Our first embryo transfer had just failed.

I found out alone in an urgent care room. Daniel was hundreds of miles away on business. A nurse read my results. No pause. No warmth. Just: “Your pregnancy test is negative.”

I drove home in silence. Tears falling. This is not how the story was supposed to go.

Three days later, I got a text from a good friend.

“Your nephew is finally ready to tell you happy New Year.” With a sonogram attached.

My heart dropped.

I put my phone down. Picked it back up. Read it again. Put it down. Picked it back up. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.

I was happy for her. Genuinely.

She didn’t know what we were going through. We hadn’t shared much.

But I couldn’t tell her how I really felt. I wanted that moment to be about her. She deserved to celebrate.

So I said congratulations. And I meant it.

Then I silenced my phone. Cried. And went to sleep.

I had to separate myself from the moment just to survive it.

The hardest part of IVF isn’t the procedures. It’s carrying your grief quietly so you don’t ruin someone else’s joy.

What hurts (even when you mean well)

“Your time will come.” This one sounds hopeful. But when you’re in the middle of grief, it can feel dismissive.

“Just keep trying.” If trying was the problem, we wouldn’t be here.

“Everything will work out in the right timing.” Maybe. But that doesn’t help me survive today.

Turning every update into a problem-solving session. I’m not looking for solutions. I’m looking for someone to sit with me in this.

What actually helps

Say this:

“I hate that you’re going through this. How do you want me to support?”

“Do you want to talk about IVF right now, distract yourself, or just be quiet together?”

“Hey, I have some news. Is now an okay time?”

“I don’t know what to say, but I’m here.”

Do this:

Offer to ride with them to appointments.

Drop off a meal without making it a big thing.

Check in before and after procedures. Not once. Regularly.

Invite them out, but make it easy to say no.

You’re allowed to set boundaries around other people’s joy.

Mute the baby announcements on social media. Skip the baby shower if you need to.

This doesn’t make you bitter. It makes you human.

For the friend who’s scared of saying the wrong thing

You’ve been keeping your distance. Waiting for it to come up. Telling yourself you’ll reach out when you know what to say.

Truth is: Silence hurts more than uncertain words.

She doesn’t need you to say the perfect thing. She needs you to say something.

“I don’t know what to say, but I’m here.” That’s enough. That’s more than enough.

For the one in the waiting room

I see you.

The grief nobody else sees. The smile you put on while you’re breaking inside. The hope you’re scared to hold onto because disappointment has burned you before.

You’re not alone. Even when it feels like it.

If you love someone going through IVF, send them this with three words: “I’m here. Always.”

If you’re the one going through it, send this to the people you wish understood. Let it do the explaining for you.

Subscribe now

I keep seeing the same sentence everywhere: “Marriage is hard.”

And I get it. I’ve felt it. But lately I’ve been wondering if we’re all saying the same thing when we say it.

This is what I’ve learned in our (short but real) 5 years together: marriage isn’t the hard part. Growth is. Healing is. Doing life with another imperfect person who processes, communicates, and loves differently than you do. That’s the hard part.

Marriage just puts it all in one room.

“I thought we already talked about this.”

I can’t count how many times one of us said that in our first three years.

Same disagreements. Different days. Same tension. We’d talk it out, agree or agree to disagree, love on each other, and move on. Then a few months later, the same thing would come back.

It was frustrating. Draining. And we couldn’t name exactly what it was.

The things that motivate me aren’t the same things that motivate Daniel. I process differently. I believe certain things should be handled a certain way. And so does he. Just not the same way.

We ended up taking a behavioral assessment that measured how we each prefer to show up, what drives us, and how we make decisions.

That was the ah-ha moment. It gave us language. Now, before things spiral, we can name exactly where the tension is coming from and why.

We also learned about love languages. And how we were filling our own tanks, not each other’s.

I remember coming home from work one day. Daniel had gone full-time in our consulting business, and while I was at my 9-to-5, he cleaned the whole house. Did the laundry. Had the house smelling good. He was waiting for me at the door.

I walked in, gave him a kiss, and kept walking.

He said, “Whoa. Come back here. You don’t smell that??”

I said, “Oh yeah. It smells good. You cleaned!”

In that moment, we both realized he was filling his love tank, not mine. Acts of service is his language.

We’ve since learned to love each other the way the other person needs to be loved. Not the way we naturally want to give.

So when I hear “marriage is hard,” I think there are a few things people might actually mean:

1. Life is hard, and marriage puts you side by side in it. Bills. Jobs. Health. Family. Grief. Loss. Waiting. Marriage feels hard because you’re living a hard life together, not because you married the wrong person.

2. Two stories are colliding. Two histories. Two communication styles. Two nervous systems. It’s hard to stay kind when you’re triggered, tired, or afraid.

3. Growth and surrender are hard. Marriage exposes pride, selfishness, fear, control. Dying to ego, choosing forgiveness, staying when it would be easier to run. That’s hard.

So maybe the sentence we really mean isn’t “marriage is hard.”

Maybe it’s this: The person I was before marriage wasn’t ready for the person marriage is asking me to become.

That’s the hard part. Not the marriage. The becoming.

One thing I want to be careful about:

There’s a difference between hard like training and hard like injury.

Training stretches you. It’s uncomfortable. But you’re getting stronger together.

Injury is different. Something is torn. The pain is telling you something is wrong, not normal.

If your marriage is constantly draining you, dimming you, or making you feel unsafe, that’s not just “hard.” That’s harm. And it’s okay to name it.

But if your marriage is exposing your patterns, your pride, your fear of being fully known? That’s not broken. That’s growth.

A few questions worth sitting with:

• When I say “marriage is hard,” what do I actually mean? Life, my spouse, or my own growth?

• Am I in a hard season or a harmful pattern?

• Where is marriage inviting me to grow right now?

We’re not experts. And I don’t think you need a decade to know what it takes to stay married with joy.

3 years of recycled tension. 2 years of finally having words for it.

That’s the difference between going in circles and moving forward.

Here’s to building a marriage where hard means growing, not just surviving.

Subscribe now

Not God’s silence. Ours.

For almost three years, we kept our IVF journey to ourselves. We told ourselves we were just “private people.” But private people don’t get to be held. Private people carry things alone. Private people wait for good news before they let anyone in. And that waiting can hold you hostage.

I remember our first embryo transfer.

Daniel was away on business. The day before my blood work, I came down with a bad fever. The on-call nurses at our fertility clinic told me to go to urgent care. So I went. Alone. I let them know I was going through IVF treatments and could be pregnant.

They ran tests. Everything came back negative.

Including the pregnancy test.

The nurse didn’t pause. Didn’t ask if I wanted to know. She just listed off results like she was reading a grocery receipt. And at the end, casually: “Your pregnancy test is negative.”

I was stopped dead in my tracks.

I drove home in silence. Tears falling. Trying to make sense of what just happened. This is not how the story was supposed to go.

And then I had to call Daniel. Hundreds of miles away. To tell him.

That’s the part of this journey no one talks about. The faith side. The moments where you’re alone in a car wondering how to keep believing in something you haven’t seen. The failed cycles. The negative tests. The prayers that feel like they’re hitting the ceiling.

How do you trust God when every month says no?

Faith isn’t a feeling. It’s a decision you make when the feelings aren’t there.

Some days we felt close to God. Some days we felt nothing at all. But we kept showing up. Not because we had it figured out, but because we didn’t know what else to do.

What kept us in it? God’s track record. Not in this specific area, but in our lives overall. He’s shown up before. He’s been faithful in ways we couldn’t predict. So even when this season felt silent, we held onto what we knew to be true.

And eventually, we broke our own silence.

We started sharing. Not because we had good news, but because we couldn’t carry it alone anymore. We let people in. We let them pray with us, sit with us, hold space for us in the mess.

It didn’t fix everything. But it changed everything.

Ironically, this journey that could’ve torn us apart has brought us closer. There have been moments where one of us held faith and the other couldn’t. Moments where we were both empty at the same time. But we kept choosing each other. And choosing to believe together, even when belief felt thin.

We’re still in it. We don’t have a happy ending to share yet.

But we’re not holding it alone anymore.

If you’re in a season of silence. IVF, infertility, or something else shaking your faith. Here’s what we’d want you to know:

Be honest with how you feel. Good days and hard days. Both are allowed.

Let people in. Not everyone will understand your exact situation. But someone in your life has faced something that tested their faith. And their presence might be exactly what you need.

You’re not alone. Even when it feels like it.

Silence feels like protection. It’s not. It’s just loneliness with a better excuse.

We’re still in the middle of the story. Still believing. Still building. Together.

Know someone in a season of waiting? Forward this to them. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is remind someone they're not alone.

Subscribe now

For 6 years, we were almost. Almost the right time. Almost ready. Almost there. Then in 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, everything finally aligned.

I (Saréya) was scrolling Instagram one day when I saw a post from a pastor I followed in Tucson, Arizona. She was announcing their new youth director, a guy in a purple shirt with the biggest smile I’d ever seen. Being nosey, I clicked on his profile. There he was. Same smile. His name was Daniel Truelove. Yes, that’s his real last name.

At the time, he had recently started a Christian clothing company. His feed was filled with items from his line, scriptures, and motivation typed out on that old yellow Notes app. So I did what any interested-but-not-too-interested woman would do. I hit follow. Liked a couple pictures. Strategic. And left it alone. No sliding into DMs for me. Within 24 hours, he followed me back. Liked a couple of my pictures. And slid into MY DMs.

I was six months into a missionary trip in Ghana, West Africa. My feed was full of photos and videos of building a library at a school and orphanage, playing with the kids, eating local food. That was his gateway. “I love what you’re doing. How did you get started with this?” For the rest of my time in Ghana, we talked almost every day. I was drawn to his smile. Even through a screen, you could tell he had a great personality and was a joy to be around. He says he thought I was pretty. “Real easy on the eyes.” But deeper than that, he says my relationship with God spoke before I ever could.

The conversations were easy. When we moved from DMs to texting, his first text said: “Hey! This is Daniel Truelove aka Jr. Truelove aka Slim Boogie aka the champ!” What an introduction, right?

Daniel was coming to NYC for the NBA Draft with his t-shirt business. I figured that was the perfect time to finally meet in person. So me and one of my good friends took a trip from Long Island to the city to see him. We got food. Twice. And talked for hours. Meanwhile, my friend was sneaking pictures to send to my mom. My mom’s response: “They look like they’ve known each other forever.” We ended the night with pictures together. A moment I don’t think either one of us would want to forget.

We continued getting to know each other. He tried planning surprise birthday visits. None of them I accepted. Eventually, I told him the truth: I didn’t want anything serious at the time. Especially not long distance. I was also going through some challenging family issues and couldn’t give a relationship the attention it deserved. So we remained friends.

Other relationships came. Career changes happened. I took another trip back to Ghana. He moved from Arizona back to Alabama after 14 years. We both grew. Matured. Became different versions of ourselves. But we stayed in touch. And every time we talked, it felt the same.

July 2020 rolls around. He made his annual birthday post. Same big smile. And something in me said: “Imma lock him down.”

I texted him a happy birthday message. We spoke briefly. A week or two passed. And I made up in my mind that I had to keep the communication going. So I messaged him about streaming software. Daniel has wisdom about a lot of things, so it served two purposes: get the info AND reconnect. From there, we talked every day. All day. At one point, my mom said: “Y’all better get it together. If not, leave each other alone.”

So we got it together.

From July to September, we talked consistently. Texts. Phone calls. FaceTimes. Between September and October, we visited each other back and forth between New York and Alabama. 3 days before my birthday, we were engaged.

I thought I was headed to do a photography shoot for a friend. The day before, Daniel told me he’d be in meetings all day with limited phone access. The day of, he said his phone was acting up, and he had to go to T-Mobile to get it fixed. I walked into what I thought was a photoshoot. “Surprise! Happy birthday!” A few close friends. Some food. I didn’t think anything of it. Then they had me sit in front of a TV.

A video started playing. Daniel talking. He walked through our story, mixed with some of our favorite songs and my favorite PJ Morton songs that I had introduced him to. At the end of the video, he said: “There’s just one more thing I have to share. But I’m going to have to tell you in person. I need you to turn around.”

I turned around. And he was right there. In the flesh. Grey suit. Same purple button-up from that very first picture in 2014.

Friends and family came flooding in behind me, still in the height of the pandemic. He got on one knee. With tears in my eyes, without even looking at the ring, I said yes. For an additional gift, he uncovered a record player I had been asking for with all of PJ Morton’s records. He knew me. He had always known me.

People ask us all the time: Why did you move so fast? Three months? I’ve asked Daniel this question myself. Many times. His answer is always the same: “I knew I didn’t want anyone else. You were the one. Why waste time?”

Engaged in October. House in Alabama by December. Small, intimate wedding with friends and family in February 2021.

Before reconnecting in 2020, I had made up in my mind and prayed about it: whoever my next relationship is with, that’s going to be the person I marry. And I stuck with that. Yes, we were different. Different family dynamics. Different locations. But there was so much more we had in common, and we knew where God was taking us. We were meant to do it together. I had prayed to marry into a big family. To have sisters-in-law who felt like actual sisters. Daniel is the youngest of 11. God answered prayers I had whispered for years.

If I could tell my 2014 self anything, it would be this: Trust God’s timing because His timing is always perfect. Enjoy the journey He has you on. Keep living. Keep enjoying life. What God has for you will come with so many things far beyond anything you could ever expect or imagine.

Daniel would tell his 2014 self: “It’s more important to be the man she needs than to just be her man. Back then, I was always doing so many things. I thought being ambitious showcased something great about me. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t what she needed. She needed stability. And I didn’t understand that yet. The version of me that existed before marriage had to die so we could create the version God needed for this marriage.”

6 years of almost. 3 months of “let’s do this.” 4 years of building a marriage through IVF, grief, career changes, and starting a business together.

We don’t have it all figured out. But we’re figuring it out together. Because the best marriages are built, not found.

Welcome to the journey.

The Trueloves 🖤

Subscribe to follow along as we share what we're learning about marriage, faith, and doing life together.

Subscribe now