Sickness, Health and Junk Science: In Defense of Husbands

I have a big problem with the "When Women Get Sick, Men Leave" study that's been all over the news – the one that supposedly shows that a dismaying number of men run and hide under (someone else's) bed after their wives are diagnosed with a serious illness. All the reaction I've seen has been an uninterrupted tut-tut of "Who could be surprised?"

But wait; the authors of this study have taken the fact that many more women than men get divorced after being diagnosed with cancer or MS -- and have long-jumped from there to the conclusion that the ill partners must have been the ones who got left. ("Abandoned'' is the word the study uses.) I challenge that assumption, and question whether men are really six times more likely than women to am-scray while their spouse is mid-chemo. Nowhere in the description of the study released by one of the co-authors do I see that the researchers ever asked who had initiated the divorce, and it cannot be that men did 100 percent of the leaving. (The full piece is being published by the journal Cancer on Monday.)

Contrary to that assumption, anecdotally and based on everything else I've read on the subject, women may if anything be more likely to reevaluate a sub-par relationship after a life-threatening, life-altering illness – and to decide that what was acceptable B.C. (before cancer) no longer cuts it. So where do I get my info? The bible, for starters. No, not that bible, but Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book, which for my money is still the best of the best in terms of delivering news women can use after a breast cancer diagnosis.

"One of the least discussed subjects about life after breast cancer is sexuality'' and intimacy, Dr. Love writes. "Your surgeon won't bring it up if you don't.'' Fortunately for all of us, however, I am not your surgeon, and am here to tell you that in this as in all things, cancer does change your life, but not in ways that are so easy to predict; Dr. Love reports everything from one patient of hers who was still dressing in the closet and had never even looked at her own mastectomy scars five years after surgery to another patient "who had had bilateral mastectomy [and] felt that all the erotic sensation she had formerly had in her breasts had 'moved south' and that her orgasms were doubly good" as a result. (See what you other doctors are missing by not bringing it up?)

She also notes that many women find that an affair is "part of the healing process'' after a cancer diagnosis, and cites Sheila Kitzinger's book Woman's Experience of Sex, which relays that these wives "said it was all well and good for a husband of 35 years to still love them without a breast, but they needed to feel they were still sexually attractive to feel whole again," and began extramarital relationships.

"There are, of course, many horror stories of husbands and significant others who opted out of sex or who walked out entirely,'' Dr. Love writes, but those shallow dudes are not the norm.

Yes, Newt Gingrich famously left his first wife when she had cancer, and John Edwards not only strayed after his wife Elizabeth's diagnosis, but seems to have been under the bewildering impression that it somehow made it OK that she was in remission at the time. But why are we so quick to buy into the "men are dogs'' stereotype? Are relationships ever really that simple? And much as I hate to ask this one, are we so eager to embrace the role of victim?

I think most of my fellow cancer survivors would say that every single aspect of life is different after that *&#! disease – so why wouldn't and indeed shouldn't we re-evaluate our most important relationships while we're at it? And in the marriages that don't make it, weren't the problems surely a pre-existing condition?

This is from a 2001 Boston Globe article: "Laurel Northouse, a nurse with a doctorate in research who studies the impact of cancer on couples at the University of Michigan School of Nursing, has studied couples in which the wife has breast cancer. She has found not only that the divorce rate within the first 12 months of diagnosis is a fairly low 3 to 4 percent, but that sometimes it's the woman who decides not to spend whatever time she has left with a man she no longer loves. A divorce soon after cancer may look like the husband is leaving her, but she may be saying, `Enough already,' Northouse said."

According to this detailed summary of the "Men Leave" study, put out by the Seattle cancer center directed by one of its co-authors, the findings "confirmed earlier research that put the overall divorce or separation rate among cancer patients at 11.6 percent, similar to the population as a whole [italics mine]. However, researchers were surprised by the difference in separation and divorce rates by gender. The rate when the woman was the patient was 20.8 percent compared to 2.9 percent when the man was the patient. 'Female gender was the strongest predictor of separation or divorce in each of the patient groups we studied,' said one of the researchers. 'Why men leave a sick spouse can be partly explained by their lack of ability, compared to women, to make more rapid commitments to being caregivers to a sick partner and women's better ability to assume the burdens of maintaining a home and family.' '' Maybe.

But the summary also says that the study, which followed 515 seriously ill people, nearly half of them women, for four years, was launched "because doctors noticed that in their neuro-oncology practices, divorce occurred almost exclusively when the wife was the patient." So they found what they knew going in, and believed they knew what it meant; this is science?