Or "Manipulated."
As is well-documented, I am a master of sympathy (and empathy, and apathy, and any -pathies really). I care greatly for others. So I feel like my opinion counts extra when I tell you that a lot of pregnancy symptoms are a bunch of shit, none moreso than a man's supposed "sympathy symptoms."
For those unaware, in most pregnancy literature, there are prominent mentions of an effect wherein an expectant father will experience lesser, but similar symptoms as his pregnant wife. Nausea, sluggishness, food cravings, all the fun ones. The idea, I think, is that a man's empathy will actually trigger physical reactions in his body, so that he will share the experience of pregnancy more with his wife.
This is psychological bullshit, of course.(1) Its main intent as far as I can imagine is to help prop up the very lucrative industry that is pregnancy. I fought my way through a wedding preparation last year, dodging the endless financial sinkholes endemic to weddings all along the way, and now I'm wading through the other great unnecessary money-wasting industry in this country.(2)
There are many books and many websites devoted to pregnancy. Maybe 2% of the info contained inside them is of value. If you ever find yourself expecting a child, here is a tip: attend all your doctor visits and ask many questions at them. Make sure to ask the questions in such a way as to convey that you don't know much about the process. Your doctor will tell you everything you need to know.(3) All those books are there to make money, not to inform you of anything. And the really devious thing about the whole industry is that the books/websites/etc are not only meant to make you spend money on them, they are interconnected and meant to make you spend money on all manner of loosely related products.(4) It's like all the pregnancy-type companies are in cahoots. A rising tide lifts all boats, that sort of thing, and the pregnancy tide is a biggie.
Back to the point. No a man will not have diarrhea at the same time as his wife, not unless they ate dinner at a dicey Indian place the night before. No a man will not have back pain when his wife is carrying around the bowling ball in her stomach. This should be obvious, but since it's related to pregnancy, anybody will believe anything.
To take this a dangerous step further, I'm going to say that lots and lots of the pregnancy symptoms experienced by the actual mother-to-be are bullshit, too. I'm clearly not saying that pregnant women don't have plenty of experiences for which the word symptom doesn't do proper justice, but I am saying that the industry uses the curious and captive audience of pregnant couples as an excuse to claim just about every possible human malady is caused by pregnancy. In virtually every instance, the culprit will be the same: hormones. You can blame anything on hormones. Are you pregnant? Do you sing poorly? Hormones! Do you bite your fingernails? Does your poop smell like poop? Does swiss chard taste funny to you? Hormones! Sometimes, pregnancy hormones really are to blame, and that's all it takes to become a catch-all.
I really should take a second to mention how amazing Sara has been as it relates to all of this, before I say that I've been around other pregnant people who claim to have experienced all the symptoms when that's almost an impossibility. Sara has had her fair share of discomfort and inconvenience, but she's never taken advantage of her situation and she's never made up problems and blamed them on the pregnancy. This is because she is amazing.(5) Other women are not so amazing and other husbands are not so lucky.
1. It's a placebo effect of a placebo effect. A woman suffers from nausea not because she actually has to vomit (yes of course sometimes she will--I'm talking about the many other times when she doesn't really), but because she's been told to expect to have nausea. And then because she thinks she has nausea, the man is also supposed to think he has nausea. Quite a little trick.
2. How many billion dollars are pumped into our nation's economy thanks to weddings and chilbirth? A terrifying amount. If we ever get health-care fixed, this is the next big albatross of waste in the economy.
3. Here is something that no pregnancy book will ever tell you: you don't really need to know much of anything until you're well into the third trimester. There is a somewhat obvious list of foods that you should know not to eat early on. Any medication you take you should do what it says on the package and check with your doctor first. That's it until it's time to take your hospital tour, which is free. You can even get a very informative (and pausable and rewatchable) childbirth class via DVD and $15 is a lot less than $300 to do it live. You don't need to know anything else. Actually you don't need to know the stuff from the childbirth class, either, but it's comfortable to have the knowledge. Seriously, you're insurance company will be paying a ton to send you to 15-20 doctor visits, you might as well take advantage.
4. One example of this is in the aforementioned DVD, which is otherwise devoid of riff-raff. The doctor conducting the class takes a 10 minute break from actually spreading knowledge to talk very enthusiastically about why you should bank your umbilical cord blood. Banking cord blood is an industry unto itself, with competing companies and everything. She even mentions one company by name, and shortly thereafter that company's name and phone number appears on the screen. Thanks for that. Of course what they don't tell you is that there is no certainty that you'll ever be able to use this blood, and that it costs several thousand dollars.
5. I shouldn't bury this in a footnote, but this is one of those things that makes me love her more than ever. When I decided to marry her a little bit less than two years ago, I was completely sure that she was just the right person for me, that although we aren't exactly alike, that her things would fit with my things and it would be wonderful. What I could never have imagined then is that over time, other little things about her would present themselves to me that make her even more perfect for me. Since I try not to believe too much in intuition and mysticism, I can only attribute this to blind luck.
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