NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE ‘ My boyfriend’s cancer battle was ruining my mental health, so I left him — now I’m running a marathon in his honour.” So read the headline of a recent article that appeared not in the Onion, as you might expect, but in the Daily Mail.
Danielle Epstein, 32, met her former partner, Jelle Fresen, 37, on a dating app during the pandemic. They moved in together after the second lockdown was announced. The couple planned to get engaged during a vacation last summer. Sadly, they had to cancel the trip after Fresen was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Hoping the tumor was benign, Epstein proposed to him anyway, vowing: “This isn’t going to get in the way of our future.” But it wasn’t benign. Fresen was diagnosed with stage-four brain cancer and given a 65 percent chance of surviving the next five years.
In the months ahead, Fresen endured radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and major surgery. He suffered nerve damage, which left his face half paralyzed, and needed to learn how to walk again.
On top of all that — Epstein dumped him.
The diagnosis had been “too much” for her, she explained. She experienced panic attacks and mental distress. “I had been so close to having everything I wanted and then, all of a sudden, it had been snatched away,” she wrote. So, after a 17-hour operation that left Fresen with severe brain damage and disabilities, Epstein told him, “I can’t see a way I can be happy with you anymore.”
Of course, not yet being married, you could argue that Epstein didn’t have any moral or legal obligations toward Fresen. Still, her behavior is hardly honorable or inspiring. What’s grotesque isn’t so much that Esptein broke up with Fresen, but that, despite having abandoned him when he needed her most, she had the audacity to claim that she has “deeply” loved him all along. Hence, her highly publicized marathon run. After social media exploded in condemnation of her behavior, she wrote a follow-up piece for the Telegraph about how “it’s very easy for society to make judgements, but in situations like this there aren’t clear-cut right and wrongs.” Perhaps. But in situations like this, whether love is true is clear-cut. And her love clearly isn’t.
She isn’t the only person to confuse love with sentimentality, virtue with virtue-signaling. In many ways she’s simply a product of our current dating culture, which is profoundly unromantic, full of half-heartedness, cynicism, and duplicity.
As reflected in the marital vow, true love is total and absolute: “for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness, and in health; until death do us part.”
Not every person one dates is worthy of such commitment, obviously. But the point of dating is to discern whether a candidate is worthy before time is wasted and hearts are broken. Contrary to popular opinion, this process does not take years, it takes months (if that). And it certainly doesn’t require living together or any other arrangement by which individuals seek to selfishly enjoy the benefits of marriage — sex, convenience, shared financial burdens, etc. — without making the requisite sacrifices and promise of permanence.
Epstein says that “living together in High Barnet, north London, we grew even closer, quicker than we might have done otherwise.” But love is more than ephemeral feelings of closeness. It’s easy to love someone when things are going well. Real love persists even in difficult times — not as sentimentality, but in the practice of virtue.
Sadly, the line between real and quasi love is becoming increasingly blurred. According to a study by Bowling Green State University, over three-quarters of the marriages that took place between 2015 and 2019 were preceded by cohabitation. Hopefully those who went on to say vows intend to live by them. Though with a national divorce rate of nearly 50 percent, there’s reason to be skeptical.
Nevertheless, people still sense the distinguishing qualities of marriage. In 2019, the Pew Research Center reported higher levels of trust and satisfaction among married partners than among unmarried ones in every aspect of their relationships — from each other’s commitment to being faithful, truthful, and selfless to the handling of finances, parenting, household chores, work–life balance, communication, and sex.
In commitment-minded dating, there are two stages. The first is information-gathering, which is over quickly. The second is decision-making: Are you all in or are you all out? Being half in — for better, richer, and healthier times only — isn’t real commitment. And it certainly isn’t real love. It’s sentimentality masking selfish motivations. Such relationships are built on sand and are easily demolished by the winds of misfortune.