How To Tell Someone You’re Pregnant
Carolyn Hax has a brilliant, wonderful column about how to tell someone infertile that you’re pregnant.
The advice: There is “a preference to respond to hard news privately on their own time. So, tell her this in writing — email, a letter slipped under her door if you live close by — and aim its arrival for the best time you can gauge.”
I would take it a step further and say that is good advice on how to tell anyone your good news outside your very immediate circle of people who will be connected to the child. The truth is that you don’t know what other people are going through, and almost everyone will appreciate being given time to process news vs. hearing it and needing you react in the moment. Some only need a second and will jump on a call to discuss upon receiving the note. Some need a few days.
Keep it simple. Keep it brief. Make an empathetic statement that sometimes even happy news can be hard for someone to hear. Make it clear that you don’t expect a reaction. Good advice that can apply to so many life situations where two people with differing situations meet.
4 comments
Yep, basically most people are so wrapped up into themselves that when they hear about something good that happened to another person, it can feel like something bad is happening to them, even if the good thing happening to the other person has nothing to do with them. I have fallen victim to this way of thinking too at times. It’s sort of depressing that people are this way, but it is 100% true.
It’s so nice to read that advice in such a wide-reaching forum as the WP. I had a long comment drafted, but I think I’ll blog about it instead, and say here that it isn’t even as simple as the good thing makes you feel as if something bad is happening to you, as omdg said above. It’s the reminder that everyone else (or so it seems) manages to do something so easily, and we can’t. (As if we need a reminder!) The feelings aren’t about the friend who has the good news, though it will also signal a change in the relationship, and the potential loss of the relationship too, depending on the friend. But their good news can prompt all those feelings of self-worth and failure, even though a) you’re happy for your friend, but you’re unhappy for yourself, and b) it’s a perfectly natural reaction. So I agree that having time to process is really important. And it gives us time to prepare ourselves for being around/seeing the reaction of others too.
Eeenteresting! I am with Mali, this is making me feel of the ways that people have told me they are pregnant and how I felt about it, but also what felt good and what decidedly didn’t. I’m glad this is a topic covered in a general advice column. Also, appreciated the advice about social media — definitely knowing before that onslaught is a good thing. I have had friends give me a heads up and then also say they got it if I needed to “hide” them for a while. Fascinating!
@Mali — I like the way you put it: It’s the reminder that everyone else (or so it seems) manages to do something so easily, and we can’t.