From the outside, our relationship looked like it had for 24 years: solid.
After the first one surrogacy The experience ended in a stillbirth, and our friends were convinced that we would be fine because we were the “closest couple” they knew. I wasn’t so sure. For months, I felt as if my husband, Ethan, and I were two bodies that found each other in the dark. At home, our paths rarely cross. My eyes barely caught Ethan. At one point he didn’t notice I was right behind him and closed the door on me.
It felt like we were hanging in the silence between the cracks and the collapse. We went through life-changing challenges together in our 20s and 30s because of my full-body symptoms. endometriosis, adenomyosis, early menopauseand a medical system that trivialized them all. My condition rocked our intimacy, disrupted my career, and made Ethan my caregiver. Being undiagnosed for decades also cost me my fertility and depleted my fertility ovarian reserve and lead to miscarriage after miscarriage with IVF and IUI.
Although we weren’t living the life we dreamed of, and I felt guilty about the weight it was putting on Ethan, we managed to maintain the zest for life we’d had since we first met—until we moved into surrogacy.
Our decision to choose an egg donor and a surrogate was a compromise. Although I had always been ambivalent about motherhood, the idea of a partnership with Ethan gradually filled me with tenderness and curiosity. But by then, after years of illness, I wanted a hysterectomy. Ethan still really wanted to be a father. Neither of us wanted to risk my well-being with more hormone treatments and pregnancy loss, so we took what people call the “easy way out.” Although my doctors criticized me for donating my eggs and uterus “too soon,” our decision to adopt surrogacy felt liberating—at first.
We thought finding a gestational surrogate would be the hardest part. Turns out we were wrong. Instead, we were totally unprepared for how surrogacy would change our marriage.
The three mistakes we made in surrogacy that almost destroyed our marriage.
None of us called out the red flags we saw.
Our first surrogacy experience was something that we now warn other intended parents against. We entrusted an agency with our fate and funds, who we entrusted to introduce us to a surrogate and broker who would reimburse us for the expenses related to the pregnancy on our behalf. At the time, we didn’t know about their proven cheating history.
