Guy i just started dating gets sick

In the first few blissful months of a relationship, there’s a lot of firsts.

They’re awkward. They’re exciting. They’re new.

But they’re often not ‘first trip to the oncologist’, or, ‘first round of chemo’, or, ‘first time we found out that I’ve got terminal cancer and only a few months left to live’.

For 22-year-old Nathan and 22-year-old Yolanda, there was a lot of that in the first year they started dating.

“I knew I was sick but I didn’t realise I was that sick,” Yolanda told triple j’s sex and relationship program The Hook Up.

“I went to see some specialists, they did some tests and they were like, ‘oh it’s not quite adding up’. Then I had a biopsy done, and the test came back saying it was cancer, and unfortunately it was a bit bigger than they’d usually be able to cure.”

Meanwhile, Nathan and Yolanda had only just started dating - after meeting through uni and being friends for a few years first.

“Nathan came with me to all those appointments, thinking it was just benign, then it got worse and worse over time,” Yolanda says.

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“From a relationship standpoint, going through all of that together was quite strengthening,” Nathan said.

Yolanda says she felt like it wasn’t fair that Nathan was getting something he totally didn’t sign up for: a terminally ill girlfriend.

"I really just wanted to protect Nathan from the horrible mental drain that I foresaw him having. Cancer is really draining at the best of times.

“We’d only been going out for a few months and I said, if you need to bail on this, that’s totally fine.”

Nathan didn’t do a runner. He did the opposite (more on that below).

“I know where she’s coming from. But in my mind I was never going to leave,” Nathan says.

An exception to the rule

Nathan and Yolanda’s story is a pretty rare one, according to clinical counsellor and psychotherapist Lea Rose.

“It’s quite unusual for yolanda and Nathan at this age to stay together. I think that’s amazing what Nathan’s done,” Lea Rose told The Hook Up.

“The reality is that once you have a life threatening illness, it’s really hard to find a partner. That’s really, really a pretty big issue for most people.”

Lea says that people with a terminal illness tend to end up with people who are going through similar struggles.

“A lot of my clients, what they tend to do is date another person with a life threatening illness.

“When I used to work with teens with cystic fibrosis, they dated each other a lot. They understood each other, when they were hospitalised there was a lot of empathy, connection, both knew they had the same sort of life expectancy and they would make that journey together.

“The intimacy grew between them rather than the frustration of a partner who didn’t have a life-threatening illness and was trying to have a relationship with somebody that did.

But it’s not all bad news for people dating with a terminal illness. Lea says it can be a shortcut to intimacy, even if it ends up being short-lived.

“For me, I see the most intimacy is with people facing death. So the relationships that the partners have is extraordinary. They get that pretty quickly. They get connected to that pretty quickly.

What happened to Yolanda and Nathan?

In January last year, Nathan and Yolanda made it official and got hitched.

“It just gives me a lot of confidence in our relationship. It was really humbling that he chose to go through this really hard thing with me,” Yolanda says.

“It really gives you a reason to keep going. To have someone to wake up with, to have someone to share wonderful days with, it really helps give you energy to continue through chemo.”

“Initially they said [I had] a couple of months [to live]. Which was really really confronting, but I think it’s actually been about two years since. I think I’ve got about a year left,” Yolanda says.

“I know I wouldn’t be as emotionally healthy as I am now without Nathan, because his continuous, unwavering support has been so so amazing.”

Listen to Yolanda and Nathan on The Hook upHERE.