Featured on @StorylineReddit: November 15, 2025
There’s a particular kind of moral emergency that rearranges the furniture of a relationship overnight. A diagnosis. A phone call. A request no decent person wants to refuse.
In this story, compassion is the entry point. A fiancé’s ex-wife is sick. She says she has no one else. He goes. At first it feels straightforward book the flight, stay nearby, be present. The wedding date hovers in the background, adjustable, patient.
But emergencies stretch. What begins as support becomes relocation. A hotel turns into an apartment. A sofa becomes his bed. Skype calls thin out. The calendar is rewritten around treatment cycles instead of shared plans.
This isn’t only about kindness or cruelty. It’s about how urgency, once accepted, can start dictating the terms of a relationship and what happens when one partner is living inside that urgency while the other is left trying to understand it.
The visible conflict begins with illness, but the deeper strain comes from shifting loyalties and unshared decisions. An ex-wife reappears with a serious diagnosis and a request for companionship. The fiancé responds by rearranging his life around her treatment first temporarily, then in a way that begins to resemble permanence.
His fiancée tries to meet the moment generously. She supports the travel. She listens. Later, she proposes compromises: flight schedules, postponed honeymoons, even offering their spare bedroom. She attempts to keep the partnership intact while accommodating the crisis.
Meanwhile, daily life relocates. He is physically elsewhere. The wedding moves. Contact decreases. The relationship enters a kind of suspended animation.
The rupture arrives not with distance, but with disclosure. The severity of the illness had been overstated. The urgency that justified every adjustment was amplified. In that moment, the issue stops being geography and becomes credibility. What she agreed to was not the full story.
Text Version
[Repost]: My fiancé’s ex-wife has cancer. He’s moved in with her and postponed our wedding.
REPOST
I am NOT OOP. OOP is u/engagedthrowaway—-
Originally posted to r/relationships
Previous BoRU originally posted by u/Father-Son-HolyToast
[Repost]: My fiancé’s ex-wife has cancer. He’s moved in with her and postponed our wedding.
Editor’s note: added some relevant comments for more context that were not in the previous BoRU
Trigger Warnings: emotional manipulation, mentions of financial struggles, death of loved ones, emotional affair/infidelity, falsifying statements, gaslighting
Mood Spoilers: outrageous, sad
Original Post: August 24, 2015
My [26F] fiancé’s [28M] ex-wife [28F] has cancer. He’s moved in with her and postponed our wedding.
Apologies for length.
“Max” and I dated for two years and have been engaged for 9 months, with the wedding date set for early January. We have a healthy, honest relationship, and I’ve never had any reason to doubt him.
He and “Caroline” were high school sweethearts who married very young (They were both twenty-two, right out of college). They divorced after two years. Max told me that they got married too quickly and didn’t realise how different their relationship would be in the “real world,” i.e. when they were both working full-time jobs and struggling to pay the rent. They split up on good terms, but didn’t keep in touch. He remained in our home city, while she pursued a modelling career and began travelling extensively.
Three months ago, Caroline contacted Max over Facebook out of the blue, saying she was in town and wanted to meet for coffee. He agreed. Over coffee, she told him that she had recently been diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. Her odds of survival were low, but she was determined to fight it through surgery and chemo. She said that all she wanted was for Max to be by her side throughout her treatment.
Caroline’s parents died shortly after she married Max. She has no siblings and the rest of her family lives overseas. She described Max as the closest thing to family she has left.
I absolutely sympathise with Caroline. The next day Max had her over to our apartment and she was completely lovely, clearly trying very hard to be optimistic even in the face of her life potentially ending before she turns 30. I feel terrible for her and for the situation that she’s in, and I fully supported Max being there for her.
Her first surgery was later that month. Max flew across the country (we live on the east coast, she’s on the west) and checked into a hotel a few minutes from her apartment. He’s a writer, so working from his laptop is no issue. We spoke on the phone or on Skype almost every day for the two weeks he was over there.
Caroline had her surgery at the beginning of June. Unfortunately, it was not entirely successful. Her doctors moved to the next method, chemo.
Max came home after her surgery to tell me this. He explained that Caroline’s treatment plan was set to begin in July and end in late January. It would be an incredibly difficult time period for her, and she wanted him with her at all times.
We can’t afford to pay for a hotel until January, so he moved into her apartment, sleeping on her sofa. He’s been there for the past month and we continue to Skype, though only a couple times a week now. When we spoke yesterday, Max gently told me that based on Caroline’s condition, he wouldn’t feel right leaving her so close to the end of her treatment. He’d like for us to postpone the wedding until February, at the very least, so that he can stay with her until her treatment is over.
I’m so conflicted. I feel awful for resenting Caroline at all – she has cancer! She’s suffering immensely. But the resentment is still there. I resent her for needing Max constantly holding her hand, as though she has absolutely no friends of her own. I resent Max, too, for agreeing to this situation. We won’t be seeing each other in person for months now, on top of our wedding being postponed.
I don’t know what to do. I have no idea how I’m supposed to feel. Right now I’m just full of anger and guilt, and I don’t know how to explain it to anyone else in my life.
tl;dr: Fiance has moved in with his ex-wife to support her during chemo, postponing our wedding as a result. Am I wrong to feel resentful? Is there a better way of handling this?
Edit: Everyone seems to be in agreement that this is a completely inappropriate (if incredibly sad) situation that Max isn’t handling very well. I’ll speak to him either tonight or tomorrow, whenever we Skype next, and tell him in no uncertain terms that I want him to come home. From there, we can decide what to do, since I don’t want to leave Caroline high and dry. But him living there until February is out of the question.
Relevant Comments
Commenter 1: You have the right to resent Max, he picked his ex-wife over his fiance.
He may ‘feel’ like he has a responsibility to her but he has a responsibility to his future wife. He is asking you to put your life on hold for his ex-wife.
You absolutely have the right to feel angry about this.
Can you see yourself marrying him after this?
OOP: Honestly, I don’t know. Part of me feels like I should admire him, as in “Oh, look at how selfless he’s being for her.” But the other part is thinking, “But what about me?”
I want him to come home. But am I really going to demand that he leave his dying ex-wife alone?
Before he left, he said, “We’ve got our whole lives to spend together. She might only have a year.”
Commenter 2: He’s intending on living with his ex until February?
And you are to do what? Just wait?
No, your resentment and discomfort is not wrong.
I feel intense sympathy for her, for your partner, absolutely. Death is a terrifying cold thing.
But he’s supposed to be with you. It was not her right to ask him to be with her as a husband is through this horror.
(Did she ask you?)
My fear is…okay, so February comes, her chemo’s done, now she’s weak and miserable from chemo. Is he going to leave her then, feeling like that?
He should not have asked you over Skype. He should have been there in person.
When is the next time you are supposed to see him?
OOP: We’re not in a bad place financially, but we just couldn’t afford a plane ticket every month. We’ve been trying to save up to buy a house after the wedding, not to mention the cost of the wedding itself.
So to answer your question: End of January or early February. That’s when I’ll be seeing him in person, according to his plan.
Commenter 2: So…just before the wedding? He expects to spend all this time away from you and then just marry you, without you getting any warming-up time to get to remember what it’s like to be close to him? Without him getting any cooling down time after having lived like a husband with this other woman for most of a year?
That would be entirely unacceptable to me.
OP, I can’t figure out a way to phrase this delicately, so I hope that you will forgive me my bluntness.
If this relationship ends, are you going to be financially ok? The emotional stuff is one thing (this has to be incredibly difficult, and I admire your composure!) but just in terms of strictly physical, if he says “I’m old enough to love her the way I wanted to when we were younger,” and give up on marrying you, are you going to be able to make it?
I hope that you’re saving something aside for yourself. Something not in the joint account, if there is one.
OOP: Trust me, I’m feeling far from composed right now. But thank you.
If we’re looking at the absolute worst case scenario – the relationship ending – then the money that we’ve saved for the wedding and the house could be split between us. That’s the only money we’ve got in a joint account right now. Otherwise, we keep individual accounts. So I should have enough to remain on my feet if I end up on my own.
I really hope it doesn’t come to that.
Commenter 3: I feel horribly crass saying this, but I can’t imagine them living together, as former lovers, near the possible end of her life, and them not sleeping together at some point. Admittedly, she’ll be in an awful physical state, but it’s such an emotionally-charged situation that it’s highly likely. It might be a good idea to schedule a couple sessions with an experienced relationship and grief counselor because it’s an unusual problem, and if handled inappropriately it could end your relationship. EDIT: changed ‘marriage’ to ‘relationship’
OOP: I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought that. But I hated myself for even considering it. Max has never given me a reason to doubt him, and Caroline’s intentions seemed innocent.
But I have no idea what state she’s in now. The only time I met her was back when she visited our apartment.
Commenter 4: I think all of you painting Caroline as if she did something wrong are stupid. Max deserves 100% of the blame. Caroline is allowed to ask whoever she wants whatever she wants to ask them.
Max is allowed to say “no, ex-wife, I won’t leave my wife-to-be for you, not now, not ever”, and not face any judgement, because what an absurd thing that is to do.
OP, I don’t know how you can possibly recover from this one. You are not selfish to leave this relationship. You are not selfish to tell him he comes home right now or it’s over. You’re not selfish to resent him or her for what they’ve put on you, but you should make sure you understand that HE is 100% to blame for this. He, at every moment along this path, should’ve taken a look around and realized he was engaged to you, not her, and it is not his fault that she has no one closer than him.
Also, he’s literally living with his ex-wife. Can you imagine any circumstance where a guy leaves his fiancee to live with his ex-wife and they aren’t, at the very least, cuddling and extremely emotionally intimate?
I’d be done with him, if I was you, what an obscenely selfish man.
OOP: … Wow. I needed to read that.
You’re right. Seeing so many people in agreement – that Max and Caroline (though mostly Max) are being selfish – has decided me.
I’ll speak to him tonight or tomorrow and give an ultimatum. Either he comes home, or we need to rethink our relationship.
Update: August 25, 2015 (next day)
[Update] My [26F] fiancé’s [28M] ex-wife [28F] has cancer. He’s moved in with her and postponed our wedding.
Original post here.
First off, thank you all so much for your advice and words of support. I?m sorry that I couldn?t reply to every comment, reply, or PM that I got, but I woke up to a locked post and over 100 unread messages. I promise, I did read through every one of them. Each perspective was incredibly helpful and made me look at the situation in a completely different way. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
I spoke to Max this morning. I told him that as terrible as I feel for Caroline, I don’t want him living over there until February. I suggested that we brainstorm some sort of schedule that allowed him to continue visiting her, even postponing our honeymoon and using that money to fund his plane tickets. Several commenters brought up her moving over here for treatment, so I mentioned that as well, offering up our spare bedroom. I emphasised that I didn’t fault him for wanting to help an old loved one in what could be her final days, but that I couldn’t help but feel marginalised, especially so close to our wedding.
Max didn’t speak very much, just listened while I rambled on. When I couldn’t think of anything else to add, I asked him to please say something.
So he told me the truth: Caroline was never stage 4. She was stage 2.
He assured me that the rest of his story is true. Caroline asking him to be with her, the initial surgery being unsuccessful, her chemo treatment plan, etc. But apparently her chances of survival are far greater than he led me to believe.
Max said he lied because he felt it was the only way I could understand his need to be with her. He thought that if her situation seemed less dire than literal life-or-death, I wouldn’t agree to him essentially moving across the country for her.
He admitted to telling her that our wedding had been postponed to next August, giving her the impression that him being away until February would be no problem. He has also been the one insisting on remaining by her side. After her surgery, she had given him permission to return home, saying that it wouldn’t be fair to pressure him into living with her throughout her entire chemo treatment, as much as she would have liked him there. He refused to leave. He told her that I supported this decision fully.
Max swears that he’s not in love with her still, but I just can’t believe that. He lied to my face. Before she visited our apartment back in May, he warned me not to mention her being stage 4 as she was still “extremely sensitive about it.” And I completely bought into that lie. I trusted him.
He put his past with her over his future with me. I’ll be spending the next few months apartment hunting and cancelling wedding plans.
Thank you all for your kind words.
tl;dr: Confronted fiance. He misrepresented his ex-wife’s illness so that he could spend time with her. It’s over.
Edit: I’m blown away by the outpouring of support I’m receiving. I wish I could respond to each of you individually. Thank you so, so much. This is a wonderful community, and I truly appreciate all of your thoughts.
Relevant Comments
Commenter 1: Oh my God, i am so sorry. What a turd. You on the other hand, handled this beautifully.
Please lean on the people close to you in this time. Or lean on us! I know you don’t think it right now, but you’re going to be ok.
Many internet hugs being sent your way.
OOP: Thank you. I just feel like such an idiot. All this time, and I never once questioned his story. I never even saw Caroline – he told me that she was too embarrassed by her appearance to join in on our Skype calls. I just took him at his word.
How did Max take the breakup?
OOP: He kept apologising to me, not very sincerely. He just sounded tired, and when I said that I’d be moving out as soon as possible he replied, “That’s probably for the best.” The one thing he asked for was my ring, which I agreed to mail to Caroline’s address.
I’m realising that he checked out of this relationship a while ago.
What about the ring? Is it an heirloom? Does OOP need to return that?
OOP: No, it’s not an heirloom. We picked it out together.
I couldn’t sell it. Anything I bought with that money, I’d never be able to look at without thinking of him. I’m more than happy to return the ring to him because it’s a no-strings-attached way of getting it out of my life. Hopefully, it can be a nice reminder to him of me and why our relationship ended.
OOP can leave the ring on that counter and let Max deal with it
OOP: I might send it addressed to Caroline and include a note explaining to her why things ended between me and Max. Many people here are saying that she deserves to know the truth, since his lies were crafted around her illness.
Commenter 2: This is a very good idea, but I would be concerned about Max intercepting it and making sure she never sees it.
OOP: Good point. I could always ask a friend of mine to send it on my behalf, so that it won’t be our apartment on the return address.
But this is probably wishful thinking. I should just leave it on the counter and move on.
OOP’s plans now that she has end her engagement to Max
OOP: I intend to go no contact with him, but I might send Caroline some sort of note. She’s been completely innocent throughout all of this and she deserves to know the truth, which I doubt he’s told her.
Source
At first glance, his decision reads as loyalty. A former partner is frightened and alone; he shows up. There is something recognizably human about that impulse. She, too, wants to be humane. Her resentment is threaded with shame. How do you compete with cancer?
Then the arrangement stabilizes. He works from her apartment. He sleeps on the sofa. The wedding shifts to February. Calls move from daily to a couple of times a week. Months pass without seeing each other.
No declarations. Just logistics.
She suggests alternatives. A rotation of visits. Using honeymoon money for flights. Moving the ex into their spare bedroom. She keeps searching for a structure that includes her. He listens. He doesn’t offer much back.
And then abruptly the scale changes. Stage 4 becomes stage 2. The life-or-death frame narrows. He says he told her it was worse because otherwise she wouldn’t understand why he needed to stay.
That sentence does more damage than the move across the country.
He told his ex the wedding was postponed until August. He told his fiancée she fully supported staying through chemo. He managed both narratives carefully, adjusting details depending on the audience. It is possible he believed he was protecting everyone from unnecessary pain. It is also true that he decided what each woman was allowed to know.
After that, the energy drains. His apology sounds tired. When she says she’ll move out, he answers, “That’s probably for the best.” He asks for the ring back.
There’s no explosion. Just a thinning out of shared future tense.
What he was reaching for on that sofa duty, unfinished attachment, an exit that didn’t require confrontation never quite gets named. And maybe it doesn’t have to.
