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I’ll just come out and be blunt about some of this: in my own fertility journey, which is now leading to a seeming 2/18 IVF commencement date, a couple of times I’ve had trouble getting it up / getting aroused in a moment of potential intimacy. Why is this? Lots of reasons, honestly. (1) would be that I’m slightly older, i.e. 41. I work out pretty consistently but I’m still not “in shape” in a broad sense. (2) would be that I get in my head about a ton of stuff, and the fact that some of the IVF journey was precipitated by me definitely can weigh on me. (3) would then be that I’m just a weird dude, i.e. the fact that I’m even admitting this stuff in a Medium article. But it’s true.
I won’t deeply belabor these points, but I will say this: how you give love is about how the other person wants to receive it, not how you want to give it. This applies to employees, to partners, to children, to workout buddies, to co-workers, to dogs, and to basically every relationship under God’s yellow sun. (That is to say, best I can personally tell. I’m no expert on relationships, as I’ve been divorced and have probably resided in about 27 different friend groups in my 41.25 years.) So sometimes, if you can’t physically get there, you can convey intimacy in other ways, such as tender touching, doing the dishes, doing the laundry, taking out the dog, picking her up from work, etc.
