What I Didn’t Understand About Being the Partner During IVF

9 September 2026

Guest Contributor

But at the same time, I knew that she was right to some extent. I didn’t really understand what she is going through. 

I think optimism was my coping mechanism. I didn’t want to think about the worst-case scenario. Going to every appointment, blood test, or ultrasound is ten times harder if you  don’t believe that eventually it will work out. If you don’t know what you’re doing or what you’re supposed to do to make it work, it just feels like a waste of energy and makes you  feel like you have no control over anything. 

I still don’t know if I really convinced myself that infertility was just a temporary obstacle, or if being optimistic was simply my natural way of dealing with it. 

Over time, more than my wife being annoyed with my optimism, I became annoyed with her  pessimism. I felt like there wasn’t even one day when infertility didn’t come up. We could  go out on a date night, spend time with friends or family, cook dinner, or just get into bed, and somehow we would end up talking about it. 

The complicated expectations placed on men during infertility

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m very into sharing and talking about things. Sharing your  feelings, your thoughts, reflecting on mistakes or ideas. But there is something very complicated about the expectations placed on a man during infertility. 

You are supposed to be there for her, listen, be the strong person, absorb, bring positivity without being too positive, understand what she is going through and be empathetic. At the same time, there was also this feeling that I was supposed to want kids exactly as much as she did, and almost for the same reasons. 

I didn’t feel that way. 

I wanted kids, but I didn’t feel the same way my wife did. For her, becoming a mother felt like part of her life’s purpose. She felt that without biological kids she wouldn’t be able to live her life fully.

It’s incredibly hard to live that way when you have almost no control over whether you succeed. 

Putting my energy elsewhere

After our first failed IUI, around the same time that I didn’t get a promotion I had expected at work, I started feeling like nothing in my life was progressing or going anywhere. I needed  something that felt like mine. Something where I could create progress and have some control over the outcome. 

So I started a side hustle that became almost a start up. 

For a while it became my escape from infertility. It gave me something new to think about, something to work toward, something to discuss with other people and with my wife. More than anything, it gave me a sense of purpose again. 

Eventually the start up failed. 

Strangely, that failure helped me understand my wife in a way I hadn’t before. For the first time, I understood what it felt like to invest so much hope and energy into something you badly wanted, only to have it not work out. 

The difference was that I could redirect my purpose. I could start another project, find another business idea, put my energy somewhere else and find happiness somewhere else. 

She couldn’t do that. 

For her, becoming a mother wasn’t one goal among many. It was connected to how she imagined her life and who she was supposed to become. 

I think it took me three or four years into our infertility journey for that to really click. 

Trying to ‘fix it’

My reaction to problems has always been to try to fix them. What can we change? What  can we do differently? How can we improve our chances? What can I do today that will  make me feel a little better about where we are? 

At the time, I didn’t realize that this was becoming my default reaction to almost every infertility problem we faced. 

The irony was that it prevented me from doing what probably would have helped my wife  the most: really absorbing and recognizing her feelings, understanding where I stood  emotionally, and being able to articulate and share where I was in the process. 

I think trying to find a practical solution to every problem is a pretty typical male coping  mechanism. It was definitely mine.

But infertility is a very difficult problem for someone who needs to fix things. 

You very quickly find out that there are limits to what you can do. You can learn the terminology, ask questions, understand the numbers and show up. But you can’t make an  embryo healthy. You can’t make implantation work. You can’t control how someone else’s body responds to treatment. 

And because most of the medical process was happening to my wife, I often felt like I wasn’t even the person who could lead the process or make the decisions. 

At some point, I felt that I’m useless in the process and completely disengaged. 

I stopped thinking about solutions. I stopped bringing up infertility. Anytime my wife raised the topic, I did my best to minimally engage and then transition to something else as  smoothly as I could. 

Looking back, my disengagement wasn’t only because I couldn’t control or contribute to the process. Infertility started to feel like a black hole that pulled you toward sadness, desperation and stress. 

I didn’t know how to describe it that way back then. I just felt that it was something I shouldn’t let myself get too deep into. 

The problem was that slowly the disengagement stopped being only about infertility. Something started to feel off. 

Becoming numb

It almost felt like the connections in my brain were changing in front of me and the chemistry inside my brain was changing with them. I didn’t know how to control it or even  explain it. 

I was becoming numb. 

It was almost like being part of the walking dead. You go to work, you see friends, you do  your day-to-day things, but you don’t really feel alive. You’re not happy. You don’t laugh  from the bottom of your heart. You don’t really care what you’re going to eat tonight or what  you’re going to do tomorrow. Most of the time, you just let the day pass. 

This type of behavior was completely new to me, but it wasn’t one dramatic change. It slowly sneaked into my life. I was changing gradually enough that I didn’t really notice it  happening. 

I lost energy for even the simplest things that I used to do easily. I stopped organizing my stuff. I delayed tasks at work. I skipped meetings I could avoid. I was basically hoping no one would notice that I was becoming a shadow of myself.

I could find myself driving somewhere, barely paying attention to the GPS, missing turns and not really caring where I was going. 

I also stopped caring much about professional goals. Promotions, bonuses, or success at  work could make me happy for maybe 30 seconds. 

I didn’t think I was depressed. I wasn’t sad in the way I imagined depression was supposed  to feel, and I was still able to do my day-to-day stuff even though I had very little energy. 

In some way, the fact that I could still function gave me the illusion that I was okay. 

I kept telling myself that it was temporary. It would pass like everything else. I just needed to deal with it like a man. It would be fine. It would disappear. 

Sometimes it did disappear for a couple of days. 

But it always came back. 

Everything changed

Then we got one of the worst results we could have imagined from our first IVF cycle. 

We had every reason in the world to be optimistic. We had seven high-quality embryos and the Dr. told us that she is very satisfied with the results so far. Then, 2 weeks after genetic  testing, we got the result and learned that all of them were chromosomally abnormal. We  are screwed. 

That led to some incredibly difficult conversations. Maybe we needed to start thinking about an egg or sperm donor. Maybe adoption. 

And slowly I felt like I was losing a battle I had never picked or wanted to fight. 

I really love my wife. She is my best friend and we share so many common values, ideas and thoughts about life. We are a damn good fit together. 

And at some point I started feeling like maybe we weren’t anymore. 

It wasn’t fun being next to her. It wasn’t fun talking to her. I stopped trying to bring my optimism into the relationship or convince her to go out, see friends and meet people. 

When I realized that I was starting to avoid my wife and that I couldn’t find happiness in my own home, the most stable place I had ever had, I was devastated. 

During one of our conversations, she told me she had had enough of my escapism and that she had no idea what was going on with me. 

I didn’t want to make her feel worse. I also wasn’t sure she was capable of hearing what I was about to say.

But I said it anyway. 

Breaking point

“I think something is off with me. I don’t know what it is or how to handle it, but I can tell you that I’ve passed my breaking point.” 

I think that was the first time I saw my wife look relieved. For the first time, she didn’t feel like she was alone. 

Looking back, I think one of my biggest mistakes was believing that supporting my wife meant putting myself aside. I thought there wasn’t enough room for what she was going through and what I was going through at the same time. Her experience was physically harder, and her desire to become a mother was different from my desire to become a father, so somehow I convinced myself that my job was to absorb everything and keep going. 

I also thought that if I admitted I was struggling, I would only make things harder for her. 

What I understand today is that acknowledging what was happening to me didn’t take anything away from what she was going through. We didn’t need to feel the same way about infertility. We didn’t need to be scared about the same things or cope with them in the same way. 

I just needed to be honest about where I was. 

When I finally told her that I had passed my breaking point, I thought I was giving her one more problem to deal with. 

Instead, for the first time in a long time, she felt like we were in it together. I wish I had said it much earlier. 

Uri created HisSideFertility.com after going through IUI and IVF with his wife and  realizing how little practical, honest support existed for men who weren’t the fertility patient themselves.