Chronic illness is no doubt a deal-breaker for many people.

On DateHookup.com, the question of whether people would date someone with a chronic illness has come up more than one time in the forums. Some would if they really liked the person. Some would if the disease or illness wasn’t contagious. Some have and realized it was too much for them and won’t again. And then there are people like the person in the forum who wrote, “No, no, and no!!” and explained that she doesn’t want anyone to interfere with her active life.

Freelance writer Sascha Rothchild, in an article on Match.com, considered the question of whether she’d date a chronically ill person. She wrote, “Was I really willing to step into a relationship with someone with health issues when love is hard enough healthy?” In her case, she was, but clearly not everyone is. Or, if they are willing to take the leap, find it too difficult later. There is a statistic—“75 percent of marriages dealing with a chronic illness end in divorce”—that floats around forums and sites like About.com and Focus on the Family, but I was unable to find its origin.

Some people just don’t want to end up caregivers or to mix “that world and this world,” as the girlfriend put it in the film “50/50”—starring Joseph Gordon Levitt as a cancer patient. Others nip the idea in the bud, since they can’t imagine losing someone they love to a disease (even though 7 out of 10 deaths in the United States are from disease according to a report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

These are often the objections the chronically ill face from people who aren’t sick. Karen Swindells, 27, who has epilepsy, says a guy once dumped her right after she had a major brain surgery intended to reduce her seizures.

“He felt like nothing positive was going on in my life at that time,” said Swindells, who works at a college bookstore and is now married. “He couldn’t handle it. It was too much. Too depressing.”

Swindells has up to 10 seizures a month, which is nothing compared to the 15 to 40 she had every day before her brain surgery at age 17. A few have been major, but most are small and stop her functioning for no longer than a few minutes. After she has one, she’s often too tired to do much else, which has ended dates and prevented sexual activity.

How guys responded to her illness in the past helped Swindells separate the quality from the non-quality, though, as she reversed the deal-breaker onto them, using her illness to determine if they were the type she wanted around when things go wrong.

“If my time were cut short, were they the one I wanted to know was by my side or could I trust that they would be?” Swindells asked. “Or if I was left impaired from a seizure, were they someone who would love me enough to stick by and take care of me no matter what? I knew that whoever I married would have to be someone that could be emotionally strong themselves but also for me. It makes the words ‘til death do us part’ have even more meaning.”