My sperm are slow and shitty and it makes me feel slow and shitty most days, so my wife and I had to do IVF back in April 2022. Well, I guess we actually started in February 2022 and it finished, unsuccessfully, in April 2022. It started with a real whimper, too — I got shitfaced the night before it even began.
If you believe in karma and all that, maybe that’s why it didn’t work. Then we did it again before we went to Fiji, and that one didn’t work either. So, I tell you all this to help you understand that I might be coming at all this from a biased place, and I get that. I can lean into my own shortcomings, though.
When we did IVF the first time, leading up to it and throughout it, I regularly had to be in fertility clinic waiting rooms, either to support my wife for an appointment, learn what was going on, do a blood draw, or jerk off into a cup. I almost never saw other men in these appointments. Usually it was a woman, alone and in sunglasses, on her work laptop. You’d see a man maybe 2 out of every 10–12 times. It was interesting. So, one time I told my old therapist that stat, and he said something like “Well, the men are obviously working/earning or watching the existing kids.”
That seemed like a reasonable-enough assumption, although I did wonder at the time why people would be in a fertility clinic if they already had pre-existing kids — then, months later, I learned we have a term for that: “secondary infertility.” Not sure how I feel about all that, but eh.
OK, so point being — I never saw dudes around. At the same time, I was working out with this F3 group which was a bunch of affluent dads-of-3, and a lot of them were good guys, but a lot of them were also flippant as hell about fatherhood, i.e. “Wifey’s out of town, gotta babysit my kids this weekend!” (You don’t babysit your own kids.) Between failing at IVF and hearing those guys chatter every morning, I think I broke my brain.
It caused me to write this once.
Alright, so what I’ve tried to establish so far (possibly poorly) is that dudes don’t often seem to “show up” on this journey. Obviously this varies tremendously by person. Some guys do show up, and some guys understand there’s a difference between “traditional masculinity” (lift heavy, earn big, sire children) and “modern masculinity” (in which women can and do outearn men often, and jobs of strength have been largely outsourced, so maybe we need a new role for men). I think most guys I know are stuck in the old paradigm, trying to make it work, and if you even mention a new paradigm, they typically point to their earnings, virility, or “the need for strong men.” I think we need strong men, but I think the confusion is about what the word “strong” means. You can be strong in other ways aside from sperm, deadlift, and ability to close deals. That’s where I think we’re missing the boat.
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