What it’s like dating after cancer
Natalie
Like many young people who’ve gone through cancer, Natalie was daunted at the prospect of stepping into the dating world. How much should you disclose? What should you say to people? How will they behave?
Something that is really difficult for a lot of young cancer patients who have gone through treatment and are out the other side of it is stepping into the dating world.
It’s scary when you’re newly single and you’ve got to decide “am I going to join Tinder or am I just going to wait for it to happen like in the movies?” And then you do get on Tinder and you meet all sorts of people on there.
But it’s especially hard when you’ve gone through cancer because there’s a lot of questions of: “how upfront should I be about this?” Because you don’t want to scare people off, but at the same time you want to meet people who are going to accept everything about you.
It’s been interesting for me. I recently joined Tinder and, within 24 hours, I think about fifty percent of the messages I received were to do with my neck. I’ve had thyroid surgeries and my scars haven’t healed as they were supposed to, so they’re still quite red and they show up in pictures.
A lot of the messages were from men saying stuff like, “I see you’ve got some marks on your neck, I could give you some hickeys and see if anyone would notice” and it’s sickening. You wonder why people are like this and in whose mind is it okay to ask someone that when you don’t even know what they’ve gone through?
Recently, I met up with someone and it was a bit awkward anyway, so I wasn’t expecting much from it to be honest, but then it got to the point where I was thinking about going home. He looked at my neck and said, “do you mind me asking what happened to you?” I explained I’d had thyroid surgery and he got a little bit awkward about it.
I got on the tube and when I got back above ground there was a message from him saying: “Sorry if I got a bit awkward there. It’s just your scars are a lot more visible in person than in your pictures.” It just made me uncomfortable. It’s safe to say that he got unmatched pretty quickly after that.
Do you want someone who can just accept cancer as a part of you and not see it as something they have to overcome?
You laugh about it, but it does undermine your confidence a little bit every time it happens. It chips away a little bit at a time.
You start to wonder if you’re ever going to meet someone who can look past the cancer, or whether you want someone who can just accept it as a part of you and not see it as something they have to overcome.
When you start dating it does become a question of: how much should I disclose and how quickly? That’s a question that comes into a lot of different parts of your life, especially when you’re young.
You’re starting out in the dating world and potentially further education, so do you let your uni know? How much do you tell them? When you’re applying for jobs, how much do you tell them? It comes into every aspect of your life.
Read Natalie’s blog: ‘Am I going to die?’ was the last question I ever thought I’d ask myself at 17
12 months on from my Tinder experiences, I’m actually now in a relationship with somebody who was in my life then. He was, at the time, just a friend who was working on a similar placement year to my own and who I spent a lot of time outside of work with. A few months later, something just clicked, and we’ve been going strong ever since.
Even when we were just friends, my scars and what led to them never once featured in our relationship. He knew everything because when I started working at that company I decided to take the approach of just being super up-front about what I’ve gone through. But, he’s never commented on the scars and they’ve never been a topic of conversation for more than a passing comment (usually made by me about how itchy they are!).
This absolutely is not the defining feature of a healthy relationship, but a little win for me was when I showed him a photo from two years ago that I’d facetuned the scars off of, and the first thing he noticed was something like how my eyes looked a different colour in the light and nothing to do with my neck (sad how low the bar was set after my Tinder experiences!).
I learned it the hard way last year, but Tinder was not the right place for me to meet that someone. And if I think about it, that should have been obvious simply by design. I’ve always forged stronger friendships and relationships with people who I have common interests with, and who relate to some aspect of my life whether that be school, work, uni – even cancer treatment.
Nine times out of ten on dating apps, the only thing that I had in common with my matches was that we were both looking for someone to talk to, and that’s about as deep as it went. Sounds cliché, but sometimes you need to stop looking and then you’ll find it right under your nose!