Column: from shared excitement to shared acceptance

One of the articles was about breast cancer. I was curious if there was any useful information in it. I read that quite a few relationships ended when treatments were finished. I marveled at that. When all the stress and misery was over, why break up? Now, some ten years later, I am not surprised at all, because the first few years after treatments are not easy. Spoiler alert: My wife and I are still together. For almost forty-five years now.

My wife had discovered a lump in her breast several weeks before I looked in that basket of magazines and was immediately referred to the hospital by the acting family doctor (a woman). It turned out to be foul. Hormone-sensitive cancer. Treatment consisted of chemotherapy, breast-conserving surgery and some radiation. All in all, it took about ten months. In the years that followed, my wife had to take a pill every day that suppresses the female hormone to reduce the chances of the cancer returning.

Not surprisingly, during those ten months, sex was not a priority for either of us. After those treatments, normal life returned very slowly. But one thing did not return: my wife's libido. Because of the chemotherapy, my wife had been pushed into the menopause without mercy, with all its symptoms. I was reminded of the article I had read in the hospital. Relationships breaking up after the treatments are finally over. I couldn't imagine it then. Now I can. After ten months of stress, hospital visits, treatments and complications, you want to try to get back to your old life together as quickly as possible, but it soon becomes clear that it will never be like it was then. Whatever intimacies remained, there was no longer any shared excitement. We were in our mid-fifties and it was clear that our sex life as we had known it constituted a final closed chapter.

We wondered if we had ever been told anything about this at the hospital. True, we had had a conversation with some nurse at the end of the treatment program, but what had been said there was not really clear in our minds. We could, we seemed to remember, talk to peers if we felt the need. That was something we absolutely did not want. We wanted to put all the misery behind us as soon as possible and get on with a life where the cancer was no longer the focus.

The more normal life returned, the more the vanished libido started to play a role. Rationally, we knew that our sex life, like the cancer, had been destroyed by the chemo, but everything else seemed so normal, and so it wasn't always easy for me to accept the new situation. We spent those first few years talking to each other regularly about our vanished sex life. We carefully tested the limits of what was still possible and satisfying. Unfortunately, it was less than we had hoped.

To know if your partner is in the mood for sex, you don't always have to ask that question explicitly. Most couples will have their own words, gestures, actions that way to gauge the other person's mood. Oddly enough, my wife and I still use them from time to time, even though we know that they are connected to something that is definitely over and so they will lead nowhere. This does not make us sad; on the contrary, it usually makes us both smile. We continue to work toward a shared acceptance of the situation.

- Lucien Van Rooy