“You’re not trying hard enough,” he once uttered, his voice laced with an edge, after I openly wept from the debilitating side effects of the medication. “Not trying hard enough.” Those words echoed in my mind, a constant, painful refrain.

By our third year of marriage, our home, once a sanctuary of love, transformed into a silent battlefield. Jason’s phone became a tool of meticulous surveillance, tracking my ovulation cycles with an unsettling precision. Intimacy, once spontaneous and loving, became a scheduled obligation, treated with the cold efficiency of a business meeting. Outside of these calculated moments, his touch became a rarity, a stark indicator of the growing chasm between us. When tears welled in my eyes, he would dismiss them, telling me I was “too emotional,” that my “stress was causing the infertility,” effectively placing the e