When is it the ‘right time’ to stop trying?

There is a question many of us facing childlessness wrestle with:

“When is the right time to stop?”

When do you stop fertility treatment? Stop trying? Stop hoping? I wish there were an easy answer, that I could somehow lift the weight from your shoulders, but only you (and your partner) can make this decision.

But I can share with you a way of thinking through it that also helped me.

I knew the time was right for me when the cost of carrying on became greater than the cost of letting go.

Believe me, that realisation didn’t come easily. And it wasn’t a simple calculation. I fought against the sense that stopping meant giving up. That I was failing. That I was incapable of doing the most natural thing in the world.

But when I was trying to make sense of it, I found it helpful to try and step outside the emotion for a moment and look at the decision from every angle; to see the costs and the consequences of each option in full.

So I asked myself these four questions:

1.       What will happen if we decide to end the journey here?

2.       What won’t happen if we decide to end the journey here?

3.       What will happen if we decide not to end the journey here?

4.       What won’t happen if we decide not to end the journey here?

Some of them might seem like similar questions, but you’d be surprised what each surfaces in its own right.

How about picking up a nice fresh notebook, your favourite pen, and seeing what comes up for you when you do this exercise?

If you’re doing this with a partner, you may like to do this exercise separately at first then come back and share it with each other. Sometimes simply understanding each other’s perspectives on such a deeply emotional topic can be helpful in itself.

Here’s a free template ready for you to fill in:

This resource is part of an article written for World Childless Week and the theme of moving forwards; “Deciding to Let Go of Hope and Begin Again”. Read the full story