RESEARCH_TIMELINE
The Science of Trying to Conceive: Why the Grief, the Envy, and the Fights Aren't a Character Flaw
Trying to conceive turns a private hope into a monthly pass/fail test, and the data says the toll is real, not dramatics: infertility produces psychological distress on par with a cancer diagnosis, envy of pregnant friends is one of the most commonly documented feelings in the research — not a personality flaw — and scheduling sex around ovulation strains couples in measurable ways no matter how 'relaxed' they try to be about it. Here's what several decades of research on infertility distress actually found, and why the shame that gets attached to it doesn't hold up.
How the science changed · 1993–2022
- 1993
Domar and colleagues give infertile women the same psychological symptom checklist (SCL-90R) used with cancer, cardiac-rehab, and hypertension patients — and find infertility distress statistically indistinguishable from all three, higher than only chronic-pain and HIV-positive patients. ↗
- 2003
Peterson, Newton and Rosen show it's not how distressed each partner is alone that predicts trouble — it's the gap between partners: couples where one partner's perceived stress far outpaces the other's report worse marital adjustment and more depression. ↗
- 2005
Schmidt, Holstein, Christensen and Boivin follow 2,250 people starting fertility treatment and find that how couples communicate and cope — not their diagnosis or treatment outcome — predicts who is still struggling with fertility-problem stress a year later, among the 816 who hadn't had a baby. ↗
- 2006
In the largest coping study of its kind — 1,026 patients — Peterson and colleagues find women use proportionately more confrontive coping, responsibility-taking, and support-seeking, while men use more distancing and self-control: a patterned gender difference, not a difference in how much either partner cares. ↗
- 2007
Cousineau and Domar's review names what infertility does beyond sadness: distress, loss of control, stigma, and a derailed sense of adult life-timing — arguing that the medical framing of infertility had, for decades, let clinicians overlook the emotional load. ↗
- 2010
Greil, Slauson-Blevins and McQuillan's review of the field documents envy of other mothers and grief as recurring themes in infertile women's own accounts, and finds the evidence on relationships mixed — some studies find no added strain, others find real damage, especially where parenthood is central to identity. ↗
- 2022
In a 12-month randomized trial of 450 people trying to conceive, Martins and colleagues find no timing strategy — every-other-day sex, fertile-window monitoring, or no instructions at all — protects against rising depression symptoms or declining sexual wellbeing: the toll shows up regardless of the plan. ↗