Beyond The Wait...
A Newsletter for Those Navigating the Complex Emotions of Infertility
Issue #17 16th March 2025
Dear Reader,
When fertility challenges stretch on, our friendships often become one of the most unexpected losses of this journey. What was once easy and natural can suddenly feel tense and forced, leaving us wondering if we're being oversensitive or if our friends simply don't understand what we're going through.
Deep Dive: Navigating Friendships on the Fertility Journey
Issues in our friendships during fertility struggles often catch us off guard. The people who were once our support system can inadvertently become sources of pain, while we ourselves may feel unable to be ourselves in these relationships anymore. Let's explore some of the most common challenges and why they feel so difficult to navigate.
1. Pregnancy Announcements
Perhaps nothing highlights the complexity of friendships during infertility quite like pregnancy announcements. These moments are emotionally complex in ways that are difficult for others to understand. You genuinely want to be happy for your friend, but that joy may be overshadowed by, or may not have space to show up at all, because of the size of your own grief, envy, and fear.
The guilt that follows is often overwhelming. "What kind of friend am I if I can't be happy for her?" But not being able to feel joy for your friend doesn't make you a bad friend. It makes you human. Your grief for your own situation is important, and you can’t make yourself feel happy when you are not.
2. Your lives take different paths
As friends move into pregnancy and parenthood while you remain in fertility limbo, you may begin to have less in common. Conversations naturally shift to morning sickness, nursery preparations, and sleep schedules, while you're navigating treatment cycles, appointment schedules, and monthly disappointments.
This isn't anyone's fault necessarily, but it can feel incredibly lonely. You might find yourself sitting in conversations feeling like you have nothing to say, wondering how they can be so insensitive, wondering if it will ever be you.
3. Well-Meaning Comments
"It'll happen when you least expect it.", "Just relax and it'll happen.", "Maybe you should just adopt.", "At least you know you can get pregnant.", "You're so lucky you can travel and sleep in.".
These comments, usually offered with love, can feel massively insensitive, and highlight just how little they get it. Your friends often genuinely want to help but their attempts to fix or minimise your pain (often because they can’t tolerate seeing your suffering), can leave you feeling more isolated than before. And you don’t have the energy to educate people constantly on what is helpful and what isn’t.
4. Social Withdrawal
Many of us find ourselves pulling away from social situations, especially those involving babies or pregnant women. Baby showers become particularly challenging as the environment feels triggering and emotionally unsafe. But we may withdraw more generally. We may hold a worry about being a “downer”, and we may not want to, or feel able to, put on the smiley face we think a certain social event requires.
This withdrawal is a natural protective response, and makes perfect sense, but it can create distance in friendships just when we need support most. Friends might interpret our absence as a lack of caring, not understanding just how hard it is for us to be present in these moments.
5. Comparisons
It's natural to start comparing your journey to others'. Seeing friends conceive easily or quickly can trigger intense feelings of "why not me?". This comparison isn't helpful, but it's also completely human and understandable.
These comparisons can start affecting how we interact with friends. We might find ourselves feeling angry or resentful towards those who have had it easier, adding to further strain in our friendships.
6. Greif
Your friends who haven't experienced fertility challenges often don't understand that you're grieving multiple losses - the loss of control, the loss of imagined timelines, the loss of innocence about pregnancy, the loss of embryos and pregnancies.
They might not realise that these losses are as valid as any other form of grief. When they try to cheer you up or redirect conversations away from your struggles, it can feel like they're dismissing something fundamental about your current experience.
Finding Your Way Forward
There is no perfect solution to navigating friendships during fertility struggles. What’s helpful is learning to honour both your needs, and your relationships as best you can. Some friendships will naturally evolve or fade during this time, perhaps to be revisited at another time. Others will deepen as friends learn to support you in new ways.
Remember that it's okay to:
- Set boundaries around conversations and events
- Take breaks from social media if pregnancy announcements feel overwhelming
- Be honest with close friends about what you need
- Grieve the loss of certain friendship dynamics
- Accept that some friends won't understand, and you may need space from them
This Week's Self-Care Exercise: Friendship Inventory
Take some time to reflect on your current friendships and how they're serving you during this journey:
- Which friendships feel supportive and safe right now?
- Which relationships feel more challenging or draining?
- Are there boundaries you need to set to protect your emotional wellbeing?
- What would you want your closest friends to know about supporting you right now?
- How can you communicate your needs while still maintaining the relationships that matter to you?
This isn't about judging your friends or yourself - it's about gaining clarity on what you need during this particularly vulnerable time.
Let me know your thoughts
If you have a topic you'd like me to cover in a future newsletter, message me - I'd love to hear what would be most helpful for you right now.
And if you'd like to share your experience for a future newsletter, please reply to this email. Your story could be exactly what someone else needs to hear.
Remember Reader: You did not choose this, it is not your fault, and you are not alone.
With compassion,
Dr. Grace 💕
@thenotsofertilepsychologist
