When everyone around you is pregnant: holidays, christenings and birthdays

The message lands in the family group chat at 10.14, in the middle of a meeting. An ultrasound photo, three hearts underneath and a line: “Come August, there’ll be one more of us!” Within seconds the congratulations roll in, the exclamation marks, your mum crying with happiness in a voice message. You look at the screen, turn it face down on the table, and for the rest of the meeting you don’t hear a word. In the afternoon you send your congratulations with every exclamation mark you can muster. And you mean it. And at the same time you don’t.

If you recognised yourself in that, you probably know the rest too: the christening where you’re asked to be godparent, your niece’s first birthday, the holiday lunch where every conversation circles around children, and the question that always comes at the worst possible moment. This post is about why events like these are so hard when you are facing infertility, why the feelings they bring are not a sign that you are a bad person, and how you can get through them without having to shut yourself off from everyone you love.

Why someone else’s news hits so hard

Infertility is not rare. In 2023 the World Health Organization pooled data from more than a hundred studies and estimated that roughly one adult in six experiences infertility at some point in their life. But because it isn’t talked about, almost everyone going through it feels they are the only one — and that everyone else around them is pregnant.

That feeling isn’t entirely imagined. Infertility most often comes at the stage of life when friends, colleagues, brothers and sisters are having children too. So the pregnancy announcements really do pile up, and each one arrives as a small comparison: it happened for them, not for us.

Research on the psychological burden of infertility is fairly consistent on one point. Back in the 1990s, Alice Domar and her colleagues compared women being treated for infertility with women living with other medical conditions — and found that levels of anxiety and depression among the women with infertility were comparable to those among women with cancer or heart disease. That doesn’t mean infertility is “the same” as cancer. It does mean that the distress you feel at someone else’s pregnancy is not an overreaction, but part of something that research has described well. You’ll find a short explanation in the knowledge base under infertility and distress.

The envy you aren’t allowed to call envy

Often the hardest part isn’t the sadness. Sadness is still somehow acceptable. Harder is the other thing: the sharpness you feel when your sister says it “happened straight away”. The thought you don’t say out loud: why her, why not me. Sometimes even a brief, ugly wish that it would be hard for her too.

This is called envy, and the people who feel it are usually more ashamed of it than of anything else. Richard Smith and Sung Hee Kim, who reviewed the psychological research on envy, describe it as a painful emotion that arises when someone else has something we deeply want, in an area that matters to who we are. That is exactly why envy is so strong with infertility: this isn’t about a car or a job, but about whether you will ever become a mother or a father at all.

It helps to separate two things. Envy is a feeling, not an action. You can love your sister and envy her at the same time. You can want her baby to be healthy and still feel that her happiness hurts. That isn’t hypocrisy. It’s a person holding two truths in one body. The damage only starts when envy turns into shame, and shame into withdrawing from everyone — or when you try to suppress it so hard that it spills out elsewhere: onto your partner, into anger at yourself, into sleepless nights.

Grief without a funeral

Kenneth Doka coined the term disenfranchised grief for losses that the people around us don’t recognise as losses. Infertility is one of the clearest examples. There is no funeral, no condolences, no day you can take off work. But every month there is a new small loss — and every month, hope that has to be put somewhere again. I wrote more about why losses like this hurt differently in The grief nobody acknowledges.

Pauline Boss described a similar state as ambiguous loss: a loss that isn’t final and so has no clear ending. With infertility you aren’t grieving a child who has died, but a child who isn’t here (yet) — and you don’t know whether they ever will be. If you have already lost a pregnancy, this layer doubles; that is the subject of Pregnancy loss: the grief others don’t acknowledge.

So when you suddenly feel tears coming at a christening or a birthday party, that isn’t “being oversensitive”. It is grief that others can’t see, in a room meant for joy.

A calendar no one else can see

People facing infertility often live by two calendars at once. The first is shared: holidays, birthdays, weddings, christenings, a relative’s first communion, Mother’s Day at the nursery where you drop off your nephew. The second is private: cycle days, appointments, waiting for test results, the date your baby would have been born if the pregnancy had continued, the anniversary of the day you found out it was gone.

When the two calendars overlap, the day becomes twice as hard. Christmas lunch falling the day after a negative test. A christening two weeks before what would have been your due date. Other people don’t know the day is special for you. You, on the other hand, are aware of it three weeks in advance.

In Anniversaries, holidays and the empty chair I wrote about how hard dates are after the death of someone close. With infertility it is similar, except that the chair is empty before anyone has sat in it. And because no one sees it, no one tells you it makes sense that the day is harder.

Simply acknowledging your private calendar helps. Not so you can brace yourself for the worst, but so the day doesn’t catch you off guard and you can make some room for it in advance.

“So when’s it your turn?”

At Slovenian family lunches this question is almost a ritual. First “when are you getting married”, then “when’s the baby coming”, then “when’s the second one”. An aunt asks with a smile, an uncle adds a joke, your mother gives you a look as if she knows something you don’t. Nobody means any harm. But when you are in the middle of treatment or after a loss, the question is like a knife you have to hold in front of everyone with a smile on your face.

You don’t have to answer honestly. You don’t have to explain. It does help, though, to have one sentence ready that you can say without thinking. For example:

• “That’s between the two of us. What about you, how was the seaside?”
• “When there’s something to tell, you’ll hear it.”
• “That’s a hard subject for me at the moment, I’d rather talk about something else.”

And if there is someone in your family you trust, it is sometimes easier to tell them more and ask them to shield you a little at gatherings like these — to steer the conversation elsewhere, or to tell the others not to ask. I described in more detail what people find helpful to hear and what they don’t in What to say to someone who can’t get pregnant (and what not to) — it may be worth sending to someone you’d like to have on your side.

You can say no — and you can say “yes, but differently”

Many people who come to see me feel there are only two options: either you go and hold it together the whole time, or you stay away and you’re a bad brother, sister or friend. Between those extremes there is a lot of space that we can’t see when we’re struggling.

You can go to the christening in church but skip the lunch. You can come to the birthday party for an hour rather than the whole day. You can give a present without being there when it’s opened. You can tell your sister that you’ll gladly help once the baby is born, but ask her not to invite you to the gender reveal party right now. These aren’t excuses. They are boundaries — and in relationships, boundaries are what keep relationships going, not what tears them down.

If you find boundaries hard to set because you feel you are hurting someone, that may not be about infertility alone. The pattern is often older; I wrote about it in How a child who wasn’t allowed to be angry becomes an adult who can’t say no.

Here is how a conversation might sound in which a third way is found (composite, not a real person):

“I know it’s hard for you right now. Would you still come to the christening?”
“I’d love to be there for you. I just don’t know if I can manage the whole lunch, with everyone gathered round the baby.”
“What if you came to the church and skipped the lunch? Nobody will say a thing, I’ll make sure of it.”
“That would work.” Silence. “Thank you for asking me, instead of guessing what I can handle.”

The key line here isn’t the one about lunch. What matters is that the sister asked — and that it felt safe enough to answer truthfully. That doesn’t happen in every family. But where it can, it’s worth trying.

Exercise: a plan for one event

Instead of dreading every event for weeks ahead, take one that is coming up — a holiday, a christening, a birthday — and make a small plan for it. The exercise takes about a quarter of an hour.

1. Name what worries you most about this event. Not in general (“it’ll be hard”), but specifically: your aunt’s question, the moment the baby is passed from arm to arm, the speech over the cake.
2. Decide in what form you’ll take part. The whole time, part of the time, or not at all. All three options are legitimate. If you go, decide in advance when you’ll leave.
3. Prepare one sentence for questions. Write it down and say it out loud once, so you won’t have to search for words in the moment.
4. Agree on a signal with your partner or someone you trust. A word or a gesture that means “I’m stepping outside now” or “we’re going home now” — with no explanations in front of others.
5. Plan something for yourself afterwards. A walk, a bath, a film, silence. Not as a reward for having coped, but as a space where you are allowed to feel what was hard.

After the event, write down what helped and what didn’t. Your next plan will already be more your own.

When each of you copes with events differently

Infertility is something a couple goes through, but rarely do both partners experience it in the same way. Often one partner — not necessarily the woman — finds family gatherings harder, while the other wants to go because “we can’t hide from everyone”. One wants to talk to relatives about it, the other would rather nobody knew. When you renegotiate every invitation from scratch, invitations can gradually turn into arguments that are no longer about the christening, but about who doesn’t understand whom.

It helps to agree on a principle rather than on each event separately. For example: whichever of us is having a harder week gets the final say. Or: we go to family events together, while either of us can go to friends’ events alone. And always: whatever is shared with relatives is shared only if we both agree.

There is another place where the news arrives: social media. Bump photos, gender reveals, first days in the maternity ward. There you don’t have to be polite. You can mute people without unfollowing them, and bring them back later when you feel able to. I wrote about why constant comparison knocks us off balance so quickly in Comparing yourself on social media.

And one more thing: not everything has to be solved outwardly. Sometimes the most valuable thing after a hard event is to sit down together at home and tell each other: “Today was hard for me.” Without anyone correcting, consoling or suggesting solutions.

Where this view falls short

So far I’ve written as if stepping back from events is always healthy and setting boundaries is always a good idea. It isn’t quite that simple.

Withdrawal protects you as long as it is temporary. If a year goes by and you’ve avoided every get-together with friends who have children, if you’ve stopped visiting your sister, if you shut yourself away at home even when nobody is talking about children, then withdrawal is no longer protecting you — it is shrinking your life. And loneliness tends to deepen the distress of infertility, not ease it. That’s when it’s worth looking at whether you are avoiding more than just the painful moments.

Nor is every pang at other people’s pregnancies only a reaction to infertility. Sometimes there is an old relationship underneath — a sister you were always compared with, a family where love depended on achievement. Then the events stir up something that was already there, and that is worth exploring in its own right.

And finally: if you notice that you aren’t sleeping, that nothing gives you pleasure any more, that the days feel meaningless, or that thoughts are appearing that it would be better if you weren’t here, this is no longer just distress around events. Talk to your doctor or see a psychiatrist. If the thoughts are serious, in Slovenia you can call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (from 7 pm to 7 am), the Samaritans helpline in Slovenia on 116 123 (every day, 24 hours), or in an emergency 112.

How therapy can help

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we are interested not only in what you feel, but in how what you feel is woven into your relationships — with your partner, your sister, your parents. It often turns out that the hardest moments at family gatherings aren’t the ones when someone talks about children, but the ones when you feel invisible. And that this feeling of invisibility has a longer history in the family than you might expect.

In sessions you can safely say even what you don’t tell anyone else: that you are envious, that you are angry, that you are ashamed. Not so that you can get rid of these feelings, but so that you no longer carry them alone. Self-compassion is very valuable here too — the ability to say to yourself, in a hard moment, what you would say to a friend in your place. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

Therapy doesn’t replace medical care. Questions about treatment, test results and options belong with your gynaecologist or a fertility clinic. But therapy can help you stay in touch with yourself, and with the people who matter to you, through all of it.

What to remember

• Pain at other people’s pregnancies is common with infertility and well described in research — it isn’t a sign that you are a bad person.
• Envy is a feeling, not an action. You can love someone and envy them at the same time.
• Between “I’ll go and hold it together” and “I won’t go” there are many options in between; all of them are legitimate.
• A plan for one event helps: what worries you, how long you’ll stay, one sentence for questions, a signal for leaving, and something for yourself afterwards.
• Withdrawal is protection as long as it’s temporary. If your life is shrinking, it’s time to look for support.