This one short sentence divides your life like the stroke of a sword.

Receiving a diagnosis of cancer can profoundly interfere with intimacy due to the fear, treatment ramifications, and changes in your body. Often our partners are confused about how to respond and both people are unable to express the depth of their feelings.

Having cancer can actually be an opportunity to become more loving and more intimate in your marriage as you learn how to share the experience in the context of emotional safety and the ability to be open. In the face of getting a serious diagnosis, what we all need is to be able to share the suffering that comes with it and know that our beloved is there for us because we need each other.

We are all inter-dependent beings who can hold each other's suffering.