Can You Still Find Me?
Updated: Aug 5
On the Interior of Intimacy Under Illness
“Since I got cancer, intimacy has disappeared from my relationship.”
Patients have said versions of this to me many times. And there are understandable reasons why physical intimacy may change after cancer enters a relationship.
Illness and treatment can bring fatigue, nausea, pain, neuropathy, and changes to the body. Time becomes organized around appointments and medications. Couples find themselves learning medical language they never imagined needing to know.
Roles change, too. One partner may need to receive care while the other takes on more responsibility for providing it. Without fully realizing when it happened, two people who once knew themselves primarily as partners may begin relating to one another as patient and caregiver.
There may be little energy—or room—left for being lovers.
At first, I understood this to mean a loss of physical intimacy. Given everything cancer asks of the body and the relationship, that seemed explanation enough. But the more I listened, the less certain I became that physical closeness was the only thing that had gone missing.
Had intimacy disappeared—or had it become harder to recognize?
Physical closeness is one expression of intimacy. Intimacy is also the experience of being seen, known, and reached toward by another person.
Cancer can change how we look. It can also change how we imagine we’re being looked at.
A gaze that once felt loving may now be interpreted as worried. A touch that once communicated desire might become associated with tending to pain, checking an incision, or helping with something the body can no longer do alone. The body itself can begin to feel less like a place of connection and more like the place where cancer happened.
Many people living with cancer tell me, “I don’t recognize myself anymore.”
From an early age, we come to know something about who we are through the ways other people reflect us back to ourselves. We see ourselves in their faces, their words, their attention, and the ways they move toward us.
When those familiar reflections change, it can become harder to find ourselves.
A partner may say:
“I still see you.”
“I still love you.”
“I’m still drawn to you.”
The person living with cancer may know those words are sincere and still be unable to take them in.
How can I believe what you see when I no longer recognize it in myself?
Perhaps intimacy after cancer doesn’t begin with wanting to return to who we were before. Cancer may have changed too much for that. Nor does it require us to rediscover ourselves alone before allowing another person to come close.
Sometimes we need another person’s loving recognition to help us find ourselves under the weight of cancer.
Intimacy might begin by allowing two truths to exist together:
I cannot yet see myself as you see me.
And perhaps I can let you keep looking.
The question beneath the loss of intimacy might not only be, Do you still love me? Or even, Do you still desire me?
It may be:
Can you still find me beneath everything cancer has changed?
And perhaps the more vulnerable question:
Can I let you?
Reflections on the inner psychological experience of living alongside cancer.
Jae L. Ross, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist who works with individuals and families whose lives have been reshaped by cancer, helping them navigate the emotional challenges of diagnosis, treatment, and beyond.
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