From the outside, the relationship looked the way it had for 24 years: solid. After our first surrogacy experience ended in stillbirth, friends assumed the couple would be fine because they were the “most together” people everyone knew. The reality was different. For months, it felt like two bodies fumbling to find each other in the dark. At home, our orbits rarely intersected. Once, he didn’t realize I was right behind him and he closed the door on me.
We had weathered life-altering challenges in our 20s and 30s due to my whole-body symptoms from endometriosis, adenomyosis, and early menopause. My condition rattled our intimacy, upended my career, and made my husband, Ethan, my caretaker. Being undiagnosed for decades cost us my fertility, depleting my ovarian reserve and leading to miscarriage after miscarriage with IVF and IUIs. Though we managed to maintain a sense of joy we’d had since we first met, the strain eventually led us to consider surrogacy.
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Our decision to opt for an egg donor and a surrogate was an act of compromise. Ethan still really wanted to be a dad, and neither of us wanted to jeopardize my health with more hormonal treatments. Doctors criticized us for giving up on my eggs and uterus “too soon,” but the decision felt liberating at first. We thought finding a gestational surrogate would be the hardest part. We were wrong. We were totally unprepared for how surrogacy would change our marriage.
The Breaking Points
Our first surrogacy experience was the kind we now caution other intended parents against. We entrusted an agency with our fate and our funds, unaware of their fraudulent history. We were vulnerable and privileged to have found someone willing to carry a baby for us, so we ignored the red flags we noticed with the agency’s inflated reimbursements and our surrogate’s jarring mood fluctuations. If we had shared our worries early on, we might have had a chance to course-correct.
The isolation that arises from an unequal division of labor in surrogacy arrangements creates a fracture that emotional support alone cannot fix. When the logistical, legal, and financial weight shifts entirely to one partner, the process ceases to be a joint endeavor of building a family and becomes a solitary project management crisis. This administrative imbalance eats away at the foundation of a marriage, leaving the burdened partner feeling less like a spouse and more like a case manager.
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Ethan let me bear the brunt of the conversations with our surrogate. He thought he had a supportive role, but his absence from the foreground put extra weight on my shoulders. I handled the legal and financial paperwork and the communication with the agency. Ethan was grateful and proud of me for managing what he considered more in my wheelhouse, but I felt paralyzing stress and resentment having to tackle these hard tasks alone.
Our breaking point was brought on by our different ways of grieving. While I tend to dig deep into painful topics to make sense of them, Ethan prefers to compartmentalize. At the hospital after the delivery, he preferred to leave the room when I stayed to spend a few minutes with our stillborn. I wanted the loss to feel tangible, while he wanted to hold onto the joy from other memories. We snapped at each other constantly because he needed a semblance of normalcy and I needed to dwell in darkness.
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Rebuilding the Partnership
Over nearly a year, with the help of therapy, we made shifts that saved our marriage. When we met our second surrogate through a more ethical agency, Ethan and I formed a true trio with her. Ethan made it a priority to participate in conversations and reply to group texts. He also started helping with the challenging legal and financial tasks, keeping up with emails he was CC’ed on during the day. The three of us built an intimacy I never expected.
When we lost our baby with our second surrogate at the end of the first trimester, we grieved as a unit. Our trio sat intertwined with our hands piled on my lap. At home, Ethan was more receptive to my needs on bad days. He was more honest with family and friends about our emotional and financial distress, agreeing to ask for a loan to help us get back on our feet after two surrogacy journeys and thirteen years of fertility expenses.
