Jess never dreamed that she was going to get sick, nor did she consider what it would mean for her love life if she did. When she first started dating her boyfriend, they were both in their late 20s, living busy, active lives. But around a year into their relationship, all that stopped abruptly when Jess was diagnosed with long Covid. For her, it meant “a general shutdown of my body: lungs, heart, stomach, really bad brain fog”. She went from being a sporty, independent 29-year-old to sleeping all day and relying on her boyfriend for everything.
Three years on, Jess has recovered enough to return to work part-time, though she still struggles with chronic fatigue. What knocked her for six, however, is that, having nursed her through the worst of it, her boyfriend broke up with her just when she seemed to be getting better. Six weeks on from the split, Jess is still struggling to process what happened. “In the end there were a number of reasons for our breakup, but I think it’s hard to not trace almost all of them back to my illness,” she says.
The stereotype of heartless husbands and wronged wives obscures a much more complicated web of emotions. The idea that men are more likely to run away from caring responsibilities can be traced back to a 2009 US study of 515 people with cancer or multiple sclerosis. It was led by two oncologists who had noticed how often their female patients’ relationships ended after diagnosis.
