The silent struggle of infertility: When your friends are pregnant – and you aren’t

“I felt like a failure.” The psychological toll infertility can have on women can feel overwhelming, taking over every ounce of a woman’s emotional energy. Without others around them having an understanding of its impact, women feel isolated and alone, left to deal with their infertility stress in silence.

“My rational side knew it wasn’t my fault, but it’s just something that many, many women feel,” says Anna Sane. Sane, a 37-year-old living in Stockholm, started trying to conceive with her partner in 2017 and soon after, became pregnant. “But at eight weeks, I started bleeding, and a miscarriage was confirmed,” she says.

Suddenly, becoming pregnant was all she could think about. “I was obsessed, and it felt very important that it happened now,” she says. “I was taken by surprise by all of these emotions. Both how sad the miscarriage made me, and how I suddenly become so stressed.”

Following other miscarriages, the loss of two children more than halfway through pregnancy, and several failed IVFs, Sane eventually gave birth to her little boy in May 2021.

During the years she struggled with infertility, Sane was bombarded by unexpected emotions and stress. “It was like a vicious circle,” she says. “I had all these difficult thoughts, and then I felt bad for having them. I felt I should be able to cope better and have some more patience.”

Sane remembers a friend texting her to say she was pregnant. “I had to run to the bathroom at work to cry. What was going on? Why couldn’t I be happy for her? Most of my friends had not only one, but two children throughout the time we were struggling. It was an obvious reminder of what I didn’t have. One of my low points was my husband told me friends were expecting their second child, and I threw a desk across the room.”

For nearly five years, as Sane struggled to have a baby, she felt isolated. “My relationships became difficult in general because people simply didn’t know how to support me,” she says. “There was a lot of toxic positivity and after a while of being told what I should be feeling (positive and hopeful), I just stopped telling people how I was actually feeling (hopeful but lost).”

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Her life was ‘on pause’ while trying, and she felt like a failure. She avoided looking for a new job, postponed her wedding party, and said no to all the ‘good’ things in life because she was “caught in the middle”.

Even when she became pregnant with her son, who she would go on to give birth to, she found that all the emotions she’d been feeling for years came to the surface. “When you’re in the midst of infertility, you’re also in ‘do-mode’,” she says. “There’s not always time to feel everything you need because you have to focus on the next step.”

After enduring all the emotional impacts of infertility, Sane went on to create the Tilly app to offer emotional support for anyone struggling to conceive.

“One of the most discussed topics in online forums is how lonely and misunderstood people feel,” she says. “A lot of people also underestimated their own distress which just makes it harder to cope. I believe that a different conversation and narrative around infertility can change this, so we can support each other better.”

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While each woman will experience different emotions and challenges whilst struggling with infertility, there is one thing most women have in common, according to psychologist Stina Järvholm.

“Infertility is an emotional rollercoaster,” Järvholm says. “You’re hoping every cycle it will turn out the way you want. Some days are really great, and some days are really awful. It’s the hardest place you can be to help yourself when things are shifting back and forth really fast.”

This emotional rollercoaster can be difficult for women to help themselves through because they can feel one way today, and a totally different way tomorrow.

“You don’t get a rest from it,” says Järvholm. “When you’re wanting your body to be pregnant, you are ‘on’ all the time.”

When you're on the rollercoaster, other aspects of life are also impacted. Relationships might feel strained. Other life stresses could become breaking points. Loneliness may be acutely felt.

Miscarriages and IVF rounds have their unique challenges, Järvholm explains. “While both are similar, they are slightly different in a psychological way,” she says. “Repeated miscarriages may feel like a roulette situation – you’re just stuck on the wheel, trying again and again, because sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Repeated implant failures are more like depressive burnout. One part of your mind says to stop, but the other part of the brain is asking what other options there are. That you need to try once more.”

Elin Hörberg remembers when she and her partner found out her partner had no sperm in the samples he had provided. “My heart dropped,” the 37-year-old, who lives in Malmö, says. “The doctors came in and talked to us about possible surgeries and about sperm donation, but it was all a blur. We were so shocked. It was such a dark time, like falling down a black hole. We were so sad.”

Following that initial appointment in 2020, Hörberg and her fiancé have tried different avenues to become pregnant. Her fiancé had surgery to remove and freeze the few sperm found in his testicles, but the subsequent embryos didn’t end up surviving.

“Right after they found those first few sperm, I found out that two of my best friends were both pregnant,” she remembers. “I got so happy and thought naively that the three of us were going to have babies at the same time. And here I am, years later. They have their babies and I’ve never even gotten a plus on a pregnancy stick. That hurts.”

Doctors suggested sperm donations, egg retrievals, different methods and medicines - none of which have worked to give them the result they have wanted: their own baby.

“It’s taken its toll on my personality, my creativity, my friendships, my self image,” Hörberg describes. “I’ve had to take long term sick leaves from work and started with anti-depression medicine. It messes with your head in a way that I don’t think you can understand if you haven’t gone through it. I’ve gone through grief before, but this is something else. I’m not saying it’s worse, but something else because you can never give up and move on. You always have to recharge and find hope again. You can never start planning for an alternate future, so you get stuck. Your whole life is on hold. It’s horrible.”

Even now, Hörberg's body has two embryos in her uterus. “I don’t know if they are still there, if I’m pregnant, or if they’ve disappeared,” she says. “It’s been a couple of mentally exhausting weeks. My body is expecting grief. I wish more people would feel comfortable to talk about their infertility journeys. It’s still very stigmatised, both with women and men. I think this has a huge impact on emotions around infertility. I mean it’s hard enough as it is. We shouldn’t need to feel ashamed or like it’s something you should keep to yourself.”

Even though each woman’s journey is different, Järvholm gently suggests to women to just take the next step. “Focus on the next week, the next month, this cycle, or this treatment, not what you should do to feel better, but what you should do to support yourself,” she says. “Try to live what you should do, not what you should think or feel.”