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PCOS Infertility: 8 Tips for Keeping your Relationship Healthy
If you have PCOS and you’ve been unable to get pregnant or stay pregnant, you may have already added infertility to the list of “everything that’s wrong with my body.” Infertility often feels like a huge failure, crushing to your sense of femininity, and perhaps even like a threat to your relationship.
A 2014 Danish study (Trille, K., et al) of 47,500 women showed that 27% of women dealing with infertility were no longer in their relationship after five years. But wanting a child shouldn’t mean losing your partner. There are many ways to ensure that your relationship remains intact, and even grows stronger as a result of dealing with infertility.
1. Know that infertility is not your fault. Overall, infertility is about equally divided between male, female, and unknown (or both halves of a couple) factors. Infertility is absolutely more common in women with PCOS, but you did not choose to have infertility.
2. Aim to come out stronger as a couple. Have you ever heard “what you focus on grows?” If you set a goal to embrace the process of dealing with infertility with strength and grace, together, you will most likely actually become more resilient, and come out the other side stronger for life, whether you have a baby or not.
3. Decide upfront about time and costs. Like it or not, infertility is almost always expensive. And money is one of the most common things that couples argue about, regardless of fertility issues. Deciding upfront how much time, and how much of your shared financial resources you are willing to commit to paying for procedures will help you balance your priorities. Infertility can take years or even decades to resolve. The longer you try, especially with more expensive procedures like IVF, the bigger the toll on your relationship. You can reevaluate these dates and dollars periodically, and renegotiate what feels healthy and appropriate to both of you at that time.
4. Have your feelings together – all the feelings! Infertility is a complicated condition that elicits all sorts of feelings. And it’s true that men and women deal with those feelings differently. Shame, anger, rage, depression, embarrassment, moodiness, regret, irritability, sadness, fear, grief, and impatience are just some of the many feelings that may come up. If you keep your feelings to yourself, rather than sharing them with your partner, you are losing out on the opportunity for both support and relational deepening. You might find that your partner is having the exact same feelings, and that can be a growth point for you.
Read the full article on PCOS Diva
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