When Fertility Becomes a Relationship Issue: Couples & Infertility

Nobody drops off a casserole when your transfer fails. If a friend got a cancer diagnosis, you would expect the world to rally. Meals would show up. Someone would think to ask how the partner was holding up. But couples going through fertility treatment carry a comparable weight in near total silence, and the person standing right next to them carries it silently too. This week we sat down with Batya Novick, LCSW, founder of Calla Collective and one of the very few therapists whose entire practice is reproductive mental health. She has been on both sides of the clinic door. In 2010, while already specializing in maternal and reproductive mental health, she went through her own fertility journey and found herself sitting in a waiting room full of people who were obviously going through the same thing, feeling completely alone. She asked her doctor why there wasn't a single mental health person in the building. He told her she should do something about it. Calla Collective is what came of that. We talked about what fertility struggles actually do to a relationship, and how couples get through it together instead of quietly drifting apart. We get into: Chicken or egg: does fertility surface relationship struggles, or create them Why "I'm broken, he should just find someone else" is one of the most common things happily married women say out loud The internalized shame of unexplained infertility, and why uncertainty is the hardest thing for a brain to hold Time, expectations, and money (Batya's take on writing a $20,000 check with no guaranteed return) The three things every couple should be doing: name the stress, calendar the check-in, and protect time that has nothing to do with fertility Why calm does not mean not sad, and why yelling is often fear Intimacy when trying to conceive is, in her words, the unsexiest thing ever Why sex only for reproduction is the fastest way to kill a couple's sex drive Fantasy vs real life, and what romantasy is doing to expectations Where the breaking points actually show up, including what Laura has watched happen in the consent room over embryo disposition What to do when one partner will not go to therapy Same sex couples, and where the dynamics are the same and where they are not Grief after loss, outside tears and inside tears Pregnancy and postpartum after a journey, and why you do not have to be happy The throughline of this whole conversation is permission. Permission to say this is hard without saying it is bad. Permission to grieve differently than your partner grieves. Permission to not be glowing at your eight week scan after four losses. Batya's point is that resilience is not something you either have or you don't. It is a muscle, and this is the muscle nobody wanted to build. But you are building it. And the relationship you are protecting right now is the same one that has to hold up long after the family building part is over. This episode is for you if you and your partner have stopped talking about it. If you are the one crying and they are the one who has gone quiet. If sex has become a task on a calendar. If you are pregnant after loss and cannot find the joy everyone insists you should feel. If you have ever thought, even silently, that they would be better off with someone else. 💛 Connect with Batya & Calla Collective:   / callacollectivehq   https://www.calla-collective.com