Ideas for strengthening your marriage:

1. Be intentional about strengthening your support system. During your infertile months/years, both of you need each other for support, but it’s vital that both husband and wife have individual friends who can be a sounding board. Pray that God will bring new friends or renewed friendships into your lives during your infertility.

3. Get into God’s Word together. Pick a Bible study to do together each week. Or take turns reading aloud a daily devotional book. Or read one chapter in Proverbs or Psalms each day. Find some way to share God’s Word with each other. He promises that His Word “will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:11, NIV). Let God nourish you.

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Survivor Quotes:  Eddie and I are having some good days together. All this infertility stuff is like a dark cloud that never goes away, but in the midst of the yuck, we sure do have fun just watching TV together, laughing together, reading books together, and more. I’ve been told that if I just “quit trying,” then I’ll probably get pregnant. It’s hard, if not impossible, to mentally tell yourself you’ve quit trying when you know you’ve got to give it all you’ve got for a few more months. (my journal)

Tension? Difficulty? Absolutely! Bob was frustrated by my laid-back “things will work out” attitude. I mourned my childlessness while Bob had a much more task-oriented “what must we do to solve this” attitude. (Paula)

Early in my marriage and before I was stressed out about infertility, a co-worker who had three children sat near me at lunch one day. Munching on our respective sandwiches, he asked me if my husband and I were going to have children. I told him I thought we would probably start a family in the next few years, but I wasn’t sure.

“Why else would you get married?” he asked incredulously. Then he went on to spout his opinion that marriage was for the purpose of producing children. I just kept chewing and offering a thoughtful “hmmm” once in a while. I could think of plenty of reasons to disagree with him, but I was sure the resulting discussion would give me indigestion.

Some people get married to have children, I suppose, but hopefully, most of us realize marriage is not just a means to that particular end. Marriage for the sole purpose of bearing children misses out on all that is wonderful and unique in a union planned by the Creator Himself.

Marriage is such an incredible partnership when you think about it. God created this concept of a permanent union between a man and woman, a union that would make each stronger than they could be separately. Best friends united for life. The minister at our wedding, Dr. Roy Fish, called it “God’s mathematics.” He explained that marriage means sharing both joys and sorrows, and that in sharing both the ups and downs of life, a couple’s joys are doubled and their sorrows are halved.

I’ve always liked that last statement especially: joys doubled, sorrows halved. But when the sorrow is infertility, even half a sorrow weighs a whale of a lot more than you expect. When both partners are limping along emotionally from infertility’s pain, the emotional baggage is a ten-ton weight. How can a marriage endure under that kind of strain? How can a wife and husband stay sane through the trials, tests, and endless diagnostic measures? How can your love survive and thrive so that when a child enters your life, your marriage is equipped to take on the added pressures of parenthood?

How can he/she not understand what I’m feeling?
Husbands and wives misread each other for some very elemental reasons, succinctly stated in two words: estrogen and testosterone. The implications are complicated, but the foundations are pretty simple.

Estrogen and testosterone are the hormones which flood our respective systems from our time in the womb. They are what makes us uniquely female and male, what makes us fit together so wonderfully, and what pits us against each other so frustratingly. Testosterone makes men generally have less need to exercise the verbal portions of their brains. It makes them content with segmenting life into compartments which can be brought out one at a time to consider and interact with. On the flip side, estrogen gives women the capacity to verbalize about twice as much as men each day, describing events and experiences with incredible (or exhausting) detail. It enables them to see their lives, not in compartments, but as one big continuum.

Men don’t understand women’s overflowing feelings, and women don’t understand men’s understated emotions. However, it’s not a great divide with no bridge. As adults who love each other, you can build a bridge of communication across the chasm….

Other topics covered in this chapter:

Anger, blame, and other ugly things
This almost goes without saying, but there will be times when you’re mad at your wife. And there will be times when she’s mad at you right back.

The world (or your marriage) isn’t going to fall apart because you blew up at each other. However, after the dust clears, sit down with each other and talk about why (yes, that three-letter word) you got angry… 

Effects on your marriage
No one really expects that infertility will come knock on their front door. But when it does, you’re totally blown away by the pain it brings to your marriage. Ann and Wallace had friends who had been successful after one in vitro fertilization (IVF). “Even though we saw our friends suffering,” she said, “we didn’t realize the severity of the pain until it was ours.” Ann and Wallace struggled through three unsuccessful IVFs before moving on to adoption. Celeste only knew one other couple who had been going through infertility for about three years: “I saw how it totally consumed them. I knew I would never be like that. But I became exactly that.” 

Intimacy just ain’t what it used to be
One thing is for sure: Infertility takes the fun out of your love life. Everyone agrees on that:

The drudgery of infertility took its toll on our physical intimacy. Much of the spontaneity was gone and intimacy became very “clinical” as we worried about timing, frequency, hormone levels, etc. (Paula and Bob)

The whole idea of spontaneity is what brings vitality to your love life. A schedule, a timetable, a temperature chart all throw cold water on spontaneity. But you can fight back with some intentional “mind games,” so to speak, and some understanding along the way.

Feelings, emotions, and opinions
To borrow from the old Yellow Pages theme song, spouses who “reach out and touch” on multiple levels have marriages that survive and thrive through infertility.

Staying tuned in to each other on these various levels requires determination and intentionality. It doesn’t just happen. But if you don’t work to stay in touch, then your marriage will be on shaky ground before you ever reach the delivery room.

Evaluating your own expectations
Everyone has preformed ideas of what they think their own family will look like. Women are more likely to come into marriage with prior expectations. What were yours? What were his?

When pregnancy doesn’t happen as you expect it to, you face the death of a dream, sometimes more than one. You lose the dream that it’ll be natural and easy to conceive a child… 

Some things improve with age
Okay, maybe not our waistlines or wrinkle quotient, but some parts of your infertility journey will look a little lighter in retrospect.

When Ellen and Paul were trying to solve their infertility problems in the 1950s, they tallied a long list of doctors and tests. “We heard about a doctor 500 miles away, so I went to see him,” Ellen said. “The sign outside his office said, ‘Eye, Ear, Nose, and Throat.’ I told him he was going to be working on the wrong end! But he assured me he had been a gynecologist for many years.”

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