By Dr. Clay Brigance, PhD, LPC
My wife and I began our fertility journey in 2017. I wish I could tell you that it was an easy process, but like so many other couples, it was not.
We struggled with our mental health, and we struggled in our marriage. The roller coaster of hope, loss, grief, and disappointment was unreal. There were moments of confusion, resentment, and emotional distance. Infertility could take over a room without either of us saying a word.
It was present in calendars, medical decisions, finances, intimacy, conversations with friends, and the future we had
imagined.
One of the hardest parts was how much we carried privately. From the outside, life looked ordinary. Yet “How are you?” could feel impossible: the truth was too large for casual conversation, while saying “fine” created its own loneliness. We were grieving something real in a world that did not always recognize it.
Years later, I looked at my wife and wondered aloud, “Why am I more in love with you now than I’ve ever been?” She wondered the same thing.
That question changed the direction of my professional life.
Why do some couples come together during infertility while others slowly drift apart? Why does reproductive trauma become, for some couples, an invisible wall between them, while for others it eventually becomes a place of deep connection?
There is no simple answer, and not every couple gets the outcome my wife and I experienced. But both my personal journey and my clinical work have taught me this: reproductive trauma does not stay neatly contained inside one person. It enters the relationship. It changes the emotional weather between two people who may already be doing everything they can simply to survive.
Infertility and Marriage Can Change How Couples Grieve
Reproductive trauma can include infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, traumatic birth, failed fertility treatments, pregnancy termination for medical reasons, or other experiences that disrupt a person’s reproductive story.
Not every reproductive struggle is experienced as trauma. But for many people, the repeated collision between hope and heartbreak begins to change the nervous system.
Hope itself can start to feel dangerous.
A positive test, a new treatment, or even an ordinary conversation about the future may bring excitement and fear at the same time. The body learns to brace. People become watchful, irritable, numb, anxious, or emotionally exhausted.
One partner may feel an urgent need to talk, research, or act. The other may need quiet, distraction, or distance just to keep functioning. Neither response is necessarily wrong. The problem is that each person’s attempt to cope can accidentally become the other person’s evidence that they are alone.
One partner thinks, “If this mattered to you, you would talk to me.” The other thinks, “If you understood how much this hurts, you would stop making me talk about it.”
The argument appears to be about communication. Underneath it is usually something more vulnerable: “Are you still with me in this? Do you see what this is doing to me? Am I carrying this by myself?”
The Grief During Infertility and Marriage Is Shared, but It Is Not Identical
Couples often assume that because they are experiencing the same reproductive event, they should grieve it in the same way, at the same pace, and with the same intensity. They rarely do.
The partner whose body is undergoing procedures, symptoms, hormonal changes, or pregnancy loss may experience the trauma as physically inescapable. The other partner may feel helpless, peripheral, or responsible for remaining steady. Their grief may be profound but less visible, even to the person they love.
In my work with men and non-birthing partners, I often see what I call well-intended chivalry. A partner says, in effect, “You are already hurting, so I will not add my pain to yours.” The intention is loving.
The result, however, can be distance. Silence may be interpreted as indifference. Competence may look like a lack of grief. The person trying to protect the relationship becomes emotionally absent from it.
At the same time, the more visibly grieving partner may become the spokesperson for the couple’s pain. They carry the questions, the appointments, the remembering, and the emotional labor of keeping the experience from disappearing. Resentment grows, not necessarily because love is gone, but because both partners feel unseen in different ways.
Reproductive grief is often disenfranchised grief: grief that is not fully recognized or publicly mourned. There may be no funeral, no familiar ritual, and no language that feels large enough. Friends may offer optimism when acknowledgment is needed.
Family members may ask intrusive questions or stop asking anything at all. Couples can begin to feel isolated from the world and then, painfully, isolated from one another.
This is where couples may turn toward each other or turn on each other.
The Argument Beneath the Argument
In couples therapy, I pay close attention to the argument beneath the argument. A conflict about money may actually be about how much more the couple can endure. A conflict about sex may be about grief, pressure, or the loss of intimacy that once felt spontaneous.
A conflict about attending a baby shower may be about whether one partner’s limits will be protected. A conflict about “being negative” may be about whether there is room for fear.
When couples argue only about the surface issue, they can become trapped in the same conflict. Each person collects evidence that the other does not understand. The goal is not always to solve the problem. Many reproductive problems cannot be solved on demand.
The first task is to help each partner feel more known and less alone. That requires slowing down. Instead of defending an intention, partners can become curious about impact. Instead of asking, “Who is right?” they can ask, “What is happening inside you when we get here?”
Instead of rushing to reassurance, they can say, “I see why this hurts. I am here. You do not have to make this easier for me.” Sometimes the most useful question is very simple: “Do you need comfort, understanding, or help solving something right now?”
That question prevents support from becoming another misunderstanding.
Protecting the Relationship Without Avoiding the Grief
Healthy connection does not mean talking about infertility constantly. It means making the pain speakable while keeping it from consuming every part of the relationship.
The Four Pillars of Connection Through Reproductive Grief
To translate connection into practice, I organize my approach around four areas.
The first is Mindful Attunement: staying emotionally present, curious, and responsive to each other’s grief.
The second is Navigating Heightened and Decisional Conflict: approaching intense emotions and difficult decisions with collaboration rather than blame.
The third is Uncovering Disrupted Visions of Parenthood: naming and grieving the dreams, identities, and expectations that have been altered.
The fourth is Maintaining Quality Sex, Passion, and Romance: protecting intimacy, affection, and desire beyond fertility treatments or loss.
Couples can practice these pillars through a slow, guided dialogue: one partner answers a question, the other reflects what they heard, and then they switch. One or two questions may be enough. They can also name reproductive trauma as the shared enemy.
The partner is not the problem; the cycle of fear, withdrawal, fixing, and resentment is.
There are also times when outside support is necessary. Persistent intrusive memories, panic, depression, emotional numbing, severe conflict, or an inability to function deserve trauma-informed professional care.
Seeking help is not evidence that the relationship is failing. Often, it is an act of protection for two people who have been asked to carry too much for too long.
Infertility and Marriage: You Can Grow Around What Happened
My wife and I did not become closer because we handled infertility perfectly. We did not. We became closer because, over time, we kept returning to each other. We learned that love during reproductive trauma is not always eloquent. Sometimes it is staying in the room.
Sometimes it is listening without fixing. Sometimes it is admitting, “I do not know what to say, but I do not want you to be alone.”
Resilience is not returning to who a couple was before the trauma.
Reproductive trauma changes people. Relational resilience is the slow work of allowing those changed people to know and be known by each other. The pain may be shared differently. The grief may move on different timelines.
But when both experiences are allowed to exist, the space between partners can become less of a battleground and
more of a refuge.
For additional support, my podcast, Love and Infertility, offers honest conversations, expert guidance, and practical tools and exercises to help couples communicate, cope, and reconnect through infertility and reproductive grief.
That does not erase what happened. It means the couple no longer has to survive it alone.
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