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. 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 H.