Breakups never really come at a “good time,” but ending things mid-cancer diagnosis might just take the cake. Some quick stats: women are six times more likely to end up separated or divorced if they are diagnosed with cancer (as compared to male partners). Another paper studying 2,701 different marriages found that only measures of a wife’s illness onset were associated with a higher risk of divorce. These numbers indicate a concerning trend: when women need their partners most, cracks start to form.
For cancer breakups specifically, patients are tasked with fighting both an incredibly physical battle, and an emotional one. The grief is two-fold, and the healing process often feels especially heavy. Getting through a breakup mid-treatment is no small feat — but it’s not impossible either. To shed light on the hardest parts, the silver linings, and the lessons learned, we spoke to three survivors who have gone through a cancer breakup themselves.
The Breakups
Three months prior to Mairead Ryan‘s breakup, doctors feared her breast cancer had spread to her brain and spinal cord. Thankfully, this turned out to be false. But it was at this point that Ryan’s partner started to express concerns about the “longevity” of their relationship. “He wanted to get married, have kids, move to the suburbs, and felt like me having stage 4 breast cancer was inhibiting him from doing so,” Ryan tells Popsugar. “Simply put, he broke up with me because I have stage 4 breast cancer.”
“Being cheated on was so much more painful than cancer.”
This sudden switch up is something Emilee Aubrey can relate to. Shortly after receiving a bone marrow transplant for leukemia in October 2021, she caught her boyfriend messaging one of her close friends, offering to come over, and even soliciting explicit photos. “Being cheated on was so much more painful than cancer,” Aubrey says. “I just would never even think to do that to someone.”
Zee Valentina describes her breakup as a more mutual decision, but it wasn’t easy either. She broke up with her partner of 11 years just one month after being diagnosed with stage 4 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. “Going through chemotherapy simultaneously, I really couldn’t handle any extra stress,” she says. “I had to quickly accept it for what it was, because I had a [bigger] battle to focus on, which was my battle against my body.”
The Immediate Aftermath
At first, the hurt and betrayal from these cancer breakups left each woman with unanswered questions. “How could someone who told me they loved me unconditionally put conditions on our love?” Ryan found herself asking. “Did he not think I wanted the same things in life too? Did he not think this was hard for me — the one going through breast cancer?” Valentina says the heartbreak mostly left her empty and numb. “[With] all my medical problems happening in parallel, I felt like I really did hit rock bottom.”
A week after her breakup, Aubrey visited a palliative care doctor. “I was just a wreck. He was like, ‘We should discuss getting on antidepressants,’ because I was just so upset and hurt.” It’s not that she was entirely without support — her friends and family were still there for her. It just felt different now. “It wasn’t the same as having conversations every second with someone that cared . . . or I thought cared,” Aubrey explains. “I was literally [at] the lowest point of my entire life.”
The Healing Process
The grief from a cancer breakup can feel overwhelming, especially in the early stages. But these survivors will be the first to tell you that healing is possible. In fact, Valentina thinks being forced to sit with her grief might’ve actually helped in the long run. “It’s a really tough situation to be in, [because] on top of all the medical problems happening at the same time, you’re not able to distract yourself much,” she says. “We are forced to face everything all at once.”
For Aubrey, antidepressants played a big role in helping her process the stress of her breakup and cancer journey. “At that time, I thought that I still had cancer,” she says. “Finding out I was in remission was a big turning point.” Still, she says healing emotionally was harder than healing physically, and working through both things at once was difficult and uncomfortable.
“The breakup really made me realize my self worth.”
Ryan agrees that her cancer breakup felt “cruel and unfair.” But as she continued to heal, she also started to learn from it. “If someone is not going to stick by you at your lowest points in life, they surely don’t deserve you at any other point,” Ryan says. “I think the breakup really made me realize my self worth and what I deserve.”
The Reflection
After the breakup, Aubrey remembers her friends assuring her it would “get better” eventually. “In the moment I [was] like, ‘I wanna kill you,'” she laughs. “But you know, it does. The people are right. It does get easier.” That said, Ryan reminds people that no matter how much the breakup hurts, your health should always come first. “You and your health are [the] number one priority. Whoever is not there to support and make that a priority is not worthy of your love,” she says.
To those navigating similar situations, Valentina says to grieve the future you thought you’d have. Healing isn’t linear and it’s OK to have mixed emotions. “If someone can’t accept you for all of you — including your history with cancer or your cancer journey — then they are not for you,” she says. “To be able to go through cancer and a breakup at the same time requires a steel amount of strength, and you will have to dig deeper than you ever have to get through. But you will.”
Chandler Plante (she/her) is a social producer and staff writer for the Health & Fitness team at Popsugar. She has over five years of industry experience, previously working as an editorial assistant for People magazine, a social media manager for Millie magazine, and a contributor for Bustle Digital Group. She has a degree in magazine journalism from Syracuse University and is based in Los Angeles.
