Why Men Leave Ill Partners

Excerpts from an article in the 10/15/09 Times Online

Until her sickness do us part: why men leave ill partners

Men are seven times more likely than women to leave a seriously ill partner, a study has found. So why are males less able to cope?

According to the Office for National Statistics, there were 144,220 divorces in the UK in 2006-07 (the latest figures available) and, of those, about 18 per cent (25,959) were due to “family strain”, a term that includes serious illness. In the US, a survey by the National Centre for Health Statistics found that 75 per cent of first marriages end in divorce if one of the partners develops a terminal or chronic illness.

Although it is not stated in these divorces which partner was ill, a study published last month in the journal Cancer found that a man is seven times more likely to leave than his wife if the other becomes seriously ill.

What causes this apparent chasm in emotional coping mechanisms between the sexes is intriguing experts, and the theories are plentiful.

Indeed, a study in the Journal of Oncology last year reported that spouses were lonelier than their ill partners and had lower levels of wellbeing and marital satisfaction. There is an immediate shift in a relationship when an illness is diagnosed. You stop being partners as you knew it and move to being patient and carer. That can lead to feelings of fear, not just about the disease, but about the relationship and the well partner’s ability to cope. Feelings of anger and resentment about life and the situation can quickly arise.

A few researchers have suggested that men are more likely to walk out on a wife whose condition is newly diagnosed because the illness is more than they bargained for when they married.

There are suggestions, too, that traditional roles shift more significantly when a woman becomes ill. Men may still be working full time, but may have to cope with additional tasks such as ferrying their wife to appointments, arranging childcare, cleaning and doing household duties.

What a women wants most of all when she is ill is not so much for her husband to take charge, but for him to listen to her feelings and to express his own more often. Men have an urge to ‘fix’ things. They want to get in there and make it better when what they really need to do is shut up and listen. Even if you have heard it one hundred times before, your wife needs you to respond by saying that whatever happens, you are there for her.

For some people, illness proves a positive factor in bringing a couple closer together. One recent study at the University of Quebec found that 42 per cent of couples thought that the experience of breast cancer had strengthened their partnership. Accepting the changes that take place is a process that takes time and effort. But many people do find their love grows stronger as a result.

How Couples Can Deal With Crisis

From an article in Examiner.com by Janet Clark

Judith S. Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee, authors of The Good Marriage, identify nine specific tasks couples must tackle in order to create a good marriage. The fourth task is a tough one: "to confront and master the inevitable crises of life, maintaining the strength of the bond in the face of adversity." This is probably the last thing a young couple is thinking about when they fall in love and look at each other-and life-through rose-colored glasses. But there is no doubt they will have to deal with some serious issues during the course of their marriage.

It's sometimes said what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. The same thing can be said about a marriage: tragedies, crises, difficulties have the potential to make or break a marriage. Couples will face illness, death of loved ones, loss of jobs, problems with children, and a host of other challenges throughout the course of a lifetime. The couples who pull together in times of trouble follow certain steps, according to Wallerstein and Blakeslee. First, they look at the situation realistically and are able to think how their lives, and the lives of other family members, would be affected. They avoid"awfulizing" the situation: while they recognize the realities of the challenges they are facing, they're able to also take time out from dealing with the problem and try to enjoy life.

They don't blame each other or say, "I told you so," because they know everybody's human and prone to error. "In fact, they went further by trying to protect each other from inappropriate self-blame," the authors said of the couples who managed this task successfully. "They protected each other against self-reproach and shame." But they don't have to pretend everything is hunky-dory: they are able to acknowledge their fears, anxiety, sadness, and anger in appropriate ways, and sometimes not so appropriately. They can allow themselves, and their partner, to lose their cool once in awhile (without being abusive) and not take it too seriously.

Finally, "they blocked the crises they could see coming," said Wallerstein and Blakeslee. "Rather than waiting until a spouse's drinking or acting out or depression was overwhelming, they intervened at an earlier stage." They don't allow their partner to go over the edge in response to whatever crises is at hand: they let them know how much they care about them, and also let them know they will not stand by and watch their partner self-destruct.

Strife at Home Can Make You Sick

From an article on Little About
Strife at Home Can Make You Sick

Disagreements between feuding spouses that continue without satisfying resolution could take a significant toll on one’s health, researchers at Ohio State University conclude. Among those who argued with ineffective conflict management skills, immune systems can be weakened and stress hormones increased.

In two trials involving 120 couples, psychologists found that partners involved in relationship disputes were at risk for sickness. The findings were similar across the marriage spectrum of participants, whether a couple was newly married or wed for many years.

One study focused on newlyweds, the other on husbands and wives married an average of 42 years. Clinicians involved with the study conclude that, with proper conflict resolution, marriage partners can enjoy less stress through real listening and honest sharing of feelings and attitudes. The men studied were more likely to withdraw from or tune out during arguments, while the women were more likely to be distressed about the argument well after a heated dispute.

With the study, mental health practitioners who try to save marriages–counselors, social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, clergy–now have the science to prove that arguments between couples can lead to battles inside the body. Long term health effects are not yet known.

Ohio State researchers studied many couples, both newlyweds and couples who have been married for decades. They measured the stress hormones in their blood. Couples were brought in for joint counselling sessions on current disputes. Blood was analyzed intermittently.

The presence of the hormones are found to be linked not to the disagreements themselves, but to the way couples fight and resolve (or don’t resolve) conflicts. “They all had a problem that they were talking about, but those who talked about it in a hostile and negative way are the ones who had the negative immune effects,” reports Dr. George Solomon, MD, professor of psychiatry at University of California Los Angeles.

Solomon studies the way in which mind and the immune system interact. He says it’s important for couples to learn how to deal with the conflicts and stress that are inevitable in any committed relationship. In the study of the older couples, abrasive arguments were tied to a weakening of certain aspects of immune response.

Dr. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, PhD of OSU’s new Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research who was involved in both studies, says that the findings from those headed toward golden anniversaries were more unexpected than the findings from the newlyweds. “You might expect that arguments would have less impact on older couples because they’ve gone through these disagreements many times before and have learned to deal with them,” says Kiecolt-Glaser. “But that’s not the case.”

Besides raised stress hormone levels, the older couples with weaker immune measures also described their usual marital disagreements as more negative.

In the study of newlyweds, researchers concluded that one key to lowering the stress during a couple’s arguments is to concentrate on the issues at hand and reduce the amount of negative responses that result. The style of the fighting is most important. “The sarcasm, name-calling and back-biting are the problems,” says Dr. Ronald Glaser, PhD, another researcher involved in the OSU study.

Of particular interest was the continued elevated stress hormone levels of the women having husbands who withdrew from the arguments. “We’re probably seeing the results of the women thinking about and reliving the argument throughout the day,” Kiecolt-Glaser says.

According to the researchers, while changes in immune response were seen in both newlywed and older couples, the effects may have greater consequences in older people as their immune systems are already waning. “Older adults have greater rates of illness and death due to infectious diseases compared to younger people,” Kiecolt-Glaser says. “Additional stress, such as from marital arguments, may put them at greater risk.”

Divorce and Illness

from The Daily News

Sunday, January 18th 2009, 11:34 PM

"Dawnwell Batista is in the middle of what will forever be known as the Kidney Divorce, and she is an amazing woman who’s been betrayed both by her body and her husband.

Her split from Dr. Richard Batista has been painful enough, dragging on for four years, and mostly, she’s been worried about the children.

But just as their trial was about to begin, the surgeon upped the ante. His lawyer announced that Dr. Batista had donated a kidney to her, and now he wants it back - or its supposed $1.5 million value"

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Speculations

Sometimes love can become a Steven King novel - you know the ones, about a killer car or a killer prom queen or a killer caretaker at a snowed-in, isolated moutain retreat.

How does this happen? How does a couple go from "I do" to "Gimme my kidney back?" From "love and honor" to "wound and maim?" Demanding a kidney refund is so much more mutilating and vampirish than taking back the diamond engagement ring. It's hateful.

And how does love become hate? Does that happen when such a critical mass of disappointment has accumulated that the pile starts to fester and breed hate bacteria? Does it happen when two people have been so blinded by their own illusions for rescue that they enshroud their partner with expectations no mortal could meet? Does it happen in the day to day, inch by inch annoyances that eventually crescendo into an unscalable wall of misery? Does a moment arrive when all murmurings of tenderness disappear leaving only a banshee shriek of hate?

How can you take back the kidney you once gave as some form of loving sacrifice?

And what role does the illlness that required the kidney in the first place play? (Dawn has supposedly had 3 kidney transplants and a double mastectomy). I can imagine illness as an amplifier. Whatever strains existed in this couple's relationship perhaps got overloaded by the extra burdens illness brings. Many of us have struggled with this.

But how many of us have demanded a body part be returned?

And finally, a woman's body is never, never to be used as a field of negotiation. This is the fundamental women's health right.

What do you do when your partner is not taking care of his or her health?

What do you do when your partner is not taking care of his or her health...at least not in a way that is up to your standards?

If I have a new symptom -- an ear ache, a twisted ankle, a mysterious rash - I will at least call my health care team to describe what's going on and ask for advice. I do know a lot about my own body, and about basic care for basic conditions -- but even so, I will seek medical opinions and consider them as additional data to be factored into my decision about how to take care of myself.

Richard is different. He likes to wait to see if the symptom will go away by itself, or if it will shape itself into some pattern that he can describe. He will consult a doctor when he believes his situation is serious enough. But that moment comes way too late by my measure. Although, I do have to admit that he is pretty healthy, and there have only been a couple of times when his delay had potentially harmful consequences.

This is a real source of tension for us. We have not figured out how to resolve it. I certainly can't make him do it my way, but neither can I sit quietly and watch him injure himself though inaction (imho).

Have you had a similar struggle? How do you handle this situation?

Mars/Venus....Who Cares!

I don't know if this communication challenge exists for all couples - but it's there for Richard and me. The challenge is how to know when the response that is required is problem solving and when the response that is desired is empathy. And illness can shorten tolerance and raise the temperature on conflict fairly quickly.

Those of you who have pegged this as a Mars/Venus dilemma with the woman as the Venus empathizer and the man as the Mars problem solver are only partially right. There are times when Richard wants a cuddle and to be told that I feel for his pain; and there are times when all I want is to have him fix the damn [fill in the blank -- usually it's computer or toilet].


The other night I was getting stressed over an upcoming business trip that will involve about 15 hours of travel time. I am not the road warrior I used to be pre-illness. Airplane travel flicks some neurological switch and I start to feel blips of pain. If the flight is shorter than 6 hours, I can ride out the blips. If the flight pushes into the double digits, pain wins -- unless I medicate myself into another dimension, which I hate doing.

So I was moaning and bemoaning. I wanted to go on this trip, but I feared the physical repercussions. And I hated that I had to factor them into the situation at all.

I could see Richard's posture stiffen in the way that it does when he is not sure of how to respond and doesn't want to say the wrong thing. I was too immersed in my worry spin to know what I wanted, much less provide him with any cues.

He handled the situation beautifully. He said:

"My instinct is to jump in and problem solve and tell you ways I think you could deal with this, but I'm not sure that's what you want. So I'll just tell you that I see that this is causing you such stress, and I truly feel for you and want to help you any way I can. I have some ideas I can share with you when you want them."

Like Golde said to Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof:

"If that's not love, what is?"

Fighting With Your Spouse Can Help You Live Longer

From a January 23 Reuters article:

"Fighting with your spouse can actually be good for your health with people who bottle it all up found to die earlier, a new study shows.

Researchers at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and its Psychology Department released preliminary findings after 17 years of following 192 couples.

The couples fell into four categories: where both partners expressed anger when they felt unfairly attacked, where neither partner expressed their anger, and one category each for where the wife suppressed her feelings and where the husband did so."

"I would say that if you don't express your feelings to your partner and tell them what the problem is when you're unfairly attacked, then you're in trouble," said Ernest Harburg, lead author of the study, in an interview.

The study found that those who kept their anger in were twice as likely to die earlier than those who don't."

"'When couples get together, one of their main jobs is reconciliation about conflict,' Harburg said."

Here's the press release about this study.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Musings

It's not surprising that the ability to express anger and to reconcile conflict is healthy. We know this in our bodies. We can almost feel the sludge of silent resentments and veiled bitterness congeal our arteries and stiffen our limbs. Forcing one's face into a mask of neutrality when the heart has been poisoned by unacknowledged wounds eventually dilutes the ability to express any emotion with full authenticity. When we constrict rage, we limit joy. When we hide from fear, we lose love.

This may sound illogical, contradictory.

I believe we have an emotional range that stretches from the horrible to the sublime, from the purest hate to the profoundest love. The pendulum of our awareness swings back and forth over this spectrum. If we limit its sweep on the dark side, its reach into the light is similarly checked. Babies know this and show us how it's done. When they awake in the middle of the night they shriek with the terror of utter aloneness. When Mom or Dad appear the world is restored, and there is no higher joy or sweeter smile.

The key lies in Harburg's statement: "When couples get together, one of their main jobs is reconciliation about conflict."

How to reconcile, to experience and express the caustic edges of rage and then find the path back to intimacy. To be so divided and then to reintegrate. T.S. Eliot asks of us, "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" We might ask of ourselves, where there is love, after such knowledge, what else but forgiveness.

So back to the key -- how to reconcile after the anger and the desperate disappointment have left their stain on our memory. The key lies in the difference between feeling and expressing. In our private cell, we may feel the violence. But in the space between that zone and our partner's heart, we must take a moment to build a cradle to carry our feelings, a cradle cushioned with the remembrance of love.

There are practical ways of reconciling, of bringing what seems broken back together again. But that's for another posting.