form an unbreakable bond.
Since then, a 2025 study of 25,000 European couples aged 50-64 from the University of Florence found a higher risk of breakup if the woman reported poor health, but no significantly increased risk if the man did. This is in line with “the idea that men struggle more than women to adapt to a caregiving role”, according to lead author Giammarco Alderotti, but also with the fact that women are more likely to be financially dependent on their husbands.
Given that a systematic review of more than a quarter of a million cancer patients’ records in 2022 concluded that they were (with the striking exception of cervical cancer patients) if anything slightly less likely to get divorced than average, perhaps all that can be said with certainty is that more research is needed. Nonetheless, the idea that men leave when women get sick has become firmly ingrained in the culture, with studies that reinforce it going viral in ways that studies contradicting it don’t. It evidently sounds true to many that women are more loyal to ailing partners, if only because nursing is still stereotyped as “women’s work”. The 2009 study is still being echoed everywhere from the popular Diary of a CEO podcast – whose host Steven Bartlett discussed it in an episode this summer – to TikTok videos full of dire warnings about desertion. “As a divorce lawyer I can tell you that when sickness comes a lot of men don’t stick around,” says the Texas divorce lawyer Lena Nguyen in a post with more than 42,000 likes. “They loved who you were, not who you become when life gets hard.” Too many men, she argues, are used to being taken care of, not the other way round.
But when the Guardian asked readers for their experiences of care within a relationship, both men and women responded with tales of selfless devotion in some cases, and of deep-seated anxiety or resentment in others.
Wendy’s husband, John, was in his mid-40s when he suffered a brain injury in a road accident. Though his broken bones mended, he came home from the hospital a different person, she says: more like an impostor pretending to be her husband.
At first, she put that down to the stress of recovering from surgery. But, slowly, it became clear that his head injuries had caused personality changes, and that the person she fell in love with was gone. “It’s so hard to explain to people. You tell them one thing and they’ll say: ‘Oh, that sounds like my husband.’” But the whole point, she says, is that it doesn’t sound like hers. “I think: ‘Well, you might have married an arsehole but I didn’t.’”
A decade and a half on, John exists almost entirely in the moment: he can follow a familiar routine but can’t plan ahead or problem-solve. “It’s like his get-up-and-go has literally been removed from his brain. You spill something, and you would automatically wipe it up; he would have done too, before, but he doesn’t now. If it’s my birthday, he doesn’t think even slightly to acknowledge it.” Domestically, he leaves a trail of chaos in his wake – “It’s like living with an enthusiastic eight-year-old” – and loses his temper easily. “If he’s pulling at a drawer and something gets stuck he’s, like, ‘Fucking hell, fucking hell’, he’s so frustrated.” A highly educated professional man, he couldn’t cope at work and had to retire. Wendy, a psychologist now in her late 50s, pays all the bills.
Their sex life ended – she found sleeping with someone who both was and wasn’t her husband disturbing – and they rarely go out together, since he finds noisy or stimulating environments overwhelming. For Wendy, it’s like living with a doppelganger trying to gaslight her into thinking he’s really her husband. “Everyone’s telling me I’m living with the same person, and really I’m living with a corpse in the room. I have gone from being in a happy marriage to being a widow who is also a carer.” He showed no obvious sympathy, she says, when she lost her father. “He never says the word ‘we’. He has no thoughts about the future or us together. He never says, ‘Why don’t we paint the bathroom?’ or ‘Why don’t we go on holiday?’ or ’Do you fancy doing this?’”
Wendy has considered leaving him, and friends have asked outright why she doesn’t. But she feels too guilty: they don’t have children, so there is nobody else to look after him, and if they separated they would both be broke.
Wendy doesn’t cry during our interview: she has learned, she says, to keep up a front. But she can’t look at photos of her husband from before the accident, or listen to music they used to enjoy, without breaking down. Though she doesn’t envy friends with happy marriages – “I don’t want their relationships, I want mine” – secretly she envies widows, whose loss is at least easy for others to see.
Ben tells a similar story. His bright, busy wife had a stroke in her mid-40s that left her paralysed down one side, with some cognitive impairment: she can’t leave the house unaided, or make lunch for herself. He has become effectively a single parent to their three children, now in their teens and 20s, and employs care professionals so he can work part-time. Only in the last few months has he started to face the fact that she is unlikely to get better. “When you are reasonably successful in your career and you’ve got a lovely family, in your head you kind of step forward and imagine what it’s going to look like [in the future], and nowhere is there something like this,” he says. “We would have been thinking now that in a few years the kids would have flown the nest, we could start enjoying a bit more freedom – dreams like that have been shattered.”
He does, he admits, feel down and even angry at times. “Where once you would share life’s chores, now it’s all me, and that gets a bit much. I do feel quite niggly at the kids sometimes, which is not me at all.” He has had counselling, but relies mostly on a stiff upper lip: “If I do think, ‘Woe is me’, then I think, ‘Oh shut up, Ben. Think about her.’”
Ben stays with his wife for now “because I have to”, though he finds that painful to say. “There’s the kids, but there’s also almost a sense of duty, I suppose. If I was to say, ‘Oh, sod this’, and go, then I am not sure what her life would look like. She couldn’t look after herself.
“But I am married to a different person, and I couldn’t contemplate putting her in a home. So I’m stuck.” He doesn’t feel he can talk about any of this with their friends. “The honest answer is I don’t know what it will be like without the kids, when they go. They’re probably a lot of the glue at the moment, and when that’s gone … I genuinely don’t know.”
Wendy and Ben aren’t alone in their feelings, nor in keeping them a secret. “What the research tells us about partners is they’re often silent in their grief, their anxiety, because they don’t want to appear disloyal,” says Dany Bell, a strategic adviser in cancer care at Macmillan Cancer Support, which recently launched a campaign highlighting how long-term illness affects sex and relationships. About half the calls to the charity’s helpline are about emotional issues, she says, rather than treatment or the illness itself.
As a breast cancer surgeon, Liz O’Riordan had plenty of opportunity to observe how couples dealt with bad news. But it wasn’t until she was diagnosed with the disease herself, a decade ago, aged only 40, that she understood the full impact it has on a relationship.
“I think it would be about a fifth or a sixth of my patients where the marriages ended,” she says. “Was it a marriage that wasn’t great before, and this is the final straw … or was it cancer? It’s really hard to say. But I think, especially for the younger women, who have just got married, it’s a really big thing – [partners having] affairs seem to be more common.”
A cancer diagnosis can, she points out, bring with it multiple pressure points: if the patient has to give up work it often means financial stress, while younger couples can struggle with the impact of treatment on fertility. What is also hard to talk about is the impact on a couple’s intimate relationship.
After her surgery, O’Riordan didn’t want her husband, Dermot – who is also a surgeon – to see her naked. “I would get changed in the dark. I would look at the scars and I would say: ‘Don’t touch me, because I don’t find myself attractive,’” she remembers. “And he said: ‘Look, don’t be silly, I’m not going anywhere. I love you.’ But you do feel it’s your fault that things have suddenly changed.” At her lowest point, she told him he should divorce her and “go and marry a woman with two breasts and a libido, because I felt guilty about what I’d done to the marriage”.
Luckily, he ignored her advice. They’re still happily married, and he is a silently supportive presence next to her as we talk on the phone. But when O’Riordan started talking publicly about those feelings, she was swamped with messages from other cancer survivors saying they had experienced something similar. A common theme was the impact of drugs given to prevent a recurrence of the cancer, which trigger early menopause with all its potential side-effects. “The vaginal dryness, the loss of libido – it is huge,” says O’Riordan. She also heard tales of husbands sleeping in spare beds because they were frightened of hurting their partners, or even of “catching” cancer. “I think we need to prepare women and their partners because this is going to have a massive impact on their relationship. At a time when you need them most, you either want to push them away or they distance themselves.”
For couples navigating cancer, she says, the key is communication. “It’s talking and asking: what do you need? How can I help you? And having those conversations around the dinner table, not in the bedroom.”
Bell, at Macmillan, agrees that couples need to be unafraid of having difficult conversations. An awkward question for many, she says, is whether a partner should take on intimate tasks like washing or helping their spouse to the loo, and what effect that might have on their relationship. “I always say to my husband: ‘If I can’t do my own personal hygiene I don’t want you to do it.’ For me, there’s something there about maintaining your dignity, even though we’ve been together a long time. But it’s a personal choice – many people work through it.”
Cancer can cast a surprisingly long shadow, well after the immediate crisis is over. “People get anxious – there’s always that thought in the back of their mind about the cancer coming back. And some treatments do have long-term side-effects,” Bell says. “There’s a high percentage of people who don’t get back into the same work, or work at all, after they’ve had cancer.”
Surviving a near-death experience, meanwhile, may inspire some to make dramatic changes to the lives they almost lost – including, in some cases, ending a relationship. One small Israeli study of breast cancer patients who had subsequently filed for divorce found that many saw the illness as a wake-up call alerting them to what was wrong with their marriages. Given a second chance at life, they wanted to live it differently. The study concluded that, for some, being sick had emboldened them to put themselves first, while others described a newfound confidence, concluding that as they had coped with almost dying, they could certainly cope with being single.
Antonia was only 24 when she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, after a three-year struggle to pin down the cause of symptoms – including repeated episodes of anaphylactic shock – that had caused her to drop out of university and move back in with her parents. Back then, she was in a serious relationship with her childhood sweetheart, but around the time she started radiotherapy, her partner broke it off.
“It felt like the world was against me,” she says over Zoom from her home in Jersey, where she grew up. “Throughout my cancer journey I’ve tried not to go down the route of ‘Why me?’ because it’s a really negative route, and that was the only time I even looked in that direction.” Sitting in a radiotherapy room by herself, being told she couldn’t hug anyone because she was radioactive, was lonely enough already. But, above all, what she felt was shame. “A lot of people are ashamed about getting dumped in general, but getting dumped and having cancer – you’re, like, what’s wrong with me?”
It was only when she plucked up the courage to talk about it on TikTok, where she was already documenting her treatment, that she realised how common her experience was among cancer survivors. “So many people were saying: ‘Oh my God, me too. I’ve never told anyone about this because I was embarrassed.’ And that’s how I felt. I’d dropped out of uni, I couldn’t work, all my friends are getting engaged, buying flats, having babies, and you just stick out like a sore thumb – it almost felt like another failure.”
Yet even at the time, she was anxious that her ex shouldn’t get the blame for walking away, a feeling that has only grown. Two years on, in remission from cancer and living happily with her new boyfriend, Antonia is working as a journalist and is an ambassador for the Teenage Cancer Trust. Last year, she made a Valentine’s Day video for Macmillan Cancer Support in which she reflected on why she now sees that breakup as for the best: at least it meant she could focus wholly on herself, and getting well.
“I know people who have stayed together throughout the cancer journey, and when they get to the stage where they’re cancer-free, they split up because the person’s so resentful,” Antonia says. “The truth is that the kindest thing someone can do for you is to be honest, saying: ‘I can’t give you what you need – I care enough to let you know that.’ When battling cancer, my focus was: I need to live. Anything else is trivial to me.”
Among the young cancer survivors of both sexes she knows, Antonia thinks it’s the women who are more likely to have been dumped after a diagnosis. “The men just can’t handle it – they see their friends going out and they’re, like: ‘I want to do that.’ That being said, I think girls return to dating quicker than men who have had cancer. Sex is a massive thing – your hormones have changed, you might not feel the same as before – and a lot of men struggle with that because it’s more of a performance anxiety thing.”
Dating again, however, wasn’t easy for her. To keep the life-threatening reactions that complicated her case at bay, Antonia will need monthly treatment for the rest of her life. She can’t work full-time, and has been left with serious allergies. “I can’t wear certain makeup, I can’t dye my hair, I can still only eat certain foods. I thought: how can I go on a date and explain I can’t drink alcohol?” Strong emotions can also trigger a physical reaction. “It’s hard in a romantic situation – some people can play it cool but I can’t; I literally break out in hives.” And she won’t know exactly how treatment has affected her fertility until she tries for a baby.
She met her current boyfriend through mutual friends, which meant he already knew about her cancer before they started going out. Her advice to anyone dating after serious illness is to be upfront about what that involves, on the grounds that to the right person it won’t matter. “When I did meet my current partner, I was, like: ‘I’m allergic to alcohol, I can’t do this, I can’t do that.’ If I didn’t, I might have started a relationship under false pretences and slowly but surely realised it was only working because I was being inauthentic.”
Yet ironically, she says, it was only going through a life-changing illness that gave her the courage to be so open about it. “I used to be such a people pleaser. I never stuck up for myself. I never cried when I got a diagnosis because I was comforting everyone around me, and I think about that a lot,” she says. “I think that breakup gave me an opportunity to be, like: ‘Right, I don’t have to consider anyone else’s feelings now: what do I need? What do I want?’, rather than sort of keeping everyone at bay.”
It’s perfectly normal, Antonia stresses, to rage at being dumped: to feel heartbroken, hurt, to wonder why this had to happen to you. But, two years later, she’s at peace with it.
“There’s nothing wrong with me. That’s a big thing that I had to come to terms with – we just weren’t right for each other. But a lot of things would be less heavy if we talked about it, and it was more normal to just go: ‘Oh, I got dumped.’” Especially, perhaps, if you’ve already survived far worse
Some names have been changed
