Kiedy owu nie ma, żołnierzyki są leniwe, beta niska, a marzenie o fasolce niespełnione… Wpływ niepłodności na relacje między partnerami

Abstract

Unplanned childlessness or inability to give birth again are nowadays a serious social problem – different statistics say there are from 1 to 3 million pairs impacted. Childlessness is not only an inability to have children but the entire scope of factors affecting social everyday life. It influences financial, professional and interpersonal relations situation but, above all, it changes intrafamilial relations. Harsh and long-lasting therapies require redefining relations between partners and crossing many barriers – intimacy (in both purely physical and illness related sense), strength (physical and emotional) or trust. It forces couples/ marriages to redefine their relations – build new rules of family (and social) life devoted (or not) to a common (or not) goal. Partners’ bodies no longer belong to them and start being treated as a tool necessary for reproduction. They way of “using” the body changes, the way one sees one’s changes – there is a separation between the mind and the body which is subject of therapies, the new language allowing partners to talk about the body and its parts is created (the language that eases familiarizing with the problem) – often childish, e.g. snowflake = frozen embryo, soldiers = sperm). The goal of the article is to outline everyday life problems that couples/marriages face when trying to have children for a very long time. Previous, media driven approach to the topic reduces it to political discussions about in vitro without mentioning mental, social and existential fear that accompanies infertile couples and changes their relationships. The topic is illustrated by the preliminary results of quality research carried out in 2010 on couples struggling with infertility.