"We hit an existential crisis," Greg Wise wrote

A fertility story that contains a baby is supposed to be a success story. Greg Wise's contains one, and it is still a story about loss.

In a first-person account published on October 25, 2026, the actor recalls how he and his wife, Emma Thompson, turned to IVF about two decades ago. Their first attempt worked. A positive pregnancy test came shortly before Thompson's 40th birthday, and their daughter Gaia was born in 1999. ^[1]

Then came the cycles that did not work. Wise says further attempts failed repeatedly, and that the couple decided to stop. ^[1] My view is that this second chapter, the one that ends in nothing, is where the real weight of the account lies, and that we are poor at hearing it because the first chapter is so much easier to tell.

A loss with no body and no date

Wise describes the failed attempts as the loss of a hoped-for future. ^[1] That is a precise way to put it. Nobody died. There was no funeral and no anniversary to mark. There was a child who had been imagined in some detail and who was now not going to arrive, and a doctor's office where, as Wise recalls, the two of them could not meet each other's eyes. ^[1]

I have lived close enough to slow, unmarked loss to know how much of it happens in silence, in the gap where a ritual ought to be. Wise makes the same point about this grief: in his view it had no recognised way of being mourned. ^[1]

And the words he chose for the damage are blunt. "We hit an existential crisis," he wrote. He recalls thinking that Thompson was "not a proper woman" and that he was "not a proper man." ^[1] Both felt shame and a sense of failure, he says. ^[1]

Read that again. Two people who, by Wise's own account, knew they were fortunate, who could afford the treatment, who already had a daughter, still reached for the oldest and cruelest vocabulary of inadequacy. ^[1] The shame did not arrive because they lacked anything the world could see. It arrived because the body had declined to do what the story said bodies do.

The best case for telling people to be grateful

There is an obvious reply, and it deserves its full weight. Wise and Thompson had Gaia. They could pay for IVF, which many people cannot, and Wise says as much. ^[1]

Surely grief for a second child that never came sits some distance behind the grief of those who have no child at all.

Much of that is fair. Gratitude and grief are not rivals, though, and the people who feel both are the ones most likely to say nothing. If you have been handed the thing others are praying for, you do not stand in the kitchen announcing that you still hurt.

Wise's account suggests the silence did real work in that house. He says the couple did not seek counselling together during the treatment, and that he later experienced what he describes as depression. His account ends as he says he had to ask for help, and it does not say what came after. ^[1]

The reply also assumes grief obeys a budget, that sorrow shrinks when you can show a bank statement and a child. Wise's testimony says otherwise, and he is the only witness in the room we have.

What the men are for

The account is worth reading for a second reason. It is rare to hear a man describe what fertility treatment felt like from the passenger seat.

The physical burden fell on Thompson. Wise lists it: fertility hormones, injections, scans, blood tests. He says he felt he had little agency beyond supporting her. ^[1] Anyone who has sat beside a hospital bed knows that peculiar job. You are useful and useless at once, and you are expected to be strong. Wise says he worked at suppressing his own grief while looking after hers. ^[1]

That is a recipe for the depression he later describes. A partner who has been cast as the rock has nowhere to put his own sorrow, and the person he would normally tell is the one he is shielding.

What the story cannot yet carry

I would like to tell you that the entertainment industry has built its image of motherhood on late-life miracles and made failed IVF unmentionable. I suspect there is something in it.

But nobody has counted how often public figures talk about unsuccessful treatment, how screens depict infertility, or whether such talk is rising. The material behind this column is one man's account, and it supports nothing grander than itself.

What it does support is a narrower and more useful point. A story told from its ending, the child at the door, the photo on the mantel, gives people one shape to measure themselves against. Wise's account is a reminder that many families live in the other shape, the one where the cycles stop because they have to. If a famous couple with money and a daughter felt like failures, the rest of us should stop assuming that a private sense of failure means something is wrong with us.

So here is the use of his piece. If someone you know has been through treatment that did not work, do not open with the silver lining. Wise says he and Thompson did not seek counselling during their treatment, and what he recalls from those years is shame. ^[1] Ask how they are, and leave the pause long enough for the answer.

Two decades is a long time to carry something you had no name for. He has now written it down, and the least the rest of us can do is read it as grief, not as an anecdote.