How Infertility Did (or Did Not) Influence “Our Marriage”

A number of people have asked me to explore this topic. (And by “a number” I mean “three.” Just keepin’ it real). In each of these requests, there seemed to be an underlying assumption that it made our marriage better, since we’re still together and happy.

How did your experience with infertility strengthen your marriage?

I keep trying to write about how our two-year struggle to conceive a child influenced our marriage, for better or worse, but I keep failing.

The first reason I keep failing,  I think, is because I have a hard time identifying this entity known as “our marriage.”

(You’d think I would have nailed it by now, given that I’ve been writing about it for over two years, right?)

All I can see is my life, and my life involves a lot of Ben because we had this wedding ceremony six years ago and now we live together. We eat together, sleep together, watch movies together, hang out with friends together, and take care of each other when we’re sick or hurt. We socialize together, we have sex with each other and we have a lot of conversations. We have promised to keep doing these things together for the rest of our lives.

When we’re not together, we text each other updates about how we’re doing and ask questions about our plans for the evening. I spend a lot of time writing about this life of ours, and I spend a lot of time cooking meals for us to share and cleaning the house that we share. So like I said, my life involves a lot of this guy.

What part of that life, though, constitutes “our marriage”? The sum of all our interactions? How is “our marriage” distinct from other parts of my life, since most of my daily activities trace back to Ben or our home in one way or another?

I guess you might rephrase it, “How did the experience of infertility affect life with Ben?”

Well, it sucked, and it was hard, and I cried a lot. It sucked for Ben mostly insofar as it meant his wife cried a lot. He felt very helpless, but not especially broken up about the lack of children.

So how did all that crying and suckiness change life with Ben?

I’m not sure.

Well, before our struggle with infertility, our main source of conflict and anxiety was Ben’s unhappiness with work. He just didn’t feel satisfied as an employee . . . he wanted to work on his own. I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t really want him to break out on his own – I was afraid it would flop and we’d be poor. I was scared. I wanted to have kids. I kept trying to talk him out of it. I guess you could say it was hard on “our marriage” if by that you mean we spent a lot of our time together arguing. But we also still talked a lot and had fun together, and eventually he started his own business anyway and it went really well.

Around that time is when we started realizing that the baby thing wasn’t quite working out as planned. Ben was quite satisfied with life, but I was becoming anxious. Now it was his turn to not understand. What was the big deal? We’d probably have kids eventually. And if not? Well, we’d see  . . . it just wasn’t something he thought about that much.

The most important thing I learned from that experience, in terms of relationships, was how important it was to have female friends who understood. Ben just couldn’t appreciate how important this whole motherhood thing was to me. And that was OK. There were women out there who did. So while Ben and I talked about it often, and he tried his best to be sympathetic, I dealt with my sorrow mostly by connecting with mothers and non-mothers who got it. It was other women who really helped me through it.

And out of nowhere all of a sudden last December I got pregnant.

So I can’t say with any confidence that our dark walk through infertility together either drew us closer together or made us drift apart. I’m not sure what it did. We just kept eating meals together and brushing out teeth together and talking, talking, talking. He watched me shed a lot of tears and gave me lots of bewildered hugs. Kind of like how I would pat his hand and tell him I loved him when he was going through his Thing about work.

I’m sorry that I can’t provide a better answer about how the experience influenced our marriage. My story can’t really help you out if you’re going through a similar struggle, because I’m not sure exactly what we did right, if anything.

This is why I don’t offer marriage advice.

We just kept doing life together, caring for each other, and acting out that promise we made to keep doing things together.

I guess that’s the closest thing to advice I can offer: when life is hard — and it will be — just keep doing life together. I guess that’s my definition of marriage.

Image courtesy of Kejadlen.