With your cancer event—how could you be sure that the partner would not want to talk about it or be involved in the situation?
She was under a lot of stress due to an ungodly amount of near simultaneous university exams and under high pressure of failing her course if she didn’t ace all of them (luckily she pulled through). She had also lost her father to cancer about a year before this event and was still suffering the effects. In fact, with the death of her father she had lost both her parents and next to her brother I’m her “only real family” and we had been together for about five years at that point.
My prediction of how she would have reacted to the possibility of me having cancer was that she would not have been able to focus on her studies and exams very well, possibly fail an education she had invested years of her life and a huge sum of money into and generally have an unbelievably miserable time during the weeks until anything conclusive about the lump would have been found. I on the other hand was actually fairly fine during the whole affair and didn’t even have trouble falling asleep. Either it was going to kill me or not, and if there was something I could do then I’d do whatever it takes, but I was not going to lose sleep over something that to me felt maybe like a 40 − 60% chance of it being cancer or nothing. A rational / stoic mindset about differentiation what you can and what you cannot control in your life and the knowledge to clearly separate those two helped me a lot with that I think.
To me it was not even remotely an option to tell her, I did what I think any good partner should have done in the situation I described above: Suck it up and don’t let anything show. When I eventually told her afterwards she did get somewhat mad about it but conceded it was the right decision...
How could I even face myself in the mirror today if I had simply told her about it and she had failed her education as a result of it—especially after it turned out to be nothing (though even if it was cancer I think the same would apply)? I think I did precisely the right thing, what she would have wanted was irrelevant, the only person who really had “a choice” in this scenario was me.
She was under a lot of stress due to an ungodly amount of near simultaneous university exams and under high pressure of failing her course if she didn’t ace all of them (luckily she pulled through). She had also lost her father to cancer about a year before this event and was still suffering the effects. In fact, with the death of her father she had lost both her parents and next to her brother I’m her “only real family” and we had been together for about five years at that point.
My prediction of how she would have reacted to the possibility of me having cancer was that she would not have been able to focus on her studies and exams very well, possibly fail an education she had invested years of her life and a huge sum of money into and generally have an unbelievably miserable time during the weeks until anything conclusive about the lump would have been found. I on the other hand was actually fairly fine during the whole affair and didn’t even have trouble falling asleep. Either it was going to kill me or not, and if there was something I could do then I’d do whatever it takes, but I was not going to lose sleep over something that to me felt maybe like a 40 − 60% chance of it being cancer or nothing. A rational / stoic mindset about differentiation what you can and what you cannot control in your life and the knowledge to clearly separate those two helped me a lot with that I think.
To me it was not even remotely an option to tell her, I did what I think any good partner should have done in the situation I described above: Suck it up and don’t let anything show. When I eventually told her afterwards she did get somewhat mad about it but conceded it was the right decision...
How could I even face myself in the mirror today if I had simply told her about it and she had failed her education as a result of it—especially after it turned out to be nothing (though even if it was cancer I think the same would apply)? I think I did precisely the right thing, what she would have wanted was irrelevant, the only person who really had “a choice” in this scenario was me.