I’ve never been good at keeping my own secrets. It followed, then, that I persuaded my much more private husband to openly tell people about our IVF journey. To my surprise, it wasn’t difficult to do. He felt that sharing what we were going through would help us glean more advice about enduring the process.
Our IVF journey started in early 2026 through the NHS, just over two years after we started trying to start a family. I was 30 and my husband 32. Fortunately, on our third date we had discussed what we would do if we couldn’t conceive. So, when it became our reality, it didn’t feel like a new or thorny conversation to broach.
Early on, we had to advocate for our dream. One doctor sent me away, telling me to “enjoy your first year of marriage with your husband”. Her words made me feel guilty. I loved my life with my husband and our sausage dog; was it wrong of me to want children, too? Later, a women’s health specialist at the same practice apologised for how my wishes had been dismissed, and gave us the fertility clinic referral that would, nearly a year later, lead to us beginning IVF treatment.
We had long suspected we had friends who had been on their own IVF journeys and kept it private. We also knew people who had struggled before conceiving their children, and others who had adopted after multiple rounds of IVF weren’t successful. I’ve found that the process can sow deep seeds of secrecy, rooted in fear of failure, a sense of shame and hidden heartbreak. I thought that by shedding some light on our own struggles, I might be able to avoid the darker recesses a fertility journey can push you into. I also hoped that we’d be met with positive stories of it working for our family members, friends, friends of friends and even strangers. Still, none of my hoping prepared me for the repercussions of inviting other people into our reality.
“You’re pregnant!?” well-meaning friends guessed too soon – excited for me, and aware my husband and I were proactively trying. I laughed it off, tears threatening to fall. At this point, I’d lost count of how many pregnancy tests I’d binned after double – sometimes triple – checking that my late period did not mean I was pregnant. “Not yet,” I replied.
Some people wanted to know precisely why we are pursuing IVF. Intimate questions that made me feel as though they were trying to figure out if one of us is “more to blame” for our situation. It seemed that, having allowed people into our secret, no questions were off limits. Our openness invited curiosity around details we hadn’t considered sharing. Then came the questions about surrogacy and adoption, which caught me off guard because, of course, we were hopeful about IVF. We ruled out surrogacy, but adoption is a very special path that we would still consider. Secretly, though, I wondered: are we not allowed to be a little bit selfish first?
“It’s an incredibly personal experience, yet others feel they can comment on your situation with knowledge,” Denise Durham, Care Fertility’s lead counsellor, explains to me. Often, they “have no concept of the emotional turmoil that’s been going on [behind the scenes]”.
Friends and family would discreetly check in with me to ask if I was OK after pregnancy announcements from others in our circle. It came from a place of kindness, but it made me worry that others were looking at me in those special moments. I wanted to celebrate them, not be reminded of my own experience of infertility on what should be a happy occasion.
Allowing so many people into our experience has been something of a double-edged sword. Our egg retrieval process was positive, but did that now mean we had to update the world on when we’re planning our embryo transfer dates, I wondered? Fear that this might mean having to disclose failed cycles to people quickly followed. And if we are lucky enough to get pregnant later down the line, would we even have those first 12 weeks to exist in our own private bubble? Yes, it feels like a problem of our own making, but it’s a complicated one to unpick.
Changing how you want to be best supported during the IVF process is normal, Durham tells me. “When people start treatment, they’re very excited. They’re hopeful.” Part of her job, she says, is talking to patients about setting boundaries. “It’s not easy, speaking to people that you’ve already told, now saying, ‘I may be going through fertility treatment. I don’t really want to talk about it. Can you wait until I bring it into the conversation?’”
Maybe we did tell everyone a little too much, too soon. There’s a long road ahead, and I hadn’t anticipated quite how much the added scrutiny might affect me. The silver lining, in amongst the probing questions and pitying looks, is that we have found one thing we were looking for – positive, hope-renewing stories about the treatment that we might never have heard otherwise. Perhaps that’s worth it.