Endometriosis breaks relationships, but it doesn’t have to break yours!

The most lonely condition…

Without a shadow of a doubt, endometriosis is the most lonely condition a woman can ever experience.

Endometriosis is a disease where tissue similar to the one that creates the uterus is found outside of it, forming growths known as lesions.

Endometriosis is a brutal, insidious, unrelenting chronic condition that causes infertility, debilitating chronic pain. Endometriosis is a misunderstood, unforgiving, life-sabotaging, relationship-braking disease.

The physical, psychological, mental, and emotional impact is the cause of anxiety, depression, sometimes suicide…

Endometriosis is invisible, neglected, and ignored by many uneducated general practitioners, who believe that it’s only a female problem, that menstruation should hurt, that it’s in women’s heads, and it’s their issue they have to deal with.

Frustration, powerlessness, grief, loss, guilt, burden… these are a few emotions women with endometriosis deal with daily. Being well is a full-time job!

So, if you ask me why endometriosis breaks relationships, I think I just summed it up in a nutshell.

Endometriosis impacts a partner’s life.

Endometriosis not only affects the person who suffers from it. For every woman with endometriosis, there is an army of men who support them. I am one of them.

My personal experience with M’s endometriosis was very unusual. In the beginning, I could barely spell it let alone understand it!

It took me years of trial and error to grasp what endometriosis was doing to my wife. The emotions I went through trying to support her were mostly negative, to begin with.

I felt powerless, useless. Knowing that I couldn’t fix my wife’s health taught me to learn to adjust to the situation, to change myself.

I felt a lot of anger, frustration, even resentment, later learning that patience, love, open and honest listening to my partner, was the key to a happier marriage. Many times I fell flat on my face and had to start over, but I’ve learned.

If you want to avoid such negative feelings, you need to educate yourself about her condition. “Endo-Tool, Endometriosis for Men” is designed to do just that, and I also give you the 1st chapter away, because you are going to learn a lot from it. The first chapter alone is filled with a lot of value, including:

• What is endometriosis?
• What are the symptoms?
• What causes endometriosis?
• What does endometriosis look like?
• What are the stages?
• What are the types?
• What is adenomyosis and how is it related to endometriosis?
• Why do some women develop severe endo and others don’t?
• Does endometriosis cause infertility?
• How is endometriosis diagnosed?
• Do types and stages affect the treatment?
• Recurrence of endometriosis after excision surgery.

Sex with endometriosis is unbearable!

One of the biggest problems couples struggle with is a lack of intimacy. Sex with endometriosis can be extremely painful. This pain can be excruciating to the point it affects both partners.

Women fear having sex due to pain, men fear hurting their partners.

Why is endometriosis sex painful?

Apart from the penetration, which causes pain during sex, orgasms through masturbation cause pain too.

Painful sex, also known as dyspareunia, is caused by factors such as a stage or invasiveness of endometriosis. Aside from that, pain can be caused by indirect contributors such as bladder or pelvic floor dysfunction.

Endometriosis is associated with an increase in nerve bundle density. This causes tenderness during sex, which in turn, causes pain. These nerve bundles are large and easily identifiable.

But this nerve bundle density is just one-factor causing pain. There are also other physical factors, such as bladder tenderness, and psychological ones, like anxiety and depression.

So, asking why is endometriosis sex painful, you must know that it’s a very complex subject.

Impact on family and finances.

Endometriosis breaks relationships for three other reasons. The first reason is the impact of endometriosis on infertility, therefore not being able to have kids, the second one is the emotional impact, the third one is financial.

Having a child and becoming a mother is a dream for most women, but let’s not forget that men also have a fatherly instinct. Not being able to be a biological parent can bring a couple to a breaking point, mentally and emotionally.

Standing in the way of having a healthy sexual relationship and having a negative impact on infertility, can be very distressing for couples.

Both partners may experience feelings of guilt and sadness as well as feelings of loss associated with a lack of intimacy, affection, and the loss of something even greater – kids and family.

Being a partner of a sufferer seems like nothing in comparison to the actual suffering. But we feel a lot of pressure on a daily basis too. This is why the endometriosis divorce rate is very high!

My personal experience of being a husband to a chronically ill woman taught me how hard it is to balance being a partner and working full-time. Many times I had to take time off work, often last-minute, sometimes even for two months straight.

My absence at work was understood to begin with, but its repetitiveness caused a lot of judgment and misunderstanding on some of the people I worked with.

It’s extremely difficult to balance work and support, especially when others don’t understand you.

On top of that, my absence cost me a lot of money. Financial worry was on our minds, however, I came up with an idea… I started this very blog. This is my 100th post. I reached a milestone, now I plan to finally monetize it.

Blogging is the safest and cheapest way to make income from home. Furthermore, to make a really good living!

But since blogging isn’t the subject of this post but how endometriosis breaks relationships, I’m giving you one of the best articles I wrote on the subject of how to blog to earn money and move on to the next part…

The pain-stress cycle!

The pain cycle It’s hard to break. It’s hard because it affects many factors of life.

Your thought processes guide everything that you do… There are situations in life, which each person interprets in a different way. That leads to different reactions.

The way you interpret situations plays a big role in how you feel, and how it impacts your experience of pain. Sometimes your interpretations are automatic, you don’t stop and think about it, these interpretations just happen.

But thoughts are rooted in your perception of yourself, and your role in the world, which is usually shaped in your childhood.

My wife sometimes wakes up in pain. She thinks that it happened again (which is true) and that this will never end. That her day is ruined, life is terrible, she’s extremely depressed. These are the patterns of thoughts of my wife’s but you may relate to that.

Naturally, she experiences stress and anxiety over the unknown, and sadness, leading to depression. Occasionally, she may also snap at me by getting more angry than usual. All that activates the automatic nervous system. It is NOT her fault.

These stress responses are the cause of pain. The cycle continues…

You have to break the cycle by restructuring your cognition. But it’s not that simple. You cannot just change something negative into positive!

However, it is important that you know that anxiety creates exaggerated thoughts. These extra thoughts aren’t helpful, and so in order to break this pattern, we have to target these thoughts.

I often remind my wife of simple facts:

• She doesn’t know the future, no one does.
• She can’t do anything about it today.
• Yes, life difficult, we have ups and downs in life.
• She’s safe, she’s with me, she’s not alone.
• No matter what happens, I’m here.

So, you need to modify anxious thoughts by revealing facts, not imaginary thoughts for which there is no evidence because they never even happened yet.

I often remind my wife that however terrible she feels in that moment, the pain flare-up will pass, anxiety will pass, nothing lasts, the day is not set. That always lowers her anxiety, anger, sadness, because she knows that I’m by her side and I won’t abandon her.

The way we perceive the world and situations shape our behavior. Remember, our thoughts are automatic.

So, in order to make some changes, you need to train your mind by repetition, you do this by repeatedly breaking the cycle of pain-stress and stress-pain.

Eventually, it will become easier.

Useful tips that help!

If endometriosis breaks relationships, here’s what you can do to work through it:

Educate yourself about the illness. Endometriosis is very complex. I found that apart from my own research, listening to my wife taught me the most about endometriosis and fibromyalgia for that matter.

So, communicate with each other. This is going to help you avoid plenty of arguments.

While having one of the early discussions, you have to set boundaries, state your own needs, especially for having alone time. Because you need to practice self-care and avoid stressors at all costs!

What you and your partner may benefit from the most is finding a psychotherapist specializing in chronic pain. Therapy is helpful, but having someone who really understands your position is crucial.

And don’t forget about intimacy. There are other ways of sex than penetration. Sounds blunt because it’s true.

Start a blog to make money from home. It will give you both more time together, private health care, a piece of mind about the future, and you can even make a really good living out of it. Just remember, blogging takes time, be patient and determined.

All the best!