You're Both Grieving. You're Just Doing It Differently.

Written By Jessica Luiz

August 11, 2026

Why infertility can strain even the most loving partnerships — and what actually helps you stay connected through it

🎯 The Same Love, Two Different Griefs

Infertility rarely arrives as a single event. It's a monthly ache, a waiting room, a hallway conversation about whether to try again — repeated for months or sometimes years. And somewhere in the middle of it, a pattern I see often in my practice starts to form: two partners, grieving the same loss, quietly convinced the other one isn't grieving "correctly."

"They just go quiet and throws himself into work. I need to talk about it. I don't understand how he's not falling apart too."

That gap in coping style gets misread as a gap in caring — as if the partner who copes differently must care less, or be handling it better, or worse. Almost always, that's not what's actually happening. It's two people who love each other, hurting in different languages.

Roughly 1 in 6 people worldwide experience infertility at some point in their lives (World Health Organization, 2023). It's common. What's less talked about is how consistently it strains the partnership itself — not because either partner is doing something wrong, but because a loss this prolonged tends to surface differences in coping that were always there, just never load-bearing before.

🧠 What the Research Shows

  • Infertility isn't a single moment of grief — it's a recurring one. Each treatment cycle brings its own arc: hope during the active phase, dread during the wait, and either relief or fresh disappointment at the end, only to begin again (American Society for Reproductive Medicine, n.d.). Clinicians often describe this as a genuine rollercoaster, and that language isn't an exaggeration — it's a fairly accurate map of what the nervous system goes through, over and over.

  • The psychological toll of this cycle is real and well-documented: women undergoing fertility treatment report distress levels comparable to those coping with cancer, cardiac illness, and other serious medical conditions (Domar, Zuttermeister, & Friedman, 1993).

  • In a study of over 1,000 patients undergoing fertility treatment, women reported proportionately more confrontative coping, help-seeking, and emotional processing, while men reported more distancing and self-controlling strategies (Peterson, Newton, Rosen, & Skaggs, 2006). Neither pattern was inherently healthier — both were associated with managing distress, just differently.

  • In a related study of 420 couples, the strategies themselves weren't what predicted distress — the mismatch was. Couples where one partner used a lot of distancing while the other used very little reported significantly higher distress than couples whose coping styles were more aligned (Peterson, Newton, Rosen, & Schulman, 2006).

  • This means the goal isn't to get both partners coping "the same way," or to stop hoping so the disappointment hurts less. It's to help each partner understand what the other's coping style is doing for them, and to find a way to keep hoping together without either of you being flattened when hope doesn't land the way you wanted.

🧭 ACT Lens: Willingness, Not Synchrony

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy doesn't ask partners to grieve in sync, and it doesn't ask you to protect yourself by hoping less. It asks each person to make room for the pain — theirs and their partner's — without needing it to look a certain way, and to keep acting from shared values even while that pain, and that hope, are both present (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 2012).

Here's the piece that's easy to miss: the exhaustion of infertility isn't just about disappointment. It's about the expectation that comes before it. Every cycle asks you to open back up to hope, knowing it might not be met — and doing that again and again takes a specific kind of courage. ACT calls this willingness: choosing to stay open to something meaningful, even without a guarantee, because closing off from hope entirely would cost you something too.

A lot of infertility-related conflict isn't actually about the infertility. It's about the meaning each partner has attached to how the other manages that same open-hearted risk. Quiet gets read as not caring. Wanting to talk gets read as dwelling. Both readings are usually wrong, and both come from fusion — treating a thought about the partner ("they don't care," "they've given up hope," "they're not being realistic") as if it were simply a fact.

The shift isn't small: from "why can't you hope, hurt, or grieve like me" to "we're both doing something genuinely hard here, and it looks different on each of us — and that's allowed."

🔧 Skills You Can Use Today

  • Name the rollercoaster together, out loud. Before a treatment cycle or big decision, acknowledge as a couple that you're about to ride the arc again — hope, waiting, and whatever comes after. Naming it in advance takes some of its power away.

  • Separate the story from the behavior. When the thought "they don't care" or "they've stopped hoping" shows up, try noticing it as a thought — "I'm having the thought that you don't care" — rather than treating it as settled fact.

  • Build in a soft landing for disappointment, before you need it. Decide together, in a calm moment, what comfort actually looks like for each of you after hard news — so you're not improvising it in the worst moment.

  • Schedule the conversation instead of ambushing it. If one partner needs to process and the other needs distance, agree on a specific time to talk, so processing doesn't feel intrusive and distancing doesn't feel like stonewalling.

  • Let hope and realism coexist. You can genuinely hope for this cycle and also prepare yourself for it not working. That's not pessimism — it's psychological flexibility, and it tends to soften the crash on the hard days without asking you to give up on the good ones.

🧷 Untrendy but True

Infertility will very likely surface differences in how you and your partner hope, wait, and grieve. That's not a sign your relationship is broken. It's a sign you're two people who love each other, going through something genuinely hard, side by side, in the ways you each know how — and still choosing, cycle after cycle, to open back up to hope. That willingness, even when it's scared and tired, is its own kind of devotion.

Resources for the Curious

📚 Books

  • The Impossible Grief — Kara Wahlin. A candid look at infertility grief that doesn't rush toward silver linings.

  • A Liberated Mind — Steven C. Hayes. The creator of ACT on psychological flexibility, useful for holding hope and disappointment at once.

  • Sweet Grapes: How to Stop Being Infertile and Start Living Again — Jean W. Carter & Michael Carter. A grounded look at redefining a path forward when treatment doesn't end in pregnancy.

🎧 Podcasts

  • Fertility Docs Uncensored — Reproductive endocrinologists answer real patient questions with clinical clarity and warmth.

  • Infertile AF — Candid, community-driven conversations about the emotional and relational side of infertility.

  • Domar on Demand — Dr. Alice Domar's mind-body approach to fertility-related stress and coping.

▶️ Videos

References

American Society for Reproductive Medicine. (n.d.). Surviving the roller coaster emotions of infertility treatment [Webinar]. ReproductiveFacts.org. https://www.reproductivefacts.org/browse-resources/videos/surviving-the-roller-coaster-emotions-of-infertility-treatment/

Domar, A. D., Zuttermeister, P. C., & Friedman, R. (1993). The psychological impact of infertility: A comparison with patients with other medical conditions. Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 14(Suppl.), 45–52.

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and commitment therapy: The process and practice of mindful change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Peterson, B. D., Newton, C. R., Rosen, K. H., & Schulman, R. S. (2006). Coping processes of couples experiencing infertility. Family Relations, 55(2), 227–239. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3729.2006.00372.x

Peterson, B. D., Newton, C. R., Rosen, K. H., & Skaggs, G. E. (2006). Gender differences in how men and women referred with in vitro fertilization (IVF) cope with infertility stress. Human Reproduction, 21(9), 2443–2449. https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/del145

World Health Organization. (2023). Infertility prevalence estimates, 1990–2021. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240068315

Jessica Luiz https://jessicaluizpsyd.com
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