TW: pregnancy loss
Dear Prudence,
Do I have to tell my husband about my miscarriage? I am 41 years old and childless by choice. My husband and I have been together since college. In over 20 years, we had no pregnancy scares because we knew we didn’t want kids. But somehow against a million odds it happened accidentally. I knew before I even missed a period but I did not tell him. I miscarried early. I still have not told him and do not think he would ever find out. The reason I didn’t tell him is not that I feared he would want to keep it, really, but that I knew he couldn’t handle it at the time. The last couple of years have been terrible for us both with multiple deaths of close friends, parents, and pets, serious diagnoses, an accident requiring a year to recover, and about 1000 other awful things beyond our control. I felt if I told him about the pregnancy at any point, I would end up taking care of him when I was already feeling like shit.
He’s pretty steady overall, but the timing was just bad, and I’m the one who handles the hardest things generally. I was already so despairing otherwise, I thought it would just be easier for me to take this on alone and not have to manage his emotions. But we don’t keep things from each other generally and for some reason this feels like a lie. He joked recently about how one or both of us must be infertile because there have never been any accidents and l felt very uncomfortable joking along. I don’t want to tell him I lied because he couldn’t handle it. Can I reasonably just never tell?
—Maybe Can’t Handle the Truth