From the outside, the relationship looked precisely the way it had for 24 years: entirely solid.
When the couple’s first surrogacy experience tragically ended in a stillbirth, friends were quick to offer reassurance, utterly convinced they would weather the storm because they were widely regarded as the most cohesive couple they knew. But behind closed doors, the reality was starkly different. For months, the author and her husband, Ethan, had felt like two separate bodies fumbling blindly in the dark. At home, their orbits rarely intersected. Her eyes barely landed on Ethan, and on one jarring occasion, he closed a door without realizing she was standing right behind him.
They felt suspended in the quiet space between cracks and total collapse. Together, they had weathered life-altering challenges throughout their twenties and thirties, driven by whole-body symptoms stemming from endometriosis, adenomyosis, early menopause, and a medical system that repeatedly trivialized their experiences. These chronic conditions rattled their intimacy, upended her career, and cast Ethan prematurely into the role of a caretaker. Being undiagnosed for decades also cost her fertility, systematically depleting her ovarian reserve and resulting in miscarriage after miscarriage through grueling rounds of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and intrauterine inseminations (IUIs).
Though they were living a life far removed from the one they had originally dreamed of—and despite the deep personal guilt she carried for the emotional weight she had foisted onto Ethan—they had somehow managed to maintain the joie de vivre that had defined their relationship since the day they first met. That dynamic held firm until they turned to the complex world of surrogacy.
The decision to opt for an egg donor and a gestational carrier was ultimately an act of compromise. While she had always felt a degree of ambivalence about motherhood, the idea of coparenting with Ethan had gradually filled her with a sense of tenderness and curiosity. Yet, after years of chronic illness, what she truly wanted was a hysterectomy to reclaim her body. Ethan, meanwhile, still desperately wanted to be a father. Neither of them wanted to jeopardize her ongoing wellness with any more hormonal treatments or pregnancy losses, leading them to take what many casually referred to as the "easy way out."
Although she faced sharp criticism from medical professionals who argued she was giving up on her eggs and her uterus "too soon," the decision to pursue surrogacy initially felt liberating. They naively assumed that finding a gestational surrogate would unquestionably be the hardest part of the entire ordeal. As it turned out, they were profoundly mistaken. Instead, they found themselves entirely unprepared for the insidious ways the surrogacy process would strain and ultimately reshape their marriage.
The Missteps That Nearly Broke the Marriage
At the outset, neither of them verbalized the glaring red flags they observed. Their first surrogacy experience became the kind of cautionary tale they now share with other intended parents. They had blindly entrusted an agency with their fate and their financial resources, placing the organization in charge of introducing them to a surrogate and acting as the primary intermediary responsible for reimbursing pregnancy-related expenses on their behalf. At the time, they were completely unaware of the agency’s proven history of fraudulent practices.
Not only were Ethan and the author entirely new to the surrogacy landscape, but they also felt intensely vulnerable, perhaps even desperate. They considered themselves deeply privileged to have found someone willing to carry a child for them, and they desperately wanted to demonstrate their generosity and gratitude. Furthermore, intended parents frequently possess very little control when their developing child resides inside someone else’s womb while their hard-earned funds sit dormant in a corporate bank account. Consequently, they chose to ignore the glaring warning signs they noticed regarding the agency’s inflated reimbursements and their surrogate’s jarring mood fluctuations.
Had they openly shared these mounting anxieties with one another early on, they might have stood a fighting chance to course-correct. At the very least, she would not have been forced to carry such an isolating angst entirely within her own bones. During a second-trimester ultrasound, a wave of bitter resentment washed over her as she watched Ethan play the part of his naturally jovial self, talking enthusiastically to their active baby boy through the screen while she stood hunched against the wall, struggling immensely to feel present.
The distress went deeper than the pregnancy feeling unbearably abstract for a mother who had contributed neither her genes nor her womb; she was also growing increasingly skeptical of the agency and felt as though she were walking on eggshells with their surrogate. The surrogate would keep them at arm’s length one week, only to accuse them of failing to provide adequate support the next. She had never carried a pregnancy this far before, and theoretically, it should have been a joyful chapter. Instead, she bottled up her distress, suffocating under the sheer weight of it all.
Compounding this emotional isolation was a profound imbalance in how they shared responsibilities. Throughout that first surrogacy journey, Ethan tacitly allowed her to bear the entire brunt of the daily communications with their surrogate. Believing he was gracefully occupying a supportive background role, his absence from the operational forefront actually piled extra weight directly onto her shoulders. It drained her time, her energy, and her mental headspace while sparing him from the friction.
She was also the one who single-handedly managed all the complex legal and financial paperwork, as well as the relentless communications with the agency. While Ethan remained genuinely grateful and proud of her ability to handle tasks he viewed as being squarely within her wheelhouse, she was drowning under paralyzing stress and building resentment for having to tackle such grueling responsibilities entirely alone during a period of extreme vulnerability.
The breaking point, however, was ultimately triggered by their starkly different ways of grieving. While she naturally tended to dig deep into painful topics and raw emotions in an effort to make sense of them, Ethan strongly preferred to compartmentalize. At the hospital immediately following the delivery, Ethan chose to leave the room while she stayed behind to spend a few quiet, agonizing minutes with their stillborn son. She desperately needed the loss to feel tangible and real, whereas he instinctively wanted to hold onto the lighter joy of other memories, such as watching the baby move during ultrasounds. Neither of their coping mechanisms was inherently wrong, but the gulf between them left them dangerously disconnected.
The months that followed proved to be an absolute agony. Local doctors refused to counsel them on the precise reasons behind their baby’s death simply because she was not the pregnant patient, acting as though they were not the child’s true parents and possessed no fundamental right to know. She spiraling deep into clinical depression and burned with fury every time Ethan told his well-meaning parents that they were doing fine. While he was merely trying to shield them from a burden, she refused to mask their devastating reality for the sake of other people’s comfort.
For 24 years—through the strains of long-distance romance, chronic illness, and profound grief—they had prided themselves on being the "strong couple" who never fought. Now, fractured by the complex realities of surrogacy, they found themselves constantly snapping at each other because Ethan desperately required a semblance of normalcy while she needed to dwell unmolested in the darkness.
The Radical Shifts That Restored the Union
Rebuilding a relationship when the previous incarnation of it has effectively died requires immense intentionality. Over the span of nearly a year, fueled by mutual self-awareness, an enduring baseline of deep respect, and mandatory therapy sessions that Ethan initially despised but dutifully attended, they implemented three subtle yet revolutionary shifts that ultimately saved their marriage.
First, they learned to forge a genuine, cohesive team for every single phase of the process. When they eventually met their second surrogate through a vastly more ethical, transparent, and supportive agency—one that did not demand trust funds—Ethan and the author established a true trio dynamic with her. It helped immensely that this surrogate actively viewed them as a unified front, insisting on their active involvement in every medical appointment, key decision, and daily update. She used the word "together" so frequently that it initially triggered a visceral reaction; it felt entirely foreign after the trauma of their first journey, leaving them unable to tell which of their experiences was the true anomaly.
Determined to break old patterns, Ethan made it an explicit priority to participate actively in conversations and instantly answered group text threads whenever she was overwhelmed. The three of them shared everything freely—their deepest fears, bright dreams, minor victories, favorite recipes, and silly inside jokes—building a level of unexpected intimacy. Even when it was just the two of them, their surrogate remained a constant, comforting presence in their thoughts, as though their marriage had naturally expanded to encompass her. Furthermore, Ethan finally stepped up to share the burden of the difficult legal and financial administrative tasks, diligently keeping up with emails and sitting patiently beside her with a reassuring hand on her back whenever the paperwork grew too overwhelming.
Second, they finally learned that grieving must be practiced as a form of turn-taking. When they suffered the heartbreak of losing another baby at the end of the first trimester with their second surrogate, they faced the tragedy as a unified unit, sitting intertwined with their hands piled heavily across her lap. At home, Ethan proved far more receptive to her needs on difficult days, simply bearing witness to her pain by listening patiently and offering a steadying presence. In return, she developed a deeper understanding of his need to lean into social activities to safely blow off steam. Ethan also became radically more honest with family and friends regarding their ongoing emotional and financial distress, ultimately agreeing to ask for formal assistance and a loan to help get them back on their feet after thirteen cumulative years of fertility battles and mounting health care expenses.
To protect their mental health, they established a strict boundary: absolutely no discussions regarding surrogacy were permitted during weekends or right before bedtime, giving their overtaxed nervous systems a crucial chance to unwind. Dark humor emerged as a vital coping mechanism, allowing them to whisper jaded, self-protective comments to each other whenever a trigger arose. When imagining creative milestones their child would never reach, they would wryly whisper, "File it under never!" During the holiday season, Ethan even raised a glass to toast her with the dark comfort, "Cheers to not losing a child this Christmas!" By holding compassionate space for their contrasting grief styles and meeting firmly in the middle, they dissolved the deep-seated resentment and tension that had once threatened to pull them apart.
Finally, they made a conscious, deliberate effort to remember that they were not defined solely by what they carried or what they had lost. Fertility treatments and surrogacy can easily consume every waking moment of a couple’s existence, a risk magnified exponentially after decades of navigating chronic illness. When the author was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) stemming from the first surrogacy ordeal, her core identity was severely shaken. To counter this, they began actively resurrecting the elements that had made their life and love so special before the medical trauma took over.
Beyond carving out dedicated periods for play, immersion in nature, and grief-free conversations, they pushed themselves to rigorously set aside funds specifically earmarked for leisure and travel—ensuring they had joyful events marked on their calendar to anticipate and savor together rather than perpetually financing medical bills. They discovered that the least daunting way to rebuild a shattered future was simply to tend meticulously to the present moment. Often, the only thing they could genuinely handle was the next half-hour: deciding where to take a quiet walk, figuring out what to make for supper, or working out how to support each other in real-time. She consciously forced her eyes to linger on Ethan until doing so felt entirely natural once again.
Even as they continue to grapple with the complex question of whether and how to proceed further with their surrogacy journey, whenever they find themselves drifting apart like passing ships due to overflowing minds and aching hearts, they stop everything. They drop their tasks, pull each other close, and reconnect through a simple, grounding touch.
They never anticipated that the tenderest gift they attempted to give one another—the chance to finally grow their family through surrogacy—would so profoundly threaten the foundation of their decades-long bond. They had naively believed that the path awaiting them on the other side of medical trauma would be smooth. Instead, their turbulent experiences with surrogacy fundamentally transformed how they show up for one another, through both the heights of joy and the depths of grief.
While they cannot say with absolute certainty that their marriage is now invulnerable to whatever hardships lie ahead, they know they have successfully forged the tools required to recalibrate their direction and find each other in the dark.
