I hope you’re all getting your IRL friend post ready to link up to on Friday. And if you’re not sure what I’m talking about go here! 
In the mean time, I wanted to take a little poll about the friends you have in real life. I know that many of you are very private people. And you probably dish so much more information online in a virtual world where you feel understood. But there are also many of you that share your struggles with your real friends. I was quite open with my friends about my infertility because I didn’t want to hide anything. To be honest though, it did cause a lot of anxiety and hurt feelings because they just didn’t relate and insensitive things were said. (Here’s a post I wrote about that called: Surrounded by Ignorance.) But I wonder if I would have had more anxiety trying to lie and not let anyone in to what was really going on.
So, here’s the poll! My very first one on this blog! 
It really depends on the friend and how close we are. Really only our closer friends know. If someone would ask directly we wouldn’t necessarily lie, but we’d just keep it short.
Great question. I think I shocked people in how open I was about my/our infertility, especially me begin a man sharing about my infertility! It just felt easier for me to be open than to lie.
I agree – this is a really great question. I just blogged a bit about this on my blog as I reached 100 followers. I agree with Mrs. S: it completely depends on the friend and whether we feel that (1) it would be mutually beneficial to share our journey with them and (2) they would react in a positive and understanding way.
At the moment, we’ve shared our adoption journey openly and with everyone, but we’ve kept our journey through infertility among immediate family and close friends only. Like Mrs. S, if we are asked directly (and we have been), we are not dishonest, but we are also not an open book – we keep it short and only really say that yes, we have struggled with infertility but we are not devastated or defeated by it because we know God will bring our family together by His perfect design.
Great post – I’m interested to see how your poll turns out!
I only just started being honest with my friends about our IF. But like others have said it depends on the friend and how safe I feel sharing with them.
When we were in the midst of our IF struggle, mostly during the time we were doing treatments, we kept everything to ourselves. In a way it was easier keeping things quiet, but keeping a secret this huge was exhausting.
But I now have a handful of friends that I’m able to be open with and even though they don’t really understand what I’m going through they listen.