Who Gets to Decide Your Infertility Openness?
Carolyn Hax had a fascinating dilemma. An infertile woman wants to keep their infertility private, only sharing with a close friend or two and the therapist. Her husband wants to tell his parents and siblings, and wants her to tell her family. You can’t be in and out at the same time. Who gets to decide how open they are when it’s a problem shared by two people?
Carolyn gives a few suggestions for how to meet in the middle and find a solution that works for both people, but she ultimately gives the woman veto power since it’s happening in her body.
This is one of the first times I ever willingly dove into the comment section. When I looked, it already had over 1.7K comments. Yeah, you can say that people had big feelings about this one.
I’m totally curious what people think of Carolyn’s advice.
10 comments
Oooof, this is a really tough one. I’m very, very glad that my husband and I were/are in agreement on the level of openness.
I’d say there might be a compromise depending on husband’s siblings. My husband is the oldest of 5, so if there are multiple sibs involved, is there one or maybe 2 that are much closer to him than all the rest/parents and could be counted on to keep the secret (bonus if that person can also – without spilling the beans – tell other people to back off if they get gossipy/speculating). If families are an absolute no-go, then I think it’s probably necessary that the husband has someone he feels close to and supported by to talk to because it’s stressful. Definitely therapy and opportunities to talk about what’s really going on beneath the surface, because it may not be an all or nothing deal, there may be things that one *really* wants kept private but other things would be okay to talk about or any number of iterations that may lead to a possible solution where both parties are okay. In the end, I come down where Carolyn did, though I think that should be a last resort solution after all good-faith efforts at compromise have been exhausted.
There are some people this time around on this last cycle we’re not putting into the loop, and we’re not being nearly as open as we were before. The first time we went through fertility treatments, we opted for openness over privacy simply because of several situations that made it very, very difficult to hide and we knew that several rounds were probably going to be needed. This time, because it’s one cycle and it’s over, it’s an FET which is slightly more controllable/fewer appointments, and there are some people whose “stuff” I don’t want to have to deal with in addition to my own feelings, it makes sense to be more private.
I read this column, and I agreed with Hax because it’s impossible to “untell” information once it’s out there. Privacy trumps the desire to share, IMO.
If her husband wants to talk about it for support, he can find a member of the clergy or a counselor who will have to keep the information to him/herself. If he just thinks that they should be more open with their families, I don’t think that’s his decision to make.
On a related note, we were fairly open with close friends and family about our use of donated ova to conceive, but I never told my father (now deceased) because (1) I knew he would tell his wife, and (2) I had had previous bad experiences with his wife sharing my personal information with people I wouldn’t want to have it (think: extended family members of hers who I’ve only met once, my high school classmates, my coworkers). My husband felt that my father had “a right to know” that our children are not genetically his grandchildren, and I disagreed. We ended up seeing a counselor on this issue, and she agreed with my approach of waiting until our sons were old enough to share the information with their grandfather themselves, if they so desired.
As it happened, my father died without ever knowing the full story of my sons’ conception. And while I wish I could have been entirely open with him, I stand by my reason for not telling him and am fine with that.
I have to admit, I’m on the woman’s side, and I agree with Carolyn’s answer. I admire people who can be open about this stuff and whose families provide just the right level of support… but that’s not me, and we all know that way too many people are going to make inappropriate comments & questions vs providing truly helpful support. I realize that the more we tell our stories openly, the less unusual all this becomes & the more people are going to learn what’s appropriate & what’s helpful and what’s not… but it’s a tough thing to do. As others have said above, once it’s been shared, you can’t UNshare and you can’t control what others do with that information.
I wrote a post many years ago about why we generally kept quiet about all things ttc & infertility related, and it’s all still relevant & true for me:
https://theroadlesstravelledlb.blogspot.com/2008/02/telling-post.html
(I scrolled through some of the comments, hoping to find yours… now I know why there are 1700 — all kinds of diversions into off-topic stuff — yikes!! :p )
I think if one person wants privacy that should prevail.
I’ve probably shared this before but for our 1st IVF my husband told everyone at work (I told no one – luckily our work orbits didn’t overlap). Then at his work holiday party people were asking if we had picked out names yet, etc. BFN of course.
I share that we got our kids thru IVFfreely now, but that is very different from when you’re trying and it’s not a sure thing.
That’s what I find interesting about the trend where people like Hilaria (sp?) Baldwin share their miscarriages to “lessen the stigma” etc. I didn’t keep my efforts or m/cs private due to stigma. It was bc I didn’t need everyone knowing my private business and constantly asking me how things are going. Like, I still had to go to work and be productive at work after BFNs and m/cs. Like, the next day. I needed to hold it together and it would’ve been excruciating if everyone knew.
Edited to Add: I went back and was sharing this with someone and caught the line more fully about how the husband thinks the LW should tell the LW’s family. That’s…questionable at best. And it sort of changes the dynamic. I don’t think it’s wrong to sort out in therapy if there’s *someone* out there the husband can go to for support and figure out how to do both, but that line smacks more of husband wanting to tell lots of people (that his wife isn’t comfortable with) rather than looking for a genuine (but much more limited in numbers – possibly to a therapist or other professional that is bound by confidentiality) support system.
I tend to be a bit more private in our TCC than my husband. Every time we get pregnant he wants to tell all of our close friends right away and I have never felt comfortable with that, but somehow he convinces me to do so and we end up telling more people than I prefer. This time I told him that I would like 8-10 weeks before we tell anyone. I am not budging on this…we’ve had 5 losses so everyone kinda expects losses now and I don’t want to deal with the million questions.
This has been my dilemma for the past 7 yrs or so since starting IVF. My husband wants to be open with everyone and I do not. I’ve had so many failures that the less people I tell, then the less I have to re-live it, to a degree. He doesn’t get it and feels that we have one life to live and this is just a part of our life and we should be open so people can support us. I, frankly, don’t want the support..I know that sounds harsh but I’ve never been one to “want” sympathy. I know many people who do but that’s just not me. I feel it’s personal for us and like to keep it that way(other than telling thousands of people on my blog monthly..oops..but I am fairly anonymous so that counts). But I agree that if either party wants privacy then it should be private. Because like Sharon mentioned above..you can’t “untell” information or take it back.
I like her focus on discernment. On an approach that has more of a fine touch than the either/or of telling anyone.
Also, what the LW is calling privacy actually sounds like secrecy to me. I get it. My IF days (pre-Internet for me) were steeped in shame and I, too, wanted to keep it secret from almost everyone. I was so ashamed to be in the predicament.
So I would counsel the LW to work through her feelings of “brokenness” and shame — as Carolyn Hax did — and then see if, once she can be kinder with herself if she can believe that others may be kind to her, too.
But it will still take discernment.
I agree with many of the comments, especially Working Mom. I share freely now what we went through but at the time, I didn’t want the “support.” It felt like more work and more pressure. And for that reason, if one person isn’t comfortable sharing, it’s not fair to share.
I also agree with the point about the trend toward sharing miscarriages to lessen the “stigma.” I feel like this is well intended but has gone too far and is heading towards making women feel like if they don’t share, they must be ashamed.
I didn’t share my losses at the time, though I talk about them now. I was not ashamed. I was sad. I didn’t want to deal with others looking at me with pity. I wanted to heal on my own.
I think our society tends away from privacy and when we want to keep things to ourselves, it’s looked at as secret keeping or shame. When really, it’s just privacy.
I 100% agree with Carolyn’s advice. If the wife doesn’t want to share, then they shouldn’t. I didn’t tell my family – except when we had ectopic pregnancies and I ended up in hospital, but that was after the event – because whilst I might have got support, I would also get additional pressure. As it was after my ectopics I felt pressure to “get better quickly” and to “get over it!”
Equally though, if the husband doesn’t want to share about IVF – and my husband did not want to – then the wife should also respect that. If at all possible, it needs to be negotiated. I’m disturbed that the husband doesn’t want to support his wife in this. It’s the whole circle of grief thing – because it is her body, and her hormones and emotions, she is at the centre, and he is the next, outer circle. So he needs to support inwards. (Does that make sense?)