The list of issues that can strain a marriage or romantic partnership is endless: financial worries, illness, unemployment, relationships with in-laws. But the pain of infertility, with its unique emotional whiplash and heartbreak, is truly unlike anything else.
Trying to get pregnant, with or without medical intervention, cleaves your life into four-week cycles. For two weeks each month, you joyfully anticipate the possibility that this will be the time. Then a negative pregnancy test, or the arrival of your period, shatters your hopes, which you spend the next two weeks dutifully scraping back together in order to try again. And the cycle repeats — for months, for years, twisting and turning with miscarriages or failed IVF procedures, the thread of your life pulled from your hands and charting a course you cannot control.
Studies show that the stress of infertility is equivalent to that of having cancer. The toll that all of this takes on a marriage is intense, and the outcome is different for every couple.
HuffPost spoke with a number of people who have faced, or are currently facing, infertility. While their individual stories all differed, several common themes emerged.
Sex loses its spontaneity and joy
Achieving a pregnancy and giving and receiving pleasure are two separate goals, and they aren’t always in alignment. Since timing is so critical to conception, it’s not unusual for sex to become perfunctory, losing its romance.
“I turned my husband into my sperm donor,” Jennifer Hintzsche told HuffPost. “I pretended to make sex seem spontaneous for about three months. It grew transactional with every failed month of trying,” she said. “It’s hard to feel sexy when you feel like the thing that makes you a woman is broken and has failed you.”
Throughout the 16 months they spent trying to get pregnant (the couple now have a daughter), Hintzche’s longing for a pregnancy overshadowed the health of her marriage. “Looking back, I’m not proud of it, but at the time, I honestly didn’t care about anything else other than getting pregnant and becoming a mom,” she said. “It felt like each month might be my last egg.”
L’Oreal Thompson Payton, who lives in Chicago with her husband and child, told HuffPost that her attitude towards sex changed as soon as she began trying to conceive, before her diagnosis of infertility. “I was definitely a bit of a drill sergeant. I’d gone off birth control, downloaded a period tracker/ovulation tracker app and was adamant about following it to a T!”
She said receiving the infertility diagnosis and beginning treatment actually improved this part of their lives. “It sort of relieved that pressure now that we knew pregnancy was less likely to happen naturally.”
Hannah Gerber, a 34-year-old living in Denver, Colorado, told HuffPost that one plus to trying to conceive is that it keeps you having sex frequently. She and her husband, however, are wary of the impact it could have on their intimacy. “We’ve been intentional about that,” she said. “If it feels forced to have sex because I’m ovulating, that’s not an energy that we want to bring in, and we’ll just skip that month.” This has happened several times over the past five years, she said.
Stress pushes you apart
Partners can and do support each other through the pain of infertility, but the hardship can also drive a wedge between them — particularly when one person prioritises conception above all else, including the relationship.
“It took me three years and therapy to come to the realisation of the damage that was done to our marriage going through infertility and my role in that damage. I thought I was carrying the load for both of us, but in reality, I was isolating myself because it was so painful,” Hintzsche said.
Gerber said that she and her partner strive to communicate openly about their feelings, but sometimes her partner holds back because he doesn’t want to add to the pressure of an already stressful situation.
Gerber also believes that “more pressure is put on the woman by society as a whole. And so I’ve definitely felt resentful of that at times.” Physically, she has borne most of the load, with frequent doctor’s visits and blood draws, while her husband has only once had to provide a sample for a semen analysis.
It’s been “a tough thing to navigate, emotionally,” she said, having these feelings and “trying ... to not take that out on him, because it’s not his fault.”
Life gets put on indefinite hold
Gerber has been trying to get pregnant since she wed her husband in 2019. Had she known how difficult the road to conception was going to be, she said, “I would have given us six months to just enjoy our time as a newly-married couple.”
Given the chance for a do-over, she said, she would have “done whatever we wanted, and traveled probably more, and just really enjoyed each other.”
“Sometimes I have to mourn the fact that we have never had a normal marriage from that perspective,” Gerber said. The couple have delayed making travel plans, not knowing whether Gerber would be pregnant at the time of the trip. This “held us back probably from living a more joyful life,” she said.
Tough decisions can lead to consequential disagreements
Most people have, at least in theory, a line in the sand when it comes to the path to parenthood. They might be willing to try actively for only so many years, open to only certain medications or procedures, willing or not to consider surrogacy, egg donation or adoption. But that line in the sand tends to shift over time. Not infrequently, couples find themselves no longer on the same page about how to proceed.
“Infertility made us have questions that I had never thought about,” Hintzsche said. “Should we get divorced if we couldn’t have children? He deserved to be a dad — so maybe if I left him, he would get the life he deserved ... I didn’t know how to have a future if it wasn’t the future we planned together.”
Sandra W., a mother in California who asked that her last name be withheld, thought that she and her husband were in agreement about potentially pursuing adoption. After two miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy, Sandra W. was exploring alternative treatment options. She also assumed that they would begin to explore ways to adopt. But it turned out her husband was no longer on board with that plan.
This amplified the pressure Sandra W. felt to find a way for her body to achieve and maintain a pregnancy. “I had a lot of angst at the time. I had a lot of resentment,” she said. The couple were able to work through this conflict in therapy, and Sandra W. eventually gave birth to their son, who is now a teen.
The therapist is someone they saw early on in their relationship and have continued to consult with from time to time in the years since. “We’ve had other things in our marriage that have come up, and we just go right back to her,” Sanda W. said, adding that she feels lucky to be married to someone who is “willing to work on a marriage that way.”
You can forge a stronger, more resilient partnership
In spite of all this struggle, many couples identify a significant upside to having confronted the challenges of infertility: their partnership grew stronger.
Gerber said she and her husband have “been able to learn to anticipate what the other person needs.” For example, “We just found out that my friend is having her third child since we started trying, and I don’t have to say, ‘I need support’, like ‘I need a hug.’ He just comes and envelops me, and knows that I just need to have a cry before I get to the happiness and excitement for my friend.”
These repeated experiences of facing hardship can have the cumulative effect of building resilience.
“We were brought to the lowest depths of our marriage during our years of infertility treatment,” Abbe Feder, a mother of twins in Los Angeles, told HuffPost. “Ultimately I can say without a doubt it made us stronger. I feel with certainty that there is nothing we can’t get through.”
This strength, however, was hard-won. “It took patience, hard work, therapy, and growth,” Feder said, but these gains became “the building blocks for parenting and the rest of our marriage.”
Thompson Payton also credited the survival of her marriage in part to the therapy she and her husband received to help them through infertility.
“Thanks to therapy, we’d learn how to communicate more openly, honestly and deeply with each other, which certainly improved our marriage overall. If it weren’t for the couples’ therapy and experiencing infertility together (amid a pandemic, no less!), I’m not sure we’d be as close as we are today (a few months away from celebrating our 10-year wedding anniversary),” she said.
Thompson Payton and her husband have returned to couples therapy as parents in order to keep their marriage strong: “We actually picked up couples’ therapy again about six months or so after our daughter was born, and we were adjusting to our new roles as parents, in addition to being partners. It’s so easy to lose your way and lose yourself in raising your child together that you forget about your partner,” she said.
Sandra W. and her husband turned a corner in their marriage, with their therapist’s help, after their son was born. Sandra W.’s mother-in-law was being very demanding about seeing her grandchild, and, at their therapist’s urging, her husband stood up for his wife and told his mother that he and Sandra W. would decide when she could see the baby. “That made a huge difference in our marriage, that he did put us first,” she said. “It meant the world to me. It changed a lot.”