Taking care of your sexual health is an important part of your overall health and wellness and has a significant impact on your fertility journey. Sexual health includes physical, mental, emotional, and social well-being for individuals and couples. Since sexual health problems are usually enhanced by an infertility diagnosis, it is important to examine if a couple is enhancing their difficulty in conceiving with their sexual activity.

In response to being unable to conceive, many people feel emotions such as anger, panic, despair, and grief, and these may have several effects on sexual activity. The stress of infertility and treatment may cause sexual difficulties for both prospective parents.

Good sexual and reproductive health is when both partners are in a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being. Ideally, this allows people to have a satisfying and safe sex life, a stronger capability to reproduce, and the freedom to decide if, when, and how often to do so. To maintain one’s sexual and reproductive health, you need access to accurate information and safe support methods. 

Sexual health questions to ask:

  • How has the inability to conceive naturally affected your sexuality and sexual relationship with your partner?
  • What has changed in your sexual relationship since you began trying to get pregnant?
  • How would you describe your sexual activity – how often do you have intercourse?

These stressors can cause a couple to have inhibited sexual expression because they become obsessed with trying to get pregnant. This in turn has a negative impact on the fertility journey overall and can actually make it harder to conceive.

If you and your partner’s sexual health relationship is starting to deteriorate as your fertility journey progresses, it is important to take a step back and reconnect. Prioritizing your sexual health relationship will promote better results and make an already tough journey more bearable.

Next step: Infertility evaluation

Both partners should have an infertility evaluation if the female partner is 35 or older and has not become pregnant after six months of having regular, unprotected sex.

Pregnancy success is reliant on many patient-focused variables.

Determining the root cause of your infertility is key to coming up with the best plan of action to get pregnant. There are many resources and services that vary depending on need and infertility severity.

It is important to work with a fertility care team having the clinical experience required to design a customized fertility treatment plan meeting your personal needs. Schedule your initial consultation with the fertility specialists at New Hope Fertility Center or call 212-517-7676.