Infertility Just Fucking Destroys You In So Many Ways

And the saddest part is, most people can never understand or attempt to, and end up telling you you’re selfish or stealing their joy.

Infertility is a brutal topic. While it does impact more people than most realize (about 1 in 6 couples), very few people like to discuss it for different reasons, from “not sure how to verbalize” to “social stigma.” Miscarriage, which is within the subset of “infertility,” is similarly not discussed that much until you have a kid or two, and then maybe it gets discussed in hushed tones, or periodically among girlfriends. I’ve probably been friends with I dunno, like 100 guys in different chapters of my life. I guarantee you there’s probably 70 miscarriages in there. I think a guy has told me about them maybe four times. So guys discuss this stuff even more.

On my own front, I got told sometime around January 2021 that I had slower, shitty sperm. I went to a doctor for a while and jerked off into various cups and had that tested. I guess my “count” did go up, but nothing was working organically, so we did IVF. That bombed, so we waited about a year and did it again. That also bombed, and meanwhile nothing was working organically. In the time between “hey, your sperm is bad” and the second time we did IVF, I…