The actor says repeated failed cycles left the couple unable to talk to each other while they tried for a second child. He says therapy “saved my life and our marriage”.
Greg Wise has said that failed IVF attempts drove a painful wedge between him and his wife, Emma Thompson, and that therapy saved their marriage. The couple’s daughter, Gaia, now 26, was born through IVF when Thompson was around 40. When they tried the same route again for a second child, it did not work, and Wise says the repeated failures left them unable to communicate. He spoke about the experience on Elizabeth Day’s podcast, How To Fail.
“The most authentic feeling of failure ever”
Wise described how the couple’s first round of IVF took place in New York, after they had been together for three or four years and found they could not conceive naturally. “Took the tests and went to New York to do the IVF and saw a four celled large collection there. Three were put back in,” he said. He added that they discovered Thompson was pregnant almost exactly on her 40th birthday, and that “this four-celled thing became our daughter”.
The couple tried again during Gaia’s second year of life, without success, and then tried once more with the same result. “It’s brutal anyway, IVF, and it brings so much baggage,” Wise said. “It’s the most authentic feeling of failure ever because this is why we’re here, to procreate and you’re not a man or woman if you can’t.” He added that people are brought up with the idea that all boys grow up to be fathers and all girls to be mothers.
A couple “dislocated”
Wise said it took them a long time to recover and that they did not seek help at first. At the same time, they had their daughter. “The pull of that, the exquisite love we felt for her and jarring pain that we wouldn’t be able to provide her with a sibling and for us to have another child,” he said.
Day asked whether the couple had been able to find each other and talk about what was happening. “No. No. No, no, we were we were dislocated,” Wise replied.
He was also asked what it was like being the man in the process, given that treatment centres on the woman. He said it was “all about the woman and filling them with the various hormones”. He explained that he had seen himself as a “saviour figure” at the time and could not save his wife. “Dispassionately it wasn’t my gig. She was undertaking all of this,” he said. “All I could was to support and to try and soothe her rather than myself. So, you get into this terrible spiral, this cycle.”
He described IVF as a process that is “utterly dehumanising”, involving “the weight of injection that completely transforms ones system”. “The madness of all that while trying to stay resolutely calm and available,” he said.
Finding a way through
Wise said they came through the period, though he knew couples who did not stay together after failed IVF. “Luckily, we found our way through,” he said.
He credited Gaia with helping to pull them through. “Here we are. Luckily we are a family, we do have a child that we love,” he said. He explained that he and Thompson both came from families with two siblings, and that this shaped their idea of what a family should look like. “Mum, dad, two kids. We’ve only got one. We’re not a family. We’ve failed. It takes a while,” he said, adding that with a small child “your heart is so open”.
“I went into therapy. Therapy saved my life and our marriage. Without a doubt,” he said. “I would not be sitting here without therapy.”
