Should you reveal health history on a date?
Q: I’m 66 and have been widowed for five years. I haven’t had much luck with online dating sites and actually had one particularly bad date. But my real question is how to reveal my breast cancer history, which required a mastectomy 12 years ago. I was not a candidate for breast reconstruction.
You can hide the loss of a breast in photos and even when clothed, if you try, but I decided to be upfront about it when I meet someone and they ask me to talk about myself. I think my ability to survive five months of chemo followed by radiation treatments shows my strength and resilience.
Still, some men are immediately turned off, especially if they lost their wife to breast cancer and fear the possibility of going through that again.
How would you suggest I reveal this part of my history?
—Janet, South Carolina
A: When dating at our age, it’s tempting to zip through all the get-to-know-each-other steps so we can land at the finish line: a committed partnership. After all, we want to know before investing precious time if our health and medical issues are a dealbreaker.
But how can we know if the stranger on the other end of the phone line or table is worthy of receiving such personal information?
I’m in favor of a slow reveal, but I may be in the minority. I believe first-date conversations should be back-and-forth exchanges instead of your-turn monologues, and lately, when I go on dates, I’ve been riffing on a storytelling card deck.
Asking something like “Tell me about a time in your life where you had to prove your strength and resilience” would be a great way to get to know your date a bit better while offering an opening to reveal your cancer history.
Maybe you could also mention losing a breast — but I wouldn’t. I’d save that detail until you’re at the point where you’re ready to have a conversation about engaging in sexual intimacy.
By the way, it’s likely the men you’ll meet also have health issues that they’re wondering when to reveal.
To help answer your question, I asked followers of the Dating While Gray Facebook page to offer their thoughts. Rich, 75, met Karen, 72, on a dating app. After a few dates, she told him she’d been diagnosed with lymphoma and was in remission. But her chemotherapy treatments had damaged her immune system, making her susceptible to infections.
“Karen said she told me in case it was important to me,” Rich said. “I appreciated her honesty and openness, so I said, ‘Let’s continue dating and see how it goes.’”
More than three years later, they’re still together. “At my age, health is just a crapshoot,” Rich said. “Who knows what may happen?”
A 66-year-old man who wants to remain anonymous told me he believes “If someone has a major disability — physical or mental — they should reveal it as soon as possible, before the first date. They don’t have to put it in their profile, and they don’t have to go into detail, but they should provide some indication” of the issue, he said. Of course, your issue isn’t a “major disability.”
Tina, 53, is also on the side of sooner rather than later. “It’s something that comes up pretty quickly for me,” she said. “I’ll say, ‘I’m diabetic. What do you have?’”
Tina prefers to move quickly from an online connection to a telephone conversation before deciding whether to actually meet in person. It’s on the phone when she mentions her diagnosis.
“No one’s ever said they don’t want to date a diabetic,” Tina said. “I’ve met a lot of veterans who told me they have PTSD. That’s a dealbreaker only if they don’t believe in therapy.”
Two readers had other responses to the question. One, Amy, admitted that she and her boyfriend, who is three years younger than she is, might not have committed to a relationship had they known their medical future.
“In the almost five years we’ve been together, he’s had cancer, and I’ve had five major surgeries,” she said. “We’ve asked each other if we would have continued seeing each other if we knew what lay ahead. We both agree, we would have thought twice.”
A widow named Susaya shared that her “first husband was the strongest, healthiest person I knew, and he died at 56 of cancer. So the lesson is, you just don’t know.”
Now Susaya is remarried to a man with heart and knee issues, but his health doesn’t really get in the way.
“He’s not as active as I had hoped for in a partner, but he’s doing what he needs to do to improve his health. As long as someone is capable of joy and fun to be around, that’s all I care about.”
Laura Stassi is host of the podcast Dating While Gray: The Grown-Up’s Guide to Love, Sex and Relationships and author of Romance Redux: Finding Love in Your Later Years. Send your questions to Laura at newloveafter50@gmail.com.
