Luna Rabarot recalls with fear the absence of her husband during her treatment. Already suffering from ulcerative colitis, this resident of Saint-Quentin-sur-Isère (Isère), now 28 years old, learned that she had stage 2 breast cancer in July 2022. When the disease was announced, her husband kept his distance. He does not accompany her to medical appointments, is regularly absent from home and rarely asks his wife about her health. Indulgent, she initially thinks that he needs time. “I told myself that he was protecting himself, that he was just scared. I didn’t realize that it was necessary for a caregiver to be present throughout the whole process. He slowly went away.”, she says.
In January 2023, between two chemotherapy sessions, her husband announced that he could not bear to see her sick and left her for a new partner he met at work. For Luna Rabarot, it is a real cataclysm: “I was fighting for him and our son. Before we got sick, we had planned to have another child. I was so vulnerable that I begged him not to leave me.” She continues: “My life no longer had any meaning, no pillars, no more than cancer. This breakup is the most traumatic experience of my life.”
This desertion also inspires a deep sense of injustice in her. The couple owned a house and the young woman found herself bearing the costs of the property alone while waiting for the divorce to be finalised more than a year later. “I was on sick leave and not receiving my full salary. It was difficult financially.confess. I had lost everything, my health, my family and soon my house, while he was living his best life with his new partner in another apartment.
Luna Rabarot’s situation is not uncommon. A study published by the journal CancerA study published in the American Journal of Cancer Research (AJCR) in November 2009 showed that women are six times more likely to break up when diagnosed with cancer than men in the same situation. To reach these conclusions, the researchers followed several couples in the United States for two years, one of whose members had just been diagnosed. At the end of this observation, they observed that the separation rate increased to 20.8% when the woman was ill, compared to 2.9% when the patient was the man. Another American study, published in 2015 in the Journal of Cancer Research (AJCR), Journal of health and social behaviorconcludes with similar results. However, as Léonor Fasse, a clinical psychologist at the Gustave-Roussy hospital in Villejuif (Val-de-Marne), points out, caution is needed: “If the number of separations is much higher when the woman is sick, we do not always know who is behind these breakups.” Therefore, we cannot conclude that sick women are abandoned by their partners more frequently than the other way around.
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