How Your Dick Breaks Your Brain

A quick walk through some bullshit that maybe 1 in 18 people deal with. Thanks for listening.

These things can always feel self-indulgent to write, so I won’t go super deep on all of it. While I think I did improve my “numbers” in the last few years, I have what some would call “significant male factor infertility.” Nice. Now, the good thing is: there’s increasing awareness that infertility “isn’t just a female thing” to the point that we have a new word for it all: Spermageddon. As such, I am not alone in all of this, although you can very often feel alone, as most guys don’t want to touch any conversation that questions virility with a 68-foot pole. It’s isolating.

I think, in my specific case, I came off a divorce in 2017 and was lucky enough to find love again. That’s good! I had always wanted to be a dad, or at least society brainwashed me enough into believing I wanted to be one, so I thought, “Oh, that’s a possible off-shoot of a new chance at a relationship too!” It was not, for the record, a primary reason.

With my ex, as that friend circle was more Northeast than Texas, people were having kids later in life. At the time I was exiting that world, there were some newborns and some pregnancies, but no adolescents or anything. Not even school-aged, really. Because I didn’t even get married the first time until 32–33, I hadn’t really had Baby on Brain for that long, if at all.

I was also kinda changing everything about my life. The top 12 people that I texted in late 2016 all became people that I couldn’t really text with anymore, for various reasons. I was really sad and alone. I had some good friends here, which is part of why I stayed, but it was a hard time and I got drunk a lot and fell asleep before my pizza order arrived. Stuff like that.

When I started meeting some of my now-wife’s friends, they seemed cool enough — but they were younger and very Southern/Texan, so in their late 20s, they had baby squarely on the brain. Now most of them have between one and three kids.

I also met a lot of their dudes; some nice guys in that bunch, but a lot of performative assholes too, and guys where you wonder if they know what grade their kid is in.

Obviously some of these guys had their own social dynamic from before I emerged, so they didn’t treat me real nice or include me in things, give or take. I think I got a couple of bar invites, which was awesome, but I flaked on one. This is all part of my pre-COVID and in-COVID friendship decline, methinks.

Once we did get married and start “trying,” nothing was happening, and then we got tested, and then I had the “significant” stuff above, and then we did IVF a couple of times and nothing worked there, and meanwhile all these people around us seem to get pregnant consistently. Now, some of those are not easy and people have their own journies, and I’m aware of lots of different miscarriages and fertility waiting rooms and all that. Life is hard, man!