![]() “Every time I had to put on a sweater, or zip up a coat it was just excruciating pain,” she says. In the months following the surgery, she had tissue expanders in her chest that were rock hard – they felt like Coke cans. 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. 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. The flip side of this is that relationships tend to function well when the woman gets sick and requires intensive care from her partner. “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. 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. This means that a lot of the time, women continue to do that work – and when they don’t, problems can arise. 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. Men tend to view their partner getting sick in almost a mechanical way: they see it as a problem to be solved. But, she says, men and women interpret what caregiving looks like very differently. 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. 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. More men than ever are stay-at-home fathers. Women have almost equal representation in the workplace and in 41% of US homes, women are the breadwinners. G endered expectations about household work ought to have changed in the last few decades. I expected him to be something but when it came down to it he just didn’t show up. ![]() ![]() “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.Ĭhristie, her brother, and her mom made the unspoken decision there and then that they would power through without him until the cancer was gone. 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. In Christie’s case, this meant watching her stepdad go from being an energetic, loving guy, to an irresponsible, stroppy teenager. 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. 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. In a 2015 paper, researchers tracked 2,701 marriages using a study on health and retirement and watched what happened when someone became unwell during a marriage: only 6% of cases ended in divorce.īut that same study showed that when partners leave, it’s normally men. If you are hoping that these are rare horror stories, there is some comfort to be had: most people – regardless of gender – do not leave their partners when they get sick. “My mom was in the 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. “My mom had stage four cancer and my dad and brother let her clean everyday till she died ! :),” read one. The post, which has now been shared more than 300,000 times, set off a wave of responses underneath. I will never forget that for as long as I live.” 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. “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.”Ĭhristie shared her experience of the ordeal on a thread that went viral on Twitter in February. But within a week Sandra – the breadwinner in the family – was back at work, and within two, she was already cooking and cleaning again.īy the six-month mark, her stepdad’s attitude had completely changed. He attended appointments with his wife, cooked meals and looked after the children. Sanchez’s stepdad, Tom, was upbeat at first.
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