When You and Your Wife Can’t Get Pregnant

I really can’t stand Facebook these days.  I love my friends, but the constant stream of baby photos is really too much to bear.

Much of that feeling is because my wife and I are having a terrible time getting pregnant.

I’m 42 and she’s 38 – both professionals who call New York City home. But during the four years we’ve been trying, “Kate” as I’ll call her, has yet to conceive. And making matters worse, scheduling our lovemaking sessions with her ovulation period has put a kink in our sex life. Imagine not being able to caress your wife the way you used to because she’s on edge, the expectation of trying to make a tiny human constantly weighing on her. Add to that Kate’s own insecurities about her body and the art of seduction becomes that much more complicated and paradoxical.

How do I get Kate turned on to make love? Luckily, I can turn it on pretty quickly thanks to a relatively high sex drive. But how do I get Kate interested without her feeling pressured?  Do I wait for her to initiate?  I’ve tried that strategy, but then weeks go by and nada. So I go back to seducing her again.  Kate tells me she needs more foreplay – at least 30 to 45 minutes of touching and cuddling before she can really get in the mood. But when I give her that, very often I feel like I’m the one doing the work and not getting much in return; the whole process starts to feel mechanical.  While she’s turned on, I’m now the one going through the motions and the end result is hardly the full-blown fireworks I really miss. Rinse, wash, and repeat and the whole disappointing cycle starts again, deepening the problem of intimacy between us. Instead of a child, what we’ve created is a downward spiral in which we both feel aggrieved, the passion is sucked out of the relationship, and the last thing either of us wants to do is make love again.

It wasn’t until Kate saw a fertility specialist and had the requisite sonograms and MRIs that the large fibroid mass in her uterus was conclusively identified. Great, I thought. Now all she has to do is get it removed and – presto! – she’ll be pregnant in no time, right?  I wish it was that easy. The biggest challenge is that Kate is wary of removing it.

When a woman finds out her lady parts aren’t working as they should, it’s devastating, and we men must be as supportive and caring as possible in helping our partners deal with the issue.If there’s one thing every woman knows and every man usually learns, it’s that a woman’s body is beautiful and precious and exists on a fundamental genetic level to make babies. When a woman finds out her lady parts aren’t working as they should, it’s devastating, and we men must be as supportive and caring as possible in helping our partners deal with the issue. At the end of the day, it’s her body that’s doing the brunt of the work.

Kate has long been averse to going to the doctor and is a big believer in natural healing.  So when the fertility doctor told us that the best course of treatment would be surgery to remove the fibroid, the recommendation scared the hell out of her. Though I’m skeptical of homeopathic methods as I believe in science, I fully backed her decision to try to shrink the fibroid naturally. Kate had read about a natural remedy involving placing castor oil packs on her tummy and wanted to try that. I knew this meant delaying fertility treatments for months, but I couldn’t blame her for wanting to avoid surgery in her private parts. It would scare me, too. Once she chose this route, she followed through on the castor oil packs, though not as regularly as I had hoped.

I want her to do everything possible – with a sense of urgency – to remove possible physical obstacles to babymaking because deep in my mind, if it’s not her, it may be me. As a man whose wife is unable to get pregnant, when you see that all your friends have kids and you’re the only one left without, you begin to seriously doubt your own abilities in the child-making department. As the better part of my childhood was spent in a Hebrew day school, thoughts of the biblical Job came to mind: ‘Why God, what have I done to deserve such torment in my life?  Why do they have kids and I don’t?’  At other times, I seek solace in Abraham: “He may have been 99, but at least Abraham had a child! (Of course, Old Abe had to submit to the painful experience of circumcising himself as an adult per God’s orders; whereas lucky me has been there, done that and thankfully doesn’t even remember.)

It’s my hope that Kate comes around to having her fibroid removed, which her doctor says will drastically increase her chances of conception. But there’s no guarantee. So I’m beginning to resign myself to the fact that either I’m going to have to find a better paying job so we can afford a surrogate, or to start looking into adopting. I’m not against the latter, but I do want to try every avenue available to conceive a child before going down that road. In order to do that, Kate and I need to be on the same page, which is becoming increasingly hard given her reluctance to accept the doctor’s advice.

Fertility treatments are still an option but the doctor wants to take care of the fibroid first. And even if Kate does go through with the surgery, there’s no guarantee that she’ll want me sticking her with a painful needle every night as part of the fertility regimen. We’ve both heard horror stories from other couples about how difficult that process is. My wish is to persuade Kate to at least agree to IUI, intrauterine insemination, or what my friend calls the “turkey baster” method, where the doctor injects the sperm into the woman’s uterus. But we have to deal with the fibroid first.

So yes, baby making can be a bitch. And there’s not nearly enough attention paid to what guys go through in these unfortunate circumstances. I don’t want to sound too fatalistic about our prospects. I firmly believe we’ll have kids one day. But for other men on a similar journey, please know that you’re not alone.  Perhaps one day when we’ve overcome these travails, we’ll strike up a conversation at the local jungle gym where our kids are playing and look back and laugh.  For my part, that’ll be a relief.