The impact of relationship status on IVF patients’ quality of life

ABSTRACT

Infertility treatments are emotionally taxing and include invasive and time-consuming procedures over extended periods of time. In light of the growing numbers of single mothers by choice, the objective of this study was to apply the Conservation of Resources Theory in the context of infertility care and examine whether relationship status constitutes a psychological resource that buffers the decline in quality of life during IVF treatments. We used the FertiQol questionnaire to compare the quality of life of IVF patients between 422 patients who are involved in a couple relationship (“attached”) and 117 patients who are not (“unattached”). Results show that the total FertiQol was significantly higher among the attached participants; the Core FertiQol and the Treatment FertiQol were rated higher by the “attached.” No significant differences were found between the attached and unattached for the Emotional and Social subscales. “unattached” participants report significantly lower levels of quality of life in the “mind-body” and “treatment tolerability” subscales than the “attached” participants. It is concluded that being involved in a long-term couple relationship is to be seen as a resource that buffers the decline in quality of life of infertile women undergoing IVF treatments.

KEYWORDS:

• Infertility
• IVF
• quality of life
• relationship status
• single mothers

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to express her sincere gratitude to the Editor-in-Chief and the Associate Editor of Women & Health and the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data are available from the author upon reasonable request.

Ethical approval

This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the Ethics Committee of the Academic College in Tel Aviv Jaffa (February 2022/No. 2022133).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.