Read Intimacy and Birth Control After Cancer: Part 1 here.
This blog is about recovery. This is how I am finding my way back. Now comes the part that is more uncomfortable to talk about.
It started slowly with a question. “What do you like?” he asked one evening after sipping a couple whiskies, perhaps some liquid courage. Whatever the reason for his question, I must give complete credit to my husband. He raised a metaphorical white flag and crossed the sexual picket line. He simply asked without judgment what I wanted and what I was ready for. And I told him.
What I needed most was emotional intimacy. I needed to feel that he cared about what I was going through. I needed affection, kisses, and hand holding before I could jump back into a physical relationship. What I didn’t tell him was that before I opened myself up again to that physical closeness, I needed to trust that he loved me enough to be able to see my now much changed body and still feel attraction as opposed to judgement or disgust.
We started small. Instead of sitting on opposite ends of the couch, we sat next to each other. We had a couple embarrassing but open conversations about “what we like” and more importantly what we each didn’t like. In almost ten years together, we had never just answered those simple questions.
Knowing birth control was a trigger for both of us, when we did become physical, we stayed away from activities that could cause pregnancy, not wanting to trigger conflict or add any anxiety or stress to my already stressful life. We focused instead on kissing and touching. I found to my surprise that, relatively quickly, I was ready for more.
Our birth control challenges required us to get creative and we both agreed that given our extraordinary challenges, it was time we trust each other enough to step outside our comfort zones. For the first time in our relationship, we found new ways to be intimate. I will spare the gory details but I will admit sometimes our attempts led to shocking levels of pleasure and sometimes it ended with us laughing and agreeing “we won’t do this again”. To our surprise, we found there were far more intimate and to some extent more satisfying ways to create physical connection than “doing the deed”.
Every cancer journey is different and every couple is different. I’m sure what worked for us will not necessarily work for every one. The important thing, I think, is that at whatever point a survivor finds themselves rebooting the physical connection with their partner, they must stay well within what they are physically and emotionally capable of. Most of all they must maintain an open and non-judgmental dialog between both partners.
My husband and I are early in our reconnection. We have a long way to go before we are back where we were before. As with everything in post cancer life, rebuilding that connection takes hard work. It takes trust between partners and dedication to the relationship. There are rough patches and days where we both retreat into our corners to cope with this new post cancer life in our own ways. But there are also days when our connection shines brightly and our future seems full of healthy promise.
We have not yet resolved our birth control problems. There are some problems that only time will solve. Hormonal birth control will never be a safe option for me again. Perhaps someday I will be physically ready for a tubal ligation or maybe someday he will be comfortable with a vasectomy. In the meantime we must build back our physical and emotional connection creatively and very carefully. As with everything having to do with cancer there will be victories and there will be failures but, at least in this case, the trying is pretty fun.
