Our new Lifetime movie, "Matters of Life and Dating," about a woman dealing with breast cancer and looking for Mr. Right, got us wondering how women with this disease find the strength and guts to look for love while battling such a serious illness. So, we decided to reach out to those who have faced this situation head on. Here's what they had to say...

The first time Cathy Bueti ever spent the night with her new boyfriend, she woke up to find huge clumps of her hair on his pillow. Almost half of it had fallen out overnight.

He kept saying, "It's fine, it's fine."

But the look on his face was pure horror.

When Bueti returned home there was an e-mail from him: "I really like you," he wrote, "but I just can't handle this."

Dating with breast cancer often means trying to feel feminine without your breasts. Or your hair. It means facing your worst fears: What if no one will ever love me?

So why do women with breast cancer throw themselves into the singles scene at one of the most difficult times in their lives? According to Dr. Carol L. Kornmehl, a board-certified radiation oncologist and author of "The Best News About Radiation Therapy," when a breast cancer patient dates, "She can feel that she is living with cancer, not dying from cancer."

Case in point: While 41-year-old Marlane Bochino of Connecticut was battling breast cancer, she rekindled a relationship with a man she'd dated previously. He was a cancer survivor himself. "He kept reassuring me, made me feel comfortable. He said, ‘You shouldn't feel bad, you're just as beautiful as you were two years ago.' The support was empowering."

Other breast cancer patients weren't so lucky in love. Camille Coke, 38, had been dating her boyfriend for more than a year when she was diagnosed. "He came to see me in the hospital once, and that was the last time I saw him," she says.

Of course Coke was disappointed, but she didn't let it get her down, and decided to start dating again. She was upfront about her cancer status with all of her dates. The result? Most didn't handle it well. For instance, after spending 15 minutes on the phone with one man, working up the courage to tell him about her mastectomy, all she heard on the other end of the line was silence. Coke says, "He'd fallen asleep, or he was faking sleep."

Eventually, she met someone who was supportive. "We've been intimate," says Coke, who completed treatment last month in Miami. "He's not afraid to touch me, not afraid of what I look like."

Bueti, now 38 and cancer-free, also found happiness. After a string of progressively bad boyfriends, she met Lou online. "I didn't have any eyelashes or eyebrows, and I thought, I'm just going to be really upfront with him. I told him I had cancer and asked him if he still wanted to date me."

Lou, who had recently lost his mother to breast cancer, wasn't scared off. The two fell in love and got married on May 31, 2003 — the two-year anniversary of Bueti's breast cancer diagnosis. She says, "The marriage replaced a really bad time in my life with a happy one."

All of the women in this article had horrible dating experiences: They dated men who freaked out, who watched "Wrestlemania" on TV while they packed for the hospital, who told them nobody else would have them. But all of them persevered with hope and allowed themselves to redefine what they believed about their own beauty.

Watch the movie "Matters of Life and Dating," about a woman dealing with her love life and breast cancer (inspired by a true story) on Lifetime. It premieres October 22 at 9 pm et/pt.

Lisa Daily is the author of "Stop Getting Dumped!" and "Fifteen Minutes of Shame."

Cathy Bueti tells her story in "Breastless in the City: A Young Woman's Story of Love, Loss and Breast Cancer."

Camille Coke has a blog called "Open Your Mind, Open Your Life!" where she talks about her experience with breast cancer. You can find it at coke-izzit.blogspot.com.