TL;DR My partner felt repulsed by me, he thought it was the end of our relationship, I panicked, we fought, we realized the repulsion was because he could smell my cancer.
So long story short, I have a cancer diagnosis and my partner became more and more phisically repulsed by me as time went on. He thought that the repulsion came from lack of feelings and attraction towards me and he proposed me to break up right when I was about to do chemotherapy for my illness, that broke me. Also since we are living in the same house and I am the one who pays for most things for the both of us, I insisted in seeing how things went. He justified the possible breakup with “I have been feeling the chemistry being off from the beginning but I stuck and the feeling didn’t leave.“ We have been together for a year or so.
After some very stressful weeks we came to an agreement and decided to make it work anyways at least until I am doing chemotherapy and he is getting help for the hashimoto syndrome he got diagnosed a few months ago. The physical repulsion he felt towards me stuck though and it only got worse, we tried to be intimate and it was terrible. That caused so many discussions because I just thought that he didn’t care about our relationship and that he had an immature view of how relationships work and he just felt like I was not respecting him in any way And going beyond his boundaries.
I was so stressed that I talked about this to my oncologist and I don’t know for what reason but the fact that my partner has a very good sense of smell popped up. Well, long story short the guy is a hound dog that has probably smelled cancer onto me from the third month of our relationship and from that point on his body went into fight or flight about it.
He can smell when people are about to get sick, he can smell when people are about to pass away days in advance, he can smell when a food is about to go bad extremely early. Yesterday when talking about this he even told me that he can smell if a person has their period which was confirmed by his friends (crazy stuff honestly). After doing some research with him we realized that the smell he started smelling onto me a few months into our relationship was the typical smell of cancer for people who can detect it in others, he wanted to break up with me at that three month mark where also doctors thought the Cancer reached stage 1.
We talked about it very deeply yesterday and he did tell me that the main problem he had was that being with me felt a little “sickly”, sex felt a bit ill, physical contact felt ill and so on, even before my cancer diagnosis, it started in September last year (when he wanted to break up with me). And now that I’m going through chemotherapy he says that kissing me is impossible because he feels like my saliva is contaminated, as said, he explained it to himself as a complete loss of feelings towards me, but now that we realized the fact that his repulsion is probably linked to my health his attitude changed. He is not excluding anything anymore and I’m not panicking about him being repulsed. We have made peace with the fact that we will have to wait and see what is going to happen after i get through chemo.
In the meantime though, the fights we had about this were terrible. We just started cussing at each other multiple times because he felt stuck and I felt completely abandoned in a sensitive time of my life. We are trying to rebuild trust and good boundaries but I’m afraid it’s not going to be enough.
I feel extremely angry about having realized this only now, because it Would have prevented many stressful moments in our relationship and I don’t really know how to repair what happened. We had so many fights and so many misunderstandings, I’m just afraid we can’t do much about it.
Does any of you have some advice?