Do Us Part
In the first months of our relationship, long before I got sick, my once lover told me she would never marry. She didn’t believe in the institution, didn’t want the pomp and public scrutiny, didn’t adhere in the sanctity — having watched her own parents cheat, didn’t know what to wear or care about the benefits.
In dating it is good to know, early on, what is off the table. By then, I already knew we could never have children, never live together long term, never meet her parents who already knew someone else as her lover of a decade and disapproved of their lifestyle. In the early months, I would only let her call me her “half girlfriend” because I had clear evidence that “girlfriend” for her meant the whole deal.
Two years into dating me, my lover married her wife, won over by love and logic: marriage would convince their families to recognize their future children, solidify this relationship over their others in the eyes of the state and their families, save them on future paperwork. I did not attend the ceremony. I was starting a new job, in a new city, celebrating my birthday alone, and I did not trust I could stand sincerely beside them in support of a legal agreement that disadvantaged me indefinitely. It took me an entire year to convince her that this was not merely a marriage between two people, but one whose effects ripped into our nascent relationship.
Instead of vows, my ever practical once-lover wrote me a “Motion of Endurance of Relationship”: both a love letter and a non-binding contract full of unenforceable commitments, sent in the two month silent separation we agreed to while her house was full of family who pretending I did not exist.
WHEREAS you make me excited and eager for all of the things I/we could achieve in life,
Marriage is complicated for disabled people. It can gain us health insurance or lose us Disability Assistance benefits (in Canada and in the U.S. advocates are still fighting this under the banner of “marriage equality”). Studies in the late-2000s and a slew of headlines sounded the alarm on husbands abandoning their sick wives at rates 6x higher than the normal divorce rate, but the data is more complicated. The oft-cited 2009 study looked only at brain tumors and multiple sclerosis; tangled up causation and correlation. The study found that patients with brain tumors who were divorced or separated were more likely to be hospitalized, and less likely to participate in clinical trials, receive multiple treatment regimes or die at home. It is hard to deduce if this means the sickest were more likely to be abandoned by their spouses, or if being partnered changes how the medical system treats you.
A more recent study using two decades of Health and Retirement survey data of Americans over 50, Karracker and Latham (2016) found divorce rates of straight marriages slightly higher when the wife gets a serious illness, with factors such as whether the husband holds the health insurance, remaining protective. Vignoli, Alderotti, and Tomassini (2025) study of 2004 - 2022 data from the European Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement, found higher rates of “silver splits” divorce among couples age 50-64 when the wife reporting poor health or faced activity limitations and the husband remained in good health.
WHEREAS you should not have to be so damn brave, and I should at the very least meet you halfway;
Leons and Lee (2018)’s Theory of Dyadic Illness Management sought to shift the study of illness management from individual research on the patient and care partner, to examine the two-person familial unit, how dyads collaborate and balance the needs of both partners, andcollective dyadic health (both mental and physical). It was part of a wave of research “examining the ‘black box’ of the household to understand the social dynamics between partners” (Vignoli, Alderotti, and Tomassini, 2025) and the impact of the well partner’s perception of the other’s condition.
To quote Shakespeare, “Marriage is a matter of more worth than to be dealt in by attorneyship.” Marriage, particularly for men, is strongly correlated with higher health outcomes in aging. For most health insurance polices, the only allowable “dependents” are spouses and children. Only when it comes to life insurance can you distribute the benefits of employment after death to designated recipients outside of the nuclear family.
WHEREAS you really have the shit end of the poly stick, loving someone who comes with all kinds of heavy baggage, with an already structured life, and with lots of existing hopes and dreams;
Like most wedding vows, my lover’s Motion for Endurance came before I truly got sick in the way that disrupts relationships and work; before the pandemic got us all sick and elevated the risk and burden of caretaking. It came not just with Whereas Clauses, but with Be It Resolveds: to strike a dyadic committee of Future Dreams for our relationship; to address financial inequities in our cross-class polycule that left me particularly vulnerable outside of marriage laws; to introduce me to her parents, in a “non-binding target of Q2” of the following year. It was less a contract and more a settlement offer: her best guess at what I would need to hear to not break up over her vows to someone else.
BE IT YET FURTHER RESOLVED that you don’t dump my ass, please and thank you.
In all the studies I read on divorce and disability, there was nothing on non-marriage breakups, despite good evidence that marriage rates for disabled women are lower; a combination of ableism and discriminatory public policy. A study based on the Canadian Community Health Survey found that, across all age brackets, disabled women were more likely to have never been married, with the highest rates for women with cognitive disabilities. Desirability and disability play out not just in attraction but in commitments; who is seen to be desirable to be publicly aligned with, who is seen as burdensome to commit to, with clear social hierarchies in what categories of disability are seen as a deformity or a detriment.
“The odds of being ‘single: never married’ and the odds of being ‘single: separated, divorced or widowed’ (vs married or common-law) were, respectively, 1.37x and 1.47x greater for disabled women, and 3.77x and 3.16x greater for disabled women with cognitive impairment, compared with non-disabled women.” Disabled women are also aging alone: 30% of disabled women and almost 50% of disabled women with cognitive impairment are single in their 50s, compared with less than 25% of non-disabled women, suggesting a higher rate of marriage dissolution.
Before I got sick, I was in high demand as a keynote speaker and moderator: the public face of a national research program on labour and inequality. In illness, I stopped speaking — publicly or privately. I couldn’t memorize speaking points, tie a narrative together, hold a pen, or stand unassisted at a podium. My quick mouth quicksanded in the Q+A portion of panels. My long distance lover told me she did not want to hear details of my condition for fear it would weigh her down with a request for help, and I was too sick to communicate well to anyone outside my sick bed, especially the specifics of a new-to-the-world virus wrecking havoc in my newly incomprehensible body. To quote Sontag, “Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.”
When I did return to public platform, it was predominantly as a disability researcher and advocate, not a technology or economic expert, prioritizing limited capacity for the most critical topics my medical professional peers were skirting. I presented my own medical file in grand rounds; gave talks on cognitive impairment as accomodation-requiring disability in the workplace; trained physiotherapists in their continuing education hours on safe(r) rehabilitation; lectured on organizational change management and recognizing the variable capacity of employees (whether married or single, disabled or well, intergenerationally wealthy or supporting family) to handle precarity and disruption.
BE IT YET FURTHER RESOLVED that do not let our relationship be uncertain and unsettled while the world unsettles around us.
In Quebec, even living together does not make you common-law without children so spousal support is uncommon in uncommon arrangements. Our cross-province break-up was both easier and harder than untangling a shared household and legal status; an easy parting made harder because she refused to use her words or acknowledge I was ill. We could simply disappear from each other’s lives, without explanation, without notifying the state or her family; friends partitioned down prior allegiances. Any agreements made (financial or social) were ephemeral and un-enforceable; any unfulfilled motions in her offer dissolved. Any lingering arguments travelled through intermediaries, without even a family law framework to ground us: be it resolved that my once lover has first right of refusal on all public events, so that she need not ever hear me speak about how illness levelled me, educate on disability’s social contagion, or advocate for those still sickened.
If, as Sontag writes,“TB is disintegration, febrilization, dematerialization; it is a disease of liquids—the body turning to phlegm and mucus and sputum and, finally, blood— and of air, of the need for better air. Cancer is degeneration, the body tissues turning to something hard,” then Long COVID is a poisoning or starvation. Patients often describe this symptomatically; the body embittered with heavy malaise. Medically: deformed blood cells, hypercoagulation, and impaired oxygen transmission can impair cellular waste removal, nutrient metabolism, and glucosal energy production. When the fatigue is deeper than bone, the sick know to pick their battles.
The Impairing Curse is a long-form, serialized experiment in personal essay, science journalism, policy analysis, and poetry. To start at the beginning and read it in order, go to the first essay or read about the aesthetics and labour of illness, the science of salt, and the failures of public health. To support this project, share it online or subscribe. The series is intentionally not behind a paywall, to ensure broad access to patients and timely circulation of information in our evolving public health crisis, but paid subscriptions are welcome
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