Carolyn Hax: Do I Have To Tell My Husband I Miscarried?

[cereta]

Dear Carolyn: Do I have to tell my husband I had a miscarriage? I’m too emotionally exhausted to cause more pain to us both, and I’d rather not have this painful episode as part of our history. I’d rather just try to conceive again and have us both excited about the future. (He never knew I was pregnant.)

— Virginia

Virginia: I can see how tempting it is, just to push your sadness aside to make room for happier feelings. But when does handling things privately become (or reflect) a habit? And at what point do husband and wife wake up feeling like roommates?

I’m getting ahead of myself somewhat. This isn’t a slippery-slope argument, where I conjure one possible future just to blame you for it in advance. This is about what you are and aren’t doing right now.

What you aren’t doing is causing “pain to us both” by telling your husband. The miscarriage did that. You are only the messenger.

What you aren’t doing is eliminating “this painful episode as part of our history.” It happened, it’s there, and it’s not going away. You are merely excluding your husband from this history, and therefore from his chance to grieve with you, grow with you. Cocktails on the deck at sunset might sound more appealing, but that’s not what brings couples close. Entrusting your hearts to each other, and regarding that trust as both a lofty honor and a mundane set of daily responsibilities — that’s what brings couples close.

Secret-keeping locks your husband out of your marriage.

Now — you don’t “have” to tell him anything. (Though please tell your OB/GYN if the emotional exhaustion persists.) For all I know, you have good reasons for locking him out. Maybe you’ve been through enough with him to know you can’t trust him with your heart.

But if that’s the case, it’s a compelling argument for using this sad event as a reckoning, to deal with your distrust of him — certainly before you get pregnant again.

And if you don’t have a reason to lock him out, then that, too, is a compelling argument for speaking up: Who says you get to feel everything for both of you? And along the more mundane lines: Isn’t it possible he’s wondering why you’re not quite yourself?

Please know I’m not trying to pile onto your grief (and hormonal flux) with a scolding. I understand and sympathize with the impulse to turn inward. But you didn’t create these hopes alone; likewise, the innermost place to which you’re retreating ought to have room for two.

Comments

[cereta]

I feel kind of bad saying this, but my mind did go almost immediately to those possible good reasons. Not even anything dramatic, just, does he not really support her much? Or does she just fairly often find herself supporting/reassuring him without getting much back? Because I could imagine a person going through some kind of painful situation deciding just to tend to themselves rather than create a situation where they'd have to tend to themselves and another person without getting any tending in return.

Note: I am in no way unsympathetic to men whose partners have miscarried, nor am I saying that the men should be doing all the supporting, etc (awkward phrasing, but you know what I mean). I would, however, side-eye anyone who didn't give at least as much comfort to the person who miscarried as they accepted from said person. The fact that she hadn't yet told him she was even pregnant sets of some faint alarm bells, though.

That said, OMG, do NOT make this situation into a test/reckoning/whatever. IF this situation has led LW to confront the idea that she can't really rely on husband for emotional support, then that's a thing to be discussed in therapy, first individual, then maybe couples, but do NOT make any life-altering decisions right now, and don't have any confrontations right now. Bad idea, bad!

[minoanmiss]

What can I say that you haven't already said?

[rmc28]

Life-altering decisions like getting pregnant again, for sure.

(If LW can't cry on husband's shoulder now, that bodes badly for the 18+ years of raising an actual child.)

[feast_of_regrets]

+1 to all of this. She doesn't need to be HIS caretaker, if that's the kind of situation she's in, but she is exhausted and grieving and she doesn't need to put her marriage on trial right now either.

[katiedid717]

I have a friend who was TTC with her husband but he was also struggling with medication-resistant depression at the time when she had a (very early) miscarriage; she chose not to tell him about it because he already had so much going on with his mental health and she didn't want to add to the burden he was feeling. She was able to get support elsewhere and that was fine for her at the time.

[cimorene]

It certainly sounds like a less than ideal relationship if she can't "trust him with her heart" (or get emotional support from discussing all her feelings with him), BUT that doesn't mean that there's anything bad about her relationship that she doesn't know about and needs to "confront". She might prefer not to talk about her innermost feelings with anybody - maybe that just always makes her feel worse. Maybe she would normally want to, but now she's under a bunch of stress from something else - pandemic, work, whatever - and is feeling built-up exhaustion and doesn't have the energy to process the feelings by talking about them right now. Whatever, the point is, it's fully possible to make an informed adult decision about sharing your innermost thoughts and feelings with your spouse. It isn't something that is necessary in order for a marriage to work, or be healthy, or be satisfying, or - whatever. This answer thus has some pretty hefty judgement in the form of her assumptions and values about how marriage is supposed to work, which are both culture-specific and time-specific, baked in.

Even if she's correct to assume that LW and her husband do both just want to be close, and could benefit from sharing all their feelings with each other, I still think it's perfectly possible that if they're not in the habit of doing that all the time LW might well prefer to process it later, since she's likely feeling kinda emotionally overwhelmed. Would she later regret that? Maybe! Particularly if it hurt his feelings or whatever, I guess. But then again, she could probably also just move on. It's her body, and it really rubs me the wrong way that an event taking place inside of it would be described as "locking your husband out of your marriage".

[feast_of_regrets]

LW really just sounds to me like she needs to grieve a bit longer and then see how she feels. (I wish she had said how long ago it was in the letter; it's hard to tell if there's really anything unusual going on here.) Instant sharing of emotion isn't really reasonable in every situation, and it's fine for her to let herself be for a while. I suspect the clear answer will arise if she just lets it. (And kind of sounds to me like maybe she already knows it and didn't want it to be what it was, but what do I know.)