Jenny* couldn’t wait to be a mum, and she thought that her partner Jared couldn’t wait to be a dad, either. But just hours before an IVF procedure, Jared dropped a bombshell…
Welcome to our series, The Love Diaries – a space for you to share your experiences, advice, fairy-tale endings, setbacks and heartbreaks. We’ll be hearing from industry experts giving practical advice alongside Capsule readers (You!) sharing your firsthand experiences with love – from the woman who cheated on her husband with a work colleague, one woman’s temptation now the love of her life is finally single (although she’s not), and the woman who forced her husband to choose between her and his girlfriend.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Send an email to alice@capsulenz.com!
It had been months – years, really – of preparation. The hormone therapies, the injections, the anxiety and the huge cost… but for Jenny*, it was all going to be worth it. Being a mum was one of her greatest dreams, but she knew that she and her partner of three years Jared could be faced with disappointment if their IVF treatment didn’t work out.
She’d braced herself for that possibility. What she hadn’t prepared herself for was Jared to walk out on their relationship, mere hours before a painful and intense IVF procedure that was, hopefully, going to give them a baby.
The beginning
Jenny and Jared met just after the first lockdown of 2020, and in hindsight, she says, the red flags were waving almost instantly. “It moved so fast,” she nods. “But then, everyone says that when you get to this age – late 30s – that when you know, you know, and it happens that way. We were together all the time, inseparable and in love – we barely spent a night apart and he moved in about 6 months later.”
While she enjoyed the intense, hot and heavy beginning, Jenny made sure to be up front with Jared about her desires to have a baby, telling him “on our second or third date” that being a mum was a non-negotiable, and if kids weren’t for him, there wasn’t much point in continuing.
She was also very honest about her fertility struggles – just months before meeting Jared, Jenny had been diagnosed with endometriosis. She needed an operation and as part of that, she’d made the choice to go through her own cycle of freezing her eggs before the operation to preserve her fertility. She had also been put on a sperm donor waiting list on the advice of her doctors as the wait list can be up to three years, so she would have an option if she didn’t meet anyone.
“I didn’t ask him to contribute to any of that, of course, that was my decision and one I had made before I met him, but he knew everything and he was supportive,” Jenny says. “Nothing was raised as a red flag by him – we had talked about kids from the beginning.”
After a few months Jenny went through with freezing her eggs, feeling great about the decision as an “investment in my future”.
“Jared took great care of me – especially by this time we were in the 2021 lockdown, so I had to do it by myself. But he picked me up, looked after me, and was supportive when I did another round after the first one didn’t go as well as I’d hoped.”
More red flags began to pop up at the end of 2021, however, when Jenny finally went in to have her endometriosis surgery, which affected her far more than she thought. She was in surgery for almost double the amount of time she had thought she would be, when doctors discovered she was “riddled” with endo.
“They told me after, ‘we don’t know how have you lived with this!?’,” she recalls. “It was everywhere, and it meant a much-longer recovery.”
Jared had dropped her off at the hospital, but didn’t visit after the surgery as due to Covid restrictions she could only have one visitor, and he had his work Christmas party -her sister came instead. Looking back on it now, Jenny can’t believe a Christmas party took priority over her health.
“The thing is, I remember saying, ‘no, you go to the party, I know how much you want to go’. But he should have been there. He should have wanted to be especially after how extensive the operation ended up being.”
Jenny hid her disappointment when he picked her up from outside the hospital, she nods, with Jared’s “lack of empathy” coming to the fore insisting that, just a week after her surgery, she travel by boat to his family Christmas down south. It was rough seas, and she was in excruciating pain, despite her putting on a brave face through the festive season.
“The whole recovery took six months, my whole body felt different – it was kind of like a washing machine had gone off inside me. I had gained a lot of weight because of the hormones with the egg freezing treatments and then the recovery, and I just wasn’t feeling happy or confident.”
With the world opening back up again, Jared’s job took him overseas more and more, with Jenny scrimping and saving to try and accompany him on a few trips a year.
“I trusted him, and thought it was really cool that we could do these things. I was proud of him and it wasn’t going to be forever – it was a sacrifice for our future. But it was very one-sided – we never split the cost of my flights to join him because it was “my choice” – for example, and while he seemed so happy when he was working, when it was just us, it sometimes felt like nothing I did was ever right. I was always on edge so I overcompensated to try and be perfect, that kind of thing. I don’t know why I just glossed over that. I regret that so much now.”
Putting down roots
The pair decided to move into a bigger house to create a home together, securing a rental in a great suburb. Jenny, again, ignored a red flag – that Jared was slow to sign the rental agreement. “I had signed the form online and just assumed he’d done the same – a few days later the leasing agent called to what was going on. I called him and remember giving him an out, asking him if he wanted to do this, but he assured me that he did, and that I was overreacting because he was just busy at work. Eventually the form was returned signed.
“I think that was a real turning point in the relationship – it forced him to put down roots, to commit to a place, to a person. Before this he just kind of cruised along. This was real responsibility.”
But for as many weird moments where Jenny would start to question or doubt the relationship, she’d get as many ‘love bombs’ back – the day they moved into their new home she received a huge bunch of flowers, with a note saying how he was excited to begin this new chapter with her. It would make her forget, or excuse, some of his behaviour. There was even a few days where Jenny thought she might have been pregnant – with Jared seeming excited about the possibility, and then gutted when it was a false alarm.
Jenny and Jared pushed forward with their plans to start a family – they were recommended IVF, in order to keep her frozen eggs on ice for a little longer. Jared was away when Jenny met the doctor and whilst she knew IVF was likely, it didn’t take away the shock. “I spoke to him before I went into the appointment and within 30 minutes was trying to call him, but his phone was off. I sent a message explaining what I had been told, I said I was upset and scared and that we needed to be a team, this wasn’t just all on me. He replied when he woke up 8 hours later saying it didn’t sound so bad, that we’d get it though it together and he loved me.”
When Jared arrived back home they went to see the doctor together. “We talked about it and agreed to it. It happened quickly but it needed to in order to coincide with his schedule, to ensure he we would be in the country at the right times in the process.”
Jared left again a week later for work with them both knowing they would be starting when he was back two weeks later. During this time, the pair’s third-year anniversary came around – and unlike every other year, Jared neglected to send Jenny flowers.
“It sounds so petty, but it was the first time, I thought it was kind of our thing. I was disappointed and semi “joked” ‘where’s the flowers’ and he sent me a message saying how much he loved and missed me and couldn’t wait to be home again”
He was home was the first day of injections and Jared sat on the couch next to Jenny and helped measure out the drugs to inject herself.
The time came for her first scan to check how the IVF was progressing. Jenny told Jared when the appointment was and he questioned me why he needed to come. “Now I can see that this was the start of the end – we got into a huge fight about it. He should have wanted to come, to support me – I explained I didn’t expect him to come every appointment but it was the first one and I was anxious. He instead promised he would come to every single one when I was pregnant.”
Sensing something had shifted, but then blaming her hormones and the toll of the IVF, Jenny pushed on.
Jared went on a lads’ golf trip just before her egg retrieval, with a stressed and emotional Jenny left to juggle the logistics of the treatment, and he arrived home the night before their appointment.
It was then that he dropped a bomb – he wouldn’t be coming to the procedure the next morning, and that he didn’t want to go any further because it wasn’t the right timing for him. “I was blindsided but I was so worried about him because the only way I could make sense of it was that there must be something seriously wrong with him that he could do that to me”.
It was mere hours before Jenny was due into the clinic, and a devastated Jenny then had to decide whether or not to go through with it.
“He refused to speak about it, the doctor even tried to call him, but he wouldn’t talk and just shut down.”
Following her doctor’s advice, Jenny moved forward with the egg retrieval.
“They gave me a lot of drugs to calm me down because I was hyperventilating.”
Whilst in recovery Jenny eventually looked at her phone to see messages from Jared, saying that they weren’t breaking up, that they could work through things, how sorry he was and how much he loved her and that he hoped she was okay. She arrived home to flowers waiting for her on the kitchen bench.
Jared wasn’t ready to talk about what happened so Jenny put her feelings to the side to let him clear his head. She tried to figure out a way to make it all work. “I should’ve walked away from him then. Because the betrayal over the IVF should have been enough.”
But despite his pleas to ‘make it work’ and the constant reassurance Jared decided 10 days later that, in fact, Jenny wasn’t part of his future.
“So it was one- blindsiding me before the egg retrieval. Two, gaslighting me into thinking we could somehow make it work and then three, actually no, we’re done and discarding me,” she says, shaking her head.
The aftermath
What followed, she says, was months of “unfathomable behaviour” by Jared. “It felt like I didn’t even know him, the nonchalance to the impact of his decision making and communication was mind blowing.
“In the end he broke me. He blew up my life and walked away without a care in the world.”
Now, two years later and after a LOT of counselling, Jenny is upbeat and happy again, following what she describes as “the hardest time of my life”. “I was made to feel that what had happened was all my fault. The guilt and pain consumed me. I was lost and exhausted and questioned everything as I searched for answers to understand what I did to deserve this. I realise now that it wasn’t my fault.. I wasn’t responsible for this, and I didn’t deserve it. There were a lot of red flags I can see now on reflection that were blinded by love.”
The only lingering repercussion now is her own journey to becoming a mother. Jenny decided to remove her name from the sperm donor list when her turn came up about a year into their relationship because of the conversations they had about starting a family together and that she was in a loving committed relationship. She still has her frozen eggs, which she’s grateful for, and while she’s not sure how she’ll realise her motherhood dream, she knows for sure that she’s better off by herself than with the wrong person.
“I still have my moments and different things that trigger me, for sure, but I realised quite early on in the healing process that I didn’t actually miss him – my grief was around my fertility and the future I thought I was going to have.”
Jenny fought Jared for the money that their IVF journey cost her – she eventually received it. A week later, he debuted his new girlfriend on social media– a woman who had joined his work, around the time of their third anniversary.
“That’s when pieces of the puzzle came together for me – there were times when I did question him about this particular person, about things I’d seen on social media, but I was told I was being silly, and that I was overreacting.
“I mean, at the end of the day, my fertility is still so important to me, and I do hope that I still have time to meet somebody. But I’m glad I never had a baby with him and could cut ties completely. I’ve been on a massive healing journey and I’ve just tried to do things that I’ve always wanted to do, like buy a house, which I managed to do this year.
“No, I think I’ve learned now… and it sounds so cheesy, but I know who I am now. I know my values and what I deserve, and if people don’t align with that, then I’d rather be by myself. I’ve learnt the importance of self-worth and not losing that in a relationship and if your gut is sensing that something isn’t right then it probably isn’t.
“This chapter changed me – I found a strength I didn’t know I had through heartbreak, healing and now hope.”
(All names have been changed)
