5. Psychological effects of infertility on couples

When a married couple fails to reproduce despite desiring to have a baby, they feel like not fulfilling the role of "being family." Failure to accomplish reproduction function leads the couples to feel like a loser and idler. By negatively affecting social life, mood, marriage life, sexual life, future plans, self-respect, body image, and life quality of couples, infertility then turns into a complex life crisis [2, 7, 27]. For the couples, the common emotions for not having a baby are frustration and missing mother-father roles valued in society. For a woman, childlessness is associated with infertility (functional disorder), loss of control (my body rebelling against my will), psychological void (unfulfilled maternal instinct), feeling outcast from female community, feeling worthless, loneliness (lack of emotional support of the child), absence of social security (nobody to look after them in old age), unmet social role (mother, pregnant woman, postpartum period, mother-in-law), and lower selfesteem [2, 27]. For a man, childlessness is associated with failure to impregnate a

woman (weak functioning of manhood), psychological void (unfulfilled paternal instinct), loneliness (in old age), failure to continue the lineage, unmet social role (father, father-in-law), and diminished social security [2, 27].
