How to keep your marriage strong?

[CanadianMaple]

DH and I are struggling with our news. We're still newlyweds, we were married in July. We found out a week and a half ago that he is sterile, no sperm at all in his SA. We are waiting to see a urologist and to get into the fertility clinic.

We were devastated when we first found out. I am a natural reader, I am a former nurse, and started pouring through as much material as I could find to understand everything. DH went into denial and then now is trying to ignore it until he sees the urologist.

We went from having sex every other day to nothing much now. I have AF right now, but before that we did it once and it seemed really weird knowing there was NO chance.

We've been arguing about stupid things and is it so unlike us. I'm suddenly not excited for Christmas. We're newlyweds and this IF business is putting a huge damper on everything.

 

[Snowglobe21]

Hi CanadianMaple, I am sorry you are going through a difficult time. I wish I could say something to make you feel better, but thats impossible, so just want you to know it will get better (sorry if thats lame). I'm not a newlywed, but planning my wedding for this summer and I know what your going through as it seems like your missing out on what is supposed to be the most exciting time of your life. You don't get the normal excitement of planning for stuff that you deserve and expect to get. I get that. I feel my wedding planning has been ripped away from me as my fiancee has been moping and having major difficulties with our recent miscarriage and his low morphology score on his SA.Things that have helped us have included working together to plan the next steps. Ours include jumping through hoops for fertility tests as our doctors make it very difficult to get them and just enjoying things we have always done. THere is no magic fix. It will take time, but trust me it will get better. You can look towards further tests to see if their are extractable sperm and start coming around to considering other methods. Realize this, you are lucky to have got this news while you are young and not after 10 years of futility. Time is on your side.

 

[Princess Lou]

I am so sorry.

I can understand how your hubby feels. Just months after we were married, we were told that I will never be able to conceive without medical assistance. (As if losing my mother to cancer three months after our wedding wasn't bad enough, I get that to process too.)

Our sex life plummeted. It wasn't that knowledge that I wasn't going to be able to conceive but the feelings of being less of a woman and not deserving the title of woman as I cannot perform the basic acts of a woman. I suspect that your hubby is feeling some of the same. Not the woman part but the man part. Men are very attached to their penis's and to know that his isn't performing as it is designed to is a huge impact on everything.

Sex now needs to have nothing to do with TTC but have everything to do with intimacy/love/commitment and all that other lovey dovey crap. Lol. His confidence has taken a huge set back and he needs to know you still want him. It will take a while but he will get back to being confident again. Also, depending on how 'stable' he is and what his reactions may be (only you know him well enough to this) you can remind him that once you have conceived a child, you never need too be concerned about BC ever again. The problem I have is a chemical imbalance so I don't produce linings or ovulate, my husband said to me "Plus side is we can have sex whenever we want for the rest of our lives without ever having to stop because you have a period or the fear of getting pregnant when we are 50 or something." Took a while to appreciate the 'comfort' behind what he said but I did. It was his way of saying that he didn't care if we ever have children, I was the most important person in his life and we would be together forever with or without children. Your hubby needs to know that you feel the same. He is your life now and if you don't ever have children (with the amount of treatments available it's very unlikely) you are okay with it as you have each other.

Good luck with everything and I sincerely hope you get a BFP soon. X

 

[StorkStalker]

Dear Canadian Maple...
I am sorry you are both having to go through this... it isn´t fair.. it´s too big a load for this newlywed time that we are all told should be bliss... But love will prevail... I don´t know what to say because I know sometimes nothing seems to help... I am sure you will somehow find a way to be there for each other... My thoughts and prayers go out to you..

 

[bubumaci]

Dear CanadianMaple,

I can really relate to your situation... We are not exactly newlyweds anymore (wedding was October last year) - but we hadn't started trying to become pregnant until after the wedding. After about half a year of trying (and I was sure that we were timing it right), I decided to get checked out (was 35 at the time, am 36 now) to make sure that I was all OK physically (just to know early enough if we perhaps needed some external help)... I am all fine. My DH took a few months to get up the courage to get himself checked out ... at the end of August I received a phone call from him "it's my fault" Poor mite! The SA count was a) very low with b) 99% pathological sperm. So I got in touch with a fertility clinic I had been recommended.
In the meantime, my poor sweetheart was saying that he is broken and I should find myself someone else (doubly broken-hearted because he knows how much I want children, is so upset that we might not be able to "because of him" and of course, he is a man - and as Princess Lou says - anything making them less manly is a double hit)...
The next SA was even more disappointing, as the doctor found practically no sperm ... the two tests at the clinic similar results (so right now, we are looking at very minor surgery to try and "get it from the source").
On our wedding anniversary I tried to cheer him up and said that (hoping that the clinic will work out OK) at least we would only have children when we really wanted them and I would never have to fork out a fortune for BC again Also, I make sure that he knows that I desire him - and that it would never even enter my mind to leave him, just because we can't make a baby together.
I have told him, that if that is our fate, then we will make ourselves a nice life the two of us...

It's not easy and I can understand how the depression can catch you - but : you didn't marry each other because of being baby-making machines - you married each other for each other. Becoming a threesome or more, would just deepen it all - but, you are both still the person each of you fell in love with, the person you each married.

I wish you all the luck in the world and am here for support if you need me!

xxx Bubu.