Man Wonders If He Was Wrong To Start Rumors About His Wife Being Infertile — 'I Just Panicked'
It started as a simple lie to protect his ego and now has ballooned into a scandalous accusation.
Philip Silverman / Getty Images via Canva; DG FotoStock, Bricolage / Shutterstock A man on Reddit has sparked angry backlash online with his story about him and his wife's fertility struggles.
The incredible psychological and emotional toll of infertility can be incredibly difficult to bear. In this man's case, it seems to have gotten the best of him, and it's led to shocking accusations against his wife.
The man suffers from a low sperm count, but he blamed his infertility on his wife when his family asked about it.
In his Reddit post, the man wrote that he and his wife of seven years have been trying to conceive for the past three years, and their struggles have led to a perception that his wife is infertile. Even he himself believed it. "I admit that many times I have complained to family, friends, and coworkers about my wife's infertility," he said.
Photo: @ask_aubry / Twitter
But their fertility testing revealed a very different conclusion — "a very low sperm count." The man wrote that he was so shocked by the news he went for a second opinion, which had the exact same outcome.
The stigma against male infertility is very real, and as the doctor in the video below explains, it can be incredibly corrosive not just to a man's mental health but his marriage too, given how bound up the issue is with notions about masculinity and virility.
Outdated though those notions may be, the pain is real. But the way the man chose to deal with his feelings is difficult to square, even with the most charitable reading of the situation.
The man told his family that their infertility was caused by his wife's previous illnesses, which his family assumed to be a sexually transmitted infection.
The man wrote that his wife had suffered from a bout of tuberculosis earlier in her life while volunteering in a foreign country. For years they had both assumed this was the cause of what they both thought was her infertility. "Her primary care... flippantly told her that TB could effect the genital area and prevent her from housing a baby," he said.
But a different doctor "straight up told us that there was nothing wrong" with any of her reproductive organs, leading to the further testing that revealed his low sperm count. But by then, the perception that his wife was the infertile one had already settled in amongst his family.
Photo: @ask_aubry / Twitter
And when he was asked about it at a family gathering, he did nothing to dispel the misperception — quite the opposite, actually. "I just panicked and said that my wife's TB was likely the cause," he wrote.
As gossip so often does, the misinformation about his wife quickly metastasized into a far more dramatic story about his "reckless wife" having a "bacterial genital disease," and that the reason for her infertility was so diabolical that he and his wife were getting a divorce.
Understandably, his wife was furious and was insisting he "set the record straight" in their judgmental small town. But he blamed his mom for turning the story into a "malicious" rumor, and can't seem to grasp that he himself created this situation.
Photo: @ask_aubry / Twitter
Scientists and experts don't know why, but male infertility is on the rise, and so is the stigma against it.
Despite the nearly concrete perception that infertility is mainly a women's issue, the problem, which impacts roughly 15% of couples, involves a male fertility issue more than 50% of the time.
And the problem of male infertility is getting worse at an alarming rate, with scientists theorizing that everything from pollution to hormone-disrupting chemicals in consumer goods to certain medications being to blame.
The stigma, too, is getting worse right along with it — a 2017 study at De Montfort University in the UK found that 93% of men with infertility issues reported a negative impact on their well-being, including suicidality.
That, combined with what sounds like this man's membership in a religious community that places a high value on reproducing, and it's easy to see why he, to use his wording, "panicked." But perhaps unsurprisingly, that did little to win him sympathy among people online, who were absolutely furious with him.
Several people online thought the man's wife should immediately divorce him, while others suggested she also get even. "Dump him and go get pregnant," one person on TikTok wrote. "They’ll know the truth then!"
Even men who are infertile themselves had no sympathy for this guy. "Even if it were my wife who was infertile," one man on Reddit wrote, "I would gladly lie and pretend it was me to protect her from this kind of bullsh-t. [He] doesn't know how to love and care for his wife."
Photo: Reddit
The stigma against male infertility absolutely has to come to an end, and it's unfortunate this man is in a position where he feels he has to save face for a simple biological problem that isn't his fault. But when a man blames his infertility on his wife, he ultimately has no one to blame but himself, no matter what the statistics say.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.