Luna Rabarot recalled with horror her husband's absence during her treatment. Already suffering from hemorrhagic rectocolitis, the 28-year-old resident of Saint-Quentin-sur-Isère in southeast France was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer in July 2022. Upon learning of her illness, her husband began to distance himself – he did not accompany her to medical appointments, was regularly away from home and asked few questions about her condition. At first, Luna was understanding – she thought at first that he just needed time. "I told myself he was protecting himself, that he was simply afraid. I didn't realize that a caregiver had to be there for the whole process. He detached himself little by little," she recalled.

In January 2023, between two courses of chemotherapy, her husband announced that he couldn't bear to see her ill and left her for a new partner he had met at work. For Rabarot, it was a catastrophe: "I was fighting for him and our son. Before I fell ill, we had planned to have another child. I was so vulnerable, I was begging him not to leave me." She continued, "My life no longer made sense, I had no pillars left, only cancer. That break-up was the most traumatic experience of my life."

This abandonment also left her with a profound sense of injustice. The couple owned a house, and the young woman was left to take sole responsibility for its expenses until the divorce was finalized over a year later. "I was on sick leave and didn't have my full salary. It was hard financially," she confided. "I'd lost everything – my health, my family and soon the house – while he was living his best life with his new partner in another apartment."

Rabarot's situation is not uncommon. A study published in November 2009 by the journal Cancer shows that faced with a cancer diagnosis, a woman is six times more likely to experience a break-up than a man in the same situation. To reach these conclusions, the researchers followed a number of couples in the United States where one member had recently been diagnosed with cancer. At the end of this two-year period of observation, they found that the separation rate was 20.8% when the woman was ill, compared with 2.9% when the man was. Another American study, published in 2015 in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, concluded with similar results. For all that, as Léonor Fasse, a clinical psychologist at Hôpital Gustave-Roussy in Villejuif (south of Paris), pointed out, caution is needed: "While the number of separations is much higher when the woman is ill, we don't always know who is behind these break-ups." So we can't conclude that sick women are more likely to be left by their partners than the other way around.

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