A married woman diagnosed with a life-threatening illness is six times more likely to divorce than a man in the same position. How’s that for a headline? Here’s the article from MSNBC.
The overall divorce rate of people receiving diagnoses of life-threatening illness (in this case cancer and multiple sclerosis) was about in line with the national average. It’s only when you break it down by gender that your eyes pop. When the woman was the disease victim, the rate was 21%. When the man was the victim, the rate was 3%. The results will be published in today’s issue of the journal Cancer.
Does this mean men are more callous than women? That sick women want to be left alone? That women are better at nurturing and care-giving than men? The study doesn’t answer any of these questions, so let the conjecture begin in earnest.
For me, the awareness that I am likely to reach a state of high or total dependence on my husband was frightening. Based on our married life over the last 10 years, I saw myself homebound and receiving notably less attention than I would get in a nursing home.
To be in a dependent state with little attention paid to my emotional well being would be frightening. To be in that state in the presence of someone who broke their committment to love and honor you would be unbearable.
In general, men are self-centered, focused on their own self-gratification and superficial in their emotions. Whatever love they might feel for a woman is transitory and not deep. It is easy to see, then, why when the wife becomes seriously ill, he sees her as having little to no value and he runs off.
This very same thing happened when my ex-husband’s aunt was diagnosed with cancer. The husband left her while she was in the hospital going through an operation for brain cancer. The husband of another woman I know also left her when she got cancer. It’s hear-wrenching to see these things happen.