What miscarriage does to a marriage
Pregnancy loss is not some cathartic, therapeutic growth experience for a couple. It’s grief.
One of the most common platitudes about pregnancy loss is that it will make you stronger as a couple.
What this skims over, of course, is that it can also make you more fragile. The image of strength conjured up was one where husband and wife would enter a chrysalis of grief, holding each other’s hands, communicating and emerging some time later united, stronger, drawn together in understanding. The reality, at least for us, was more complicated.
Pregnancy loss is not some cathartic, therapeutic growth experience for a couple. It’s grief. It’s debilitating. No one would expect you to personally ‘emerge stronger’ from any other kind of grief, so the same expectation should not be placed on a pair of imperfect individuals and their relationship.
I would describe it better as having learned how to live with our losses. Like you learn how to live with, not ‘get over’ any other kind of grief, how you learn to grieve rather than ‘be stronger’ any other kind of death.
To help anyone dealing with the toll of recurrent pregnancy loss, I have written honestly below about how each of our miscarriages affected our relationship. This will hopefully bring to light the strain miscarriage places upon personal relationships. And let you know that you are not alone.
Pregnancy number one
When we found out I was pregnant two months after our wedding in 2016, it felt like the universe was telling us how compatible we were. Look, not only are you madly in love but the stars have aligned for you to have a baby together. The night that we lost it was one of the longest (we were up all night) and saddest of our marriage. Over the next 48 hours, we were that couple in the chrysalis, comforting each other, saying all the right things. We felt closer and stronger.
Then normal life descended,. At the time, we were living on a narrowboat in winter with no hot water. How to solve the hot water problem was already a subject of contention. After the miscarriage, it became all-consuming.
To be unable to have a hot shower at home started to chip away at me. I found myself lashing out at my husband about it. What neither of us understood at the time is that hormones take a really long time to settle down as your body seeks to rebalance after the pregnancy loss. Months. My lashing out was in part to do with how unstable I was feeling — but I didn’t realise that.
In the meantime, my husband was really starting to resent my behaviour as he worked to resolve the hot water problem.
The result was that even once my hormones had calmed down, there were tensions between us, which prolonged the feelings of emotional instability in both of us.
Pregnancy number two
We were very optimistic about pregnancy number two. After all, although the first had failed, we saw no reason why a second one would.
Even after the doctor came into our cubicle in Guys and St Thomas’ to explain that we had an ectopic pregnancy, we consoled each other that we were just unlucky. Again, we were there for each other, a unit, strength for one another as we went to and from the hospital to find out if they would need to operate.
Then real life descended again. Without going into detail, my family placed a lot of demands on us to follow through with arrangements we were no longer capable of honouring. My feelings of obligation towards both my family and my husband tore me apart, and, because of the miscarriage-induced hormonal storm, I was unable to take the emotional distance needed to gain perspective.
In the end, I crumbled to the family pressure and my husband and I were forced into an arrangement that still impacts on us today.
Again, even once my hormones had re-stabilised, we both found ourselves again in a situation with a lot of relationship repair work to do.
Pregnancy number three
Again, we were optimistic. Surely with a miscarriage and an ectopic out of the way, this one would be fine? Sadly it miscarried too. At this point, we began to realise that perhaps there was something medically wrong.
However, with three losses in ten months our marriage was no longer in the strongest place. We had hurt each other in the ways we had behaved to and reacted to one another. What we really needed was a period of calm in which we could start to trust one another again, but what we got was another storm.
This time, we disagreed about everything, even what doctors to go to. Looking back, I can see that we now fundamentally mistrusted one another’s judgements and reactions. He, because of the unpredictability and intensity of my feelings and how they had left him feeling voiceless, me, because I could sense the mistrust, and didn’t feel I was getting the support or understanding of how difficult this was for me.
Neither of us had the reserves to really listen to one another and the arguments increased.
Pregnancy number four
There was a big gap between pregnancies three and four, which had given us time to understand the effect of the miscarriages on our relationship. So, when I began to lose the pregnancy while on holiday, I was able to recognise the big emotional swings arriving in the aftermath, and even warn my husband that I was having a shit day or feeling really terrible.
This made all the difference and we really helped one another through it. Little did we know, however, that this was not the end of the road.
Pregnancy number five
This was the really scary one. Six weeks in, the embryo ruptured my left fallopian tube and I was rushed into emergency surgery. For me, there was no moment to grieve the lost pregnancy. In the two weeks afterwards, dosed up on painkillers, I didn’t really feel anything apart from relief to be alive.
My husband looked after me so lovingly, helping me to go to the toilet, sitting me up and down. Those two weeks gave us the time and space to process everything and we had learned in a loving way. However, this was not the end of the road for us either.
Pregnancy number six
In short, I had a breakdown. By now, I had seen all the fertility specialists, I was on all the drugs. The offending left fallopian tube had been removed — yet I still miscarried. In the weeks and months after this miscarriage, neither myself nor my husband were able to control our feelings.
I fell apart entirely. I would also say that his behaviour really let me down. One morning, in the bath, I realised I could not go on like this. I needed professional help.
I went to the doctor. I also went to London — without my husband. Lost in the streets around Covent Garden, I decided to see a Tarot reader. The first thing he told me was that someone in my life loved me so so much. I told him about our marriage problems and he said that he saw that there was so much love there, we would get through. I rang my husband after the reading and we cried and cried on the phone, knowing at least that were true.
After the breakdown, with the right counsellor and the right medication, I found I was able to locate a core of emotional stability within myself — a core that therapy and meditation alone had not been able to consistently provide.
The next time my husband and I argued, I found that I could calm down, apologise for my part and listen. To my surprise, he was so much more empathetic and understanding than he had ever been before.
Previously, the only way an argument could truly end was for my husband to set aside everything he was feeling and to cater to my emotional pain. I had no idea what a toxic pattern was being established, but neither did I have the emotional resources to see anything other than my own pain.
Pregnancy number seven
When I saw the two lines on the stick, I was scared. I thought that life could not be so cruel to take away another pregnancy so soon after the last. Yet that was exactly what had happened. When we got the blood results back telling us the pregnancy was failing, we sat together outside on our terrace, and I told my husband I could not do this anymore.
I could not keep trying for a baby, never knowing when the pregnancy would occur, never having any control over whether it would work out. He agreed.
This doesn’t mean we have given up. We decided to try something different — IVF — in the hope that a more controlled process might yield different results.
So are we stronger now? Yes. We have learned to be better people and to take responsibility for our behaviour in the relationship. This has made us trust each other in a far deeper way, and crucially, feel emotionally safe with one another when once we did not.
Yet it’s been a brutal road. If it were a graph it would look like a squiggle on a Richter scale and not a smooth upwards curve. As a result of the problems arising from the miscarriages, we closed ourselves off from the rest of the world. There was simply not enough headspace to be the kinds of friends we could have been to the other people in our lives. This requires repair work that will be ongoing for a while now.
Many times I have wondered whether we needed something as terrible as seven miscarriages to forge this solid place in our relationship, or whether we might have naturally arrived here anyway, through maturity.
What I do know, however, is that this kind of challenge holds a magnifying glass up to the faults in a relationship. In our case, the faults emerged rather marked. It really is only love that gets you through.
