The men who give up on their spouses when they have cancer

When Christie Sanchez was 12, she had the best stepdad in the world. He was charismatic and intelligent. He introduced her to new music and took her hiking every weekend. Then, her mom got sick.

For two years Sanchez’s mom, Sandra, battled stage four breast cancer. It was advanced enough that within days of her diagnosis she was having her breasts, lymph nodes and both ovaries removed.

Sanchez’s stepdad, Tom, was upbeat at first. He attended appointments with his wife, cooked meals and looked after the children. But within a week Sandra – the breadwinner in the family – was back at work, and within two, she was already cooking and cleaning again.

By the six-month mark, her stepdad’s attitude had completely changed. “It’s like, once the chemotherapy started and he saw the decline in her health he was kind of like, ‘Oh shit,’ and tapped out.”

Christie shared her experience of the ordeal on a thread that went viral on Twitter in February. The tweet that sparked it all off read: “My sister had stage four cancer and her ex husband complained about her not doing her part to clean up. I will never forget that for as long as I live.”

The post, which has now been shared over 300,000 times, set off a wave of responses underneath. “My mom had stage four cancer and my dad and brother let her clean everyday till she died ! :),” read one. “My mom was in hospice and her husband was out and about in a new sports car picking up single moms at my sibling’s after school sports programs. Absolute garbage,” read another.

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If you are hoping that these are horror stories, there is some reprieve: most people – regardless of gender – do not leave their partners when they get sick. In a 2015 paper, researchers tracked 2,717 marriages using the Health and Retirement Study and watched what happened when someone became unwell during a marriage: about 70% of those who stayed alive stayed together.

But that same study showed that when partners leave, it’s normally men. One study from 2009 found the strongest predictor for separation or divorce for patients with brain cancer was whether or not the sick person was a woman. That same study showed that men were seven times more likely to leave their partner than the other way around if one of them got brain cancer.

In Christie’s case, this meant watching her stepdad go from being an energetic, loving guy, to an irresponsible, stroppy teenager. He would go into his room and sit on the computer as soon as his wife got in, leaving her to cook and clean while going through chemotherapy. “She would be saying to us, ‘I really need your help to do this.’ We tried to step up in the best way that we could, but we were just kids,” says Christie.

Christie, her brother, and her mom made the unspoken decision there and then that they would power through without him until the cancer was gone. “It’s almost like grief. I expected him to be something but when it came down to it he just didn’t show up. He let [us all] down,” says Christie.

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Gendered expectations about household work ought to have changed in the last few decades. Women have almost equal representation in the workplace and in 41% of US homes, women are the breadwinners. More men than ever are stay-at-home fathers. And yet, when a woman falls ill, it can really reveal the extent to which men not only feel entitled to a certain level of housework, but also have no concept of how to be an efficient and appropriate caregiver.

Mieke Thomeer, a sociologist from the University of Alabama, who studies how gender affects couples when a partner gets sick, says in most couples people understand they will need to support their partner if they get sick. But, she says, men and women interpret what caregiving looks like very differently.

Men tend to view their partner getting sick in almost a mechanical way: they see it as a problem to be solved. They can separate out the obvious and immediate physical tasks that result from the illness, but other caregiving requirements are left unconsidered, such as emotional care, or housework.

This means that a lot of the time, women continue to do that work – and when they don’t, problems can arise. In 2018, researchers in Germany used a nationally representative sample to show that – as long as they are still able to – women continue to do an uneven amount of the housework while they are sick if that was the dynamic in the relationship before they became unwell. “Particularly with more mild conditions, the expectation is that the status quo will go on unless it gets so extreme that the wife really can’t do that work,” says Thomeer.

The flip side of this is that relationships tend to function well when the woman gets sick and requires intensive care from her partner. But in cases where caregiving is not necessitated, men tend to downplay a woman’s symptoms and class her as largely self-sufficient, expecting her to ask for help rather than proactively giving it.

When Dana Hurd returned after a preventive double mastectomy, her partner seemed to think that she should do anything she was able to – without considering whether it was a good idea, or whether it would be better to just help her.

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In the months following the surgery, she had tissue expanders in her chest that were rock hard – they felt like coke cans. “Every time I had to put on a sweater, or zip up a coat it was just excruciating pain,” she says. But she was still able to walk. And so, in the middle of an icy winter, her partner began to expect that she would walk their 45lb dog every day, just five weeks after surgery: “Never mind that I could have died if the dog pulled me over on to my front,” says Hurd.

In many cases, women willingly do such work. Studies on women with breast cancer show that they tend to feel guilt for burdening their caregivers, and overcompensate. They set boundaries around what help they are willing to accept and continue to do what housework they can, while also giving emotional support to their caregiver.

But the problem with this division of labor is that it is impractical in the long term: “The reality is that the condition will continue to deteriorate so that attitude is just not going to cut it,” says Thomeer. Instead, men need to take it upon themselves to learn how to do such chores when their partner gets sick, and women need to learn to give up some of that control.

Otherwise, as the sick partner is less able to provide what she used to – that is when her husband may begin to get cold feet.

Hurd’s partner’s gripe came when she stopped wanting to have sex. He started to have tantrums that she wasn’t showing him enough affection after her mastectomy. He began to accuse her of cheating on him; berated her for neglecting his needs; even cut her off his health insurance at one point – arguing that she was “treating him like a housemate”. Hurd started taking painkillers and having sex with him which she says made her feel like a blow-up doll, but she didn’t feel she had another choice.

“If the spouse is used to [her doing these things], that might lead them to say ‘this isn’t really what I wanted,’ and to leave the marriage,” says Thomeer.

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For Meredith Zapa, that point came five weeks after her mother was hospitalized for a serious heart condition. Her long-term boyfriend Andy dumped her while she was hooked up to tubes in the intensive care unit (both names have been changed).

“He said he was too young to be dealing with someone who was so sick. He was 50,” Meredith tells me on the phone.

When he dumped her mum by text, Meredith had to deliver the news. She recalls reading the text with surprise – not least because Andy had been sick just a few weeks earlier with kidney stones, and Meredith watched as her mother doted on him – constantly at his bedside, bringing him food and checking in with his doctors.

When Meredith’s mother got sick, however, Andy asked Meredith to deal with the doctors. Despite the fact that he was listed as the primary caregiver, she said it didn’t occur to him that was actually his role: “He made it seem that it wasn’t his place to do that,” says Meredith.

What became increasingly clear to Meredith was the gendered expectations men and women are willing to accept when it comes to caregiving. “My mother would never even call my brother to ask him to do anything – she didn’t want to bother him, would say that he is not good at this stuff – and yet we are both adults,” she says.

These “family myths” – that women are better at certain roles, for example; or that men are incapable of the tasks required to do them well (“he can’t see dirt!”) – are often used to justify the unequal division of labor within a relationship, and so the unequal distribution of work continues. But, as Thomeer points out, there is a glaring problem:

“People say, ‘we do what works for our family it just happens to be unequal’ – and yet, it just so happens to be unequal in very similar ways across all families.”

For Meredith’s mother, caregiving was women’s work – that much she said explicitly. Andy’s mother similarly indulged him, agreeing that he was too young to take on a caregiving role.

“Our research consistently shows us that this work is much less appreciated when women do it - it is seen as what women do, what they have always done, even if it’s a little more heightened [when someone is sick],” says Thomeer.

Men, on the other hand, are more appreciated for caregiving, and are more easily let off the hook when they decide it’s too much. Their family members notice the work that they are doing and chip in.

To say that men benefit hugely from female caregiving is borne out by research. Men tend to suffer a lot more from widowhood, partly because they gain more support from marriage than women do. When his partner dies, he is more likely to actively seek out another relationship, whereas women are more likely to avoid marriage. Why? “because they know it will entail more caregiving,” says Thomeer.

Women are so socialized into believing that they must be caregivers that it often doesn’t even occur to them that they can take time off, let alone that they might have another option. In one study with heterosexual, gay and lesbian couples, one woman gives care to her wife around the clock, taking time off to cry while on the subway. By contrast, one of the husbands participating in the study continues to ask his wife to attempt each and every task she can while she is going blind.

Can we continue to blame these men, if they know no better? Isn’t it hard for them, too? “Sure, it’s hard – but just like how having a baby is hard,” says Meredith, adding: “[People] think women have some superior ability to do this stuff, but we don’t, we just do it.” Referring back to the text that Andy sent, she tears up. “She gave so much and he left so easily,” she says.

Meredith’s mother finally came out of hospital last month, but they still haven’t heard from him. If he was reading this, what would Meredith say to him?

“I just want [men] to provide the same amount of love and care to others that they provide to themselves,” she says.