Women who do not have life partners may experience special stresses and worries as they move through the experience of having breast cancer. Remember that being married or having a committed, significant other is no guarantee of receiving unconditional and constant support. Many single women have friends who serve as family during this crisis in better ways than “real” family members would do. You may have to think creatively about who can be asked to help with what, but be assured that friends are waiting to be told what they can do for you.
Single women may also worry about how they will continue in, or how they can rejoin, the social world with the physical changes and emotional issues which breast cancer brings. It has been our experience that women who have had breast cancer, whether they have two breasts or not, will have the same success with men that they have always had. We have even been told by a few women that “men find me interesting . . . I’m a little different from most of the women out there.” Any man who is worth having will appreciate and love you whatever your breasts look like. As someone said, “We all have scars in life; ours are just more visible than some others.”
This is not intended to minimize what you might be going through right now. It is hard enough to deal with the dating world when you are feeling at the top of your game. When you are feeling vulnerable and scared and less than attractive, it may feel overwhelming. We wish that we could reassure you that your social scene will not be different after breast cancer than it was before; but of course, we cannot guarantee this. However, you might be pleasantly surprised to find it may actually improve.
This story may help. Jennifer was a never-married woman in her mid-forties at the time of her diagnosis. She had a mastectomy and chemotherapy; two years later, she had a recurrence in a regional lymph node. She had just joined a dating service and found herself on the phone with a match the evening before she was to begin radiation treatment to her neck. It turned out that the man with whom she had been matched was a physician who worked in the emergency room of the hospital where she was to receive radiation. He suggested that they meet at the hospital after her first treatment. Now, several years later, she is well, and they are married.
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