How Being Informed About Endometriosis Helps Your Partner

Informing yourself about endometriosis is a great way to better support your partner through their condition. It not only gives you a better understanding of the issues they might be facing and a better set of tools for helping with them, but also empowers you to advocate for your partner and for endo patients across the world.

You gain sympathy

The most direct benefit of educating yourself about endometriosis is understanding how your partner is feeling and thereby supporting them in a more effective and tailored way. For example, your partner may complain about feeling tired. It is one thing to hear this, to relate it to tiredness you have felt, and assume it’s the same thing. "Ah well, have a cup of coffee, we’ll go to bed early tonight, you’ll be fine." However, upon learning that chronic fatigue is a common symptom of endometriosis, you can research fatigue and realize that it won’t go away with a good night’s sleep or caffeine. It affects productivity and creativity, ruins careers and relationships, and takes over people’s lives.

Without taking the initiative to look further in to it, you could easily pass this symptom off as something we’ve all experienced at one time or another, simple tiredness. To do this would be to miss the struggle of living with endometriosis, and the strength your partner has to deal with it every day. The flip side of this is that knowing exactly what your partner is dealing with and the breadth of their struggle will enable you to have more informed and fair interactions with your partner regarding endometriosis. It’s understandable to get annoyed at your partner for cancelling your third date night in a row because of period pain – unfair, but completely natural. However, when you learn the severity and relentlessness of endometriosis pain, your opinion and patience will surely improve.

You become an advocate

Another useful benefit of being clued-up on endometriosis is that you are now able to advocate for your partner and others in the world. Endometriosis is starting to get the recognition it deserves, and the support and funding it needs, but this is a slow process, and we need to help it along. Having a good understanding of the condition puts you in a position to educate others about the condition, and challenge wrong or unfair opinions and information you come in to contact with. You can challenge doctors who dismiss potential endometriosis symptoms, present another side to your boss about why Sue from finance has so much time off, or explain to your kids why Mum needs to be allowed to sleep today. Endometriosis can feel isolating, so the more people a patient has on their side, the better.

There is no shortage of places to look for this information, so I won’t list them here, you know how to use a search engine. The most important thing is the intention to seek this information out. There’s a lot of good first-hand information out there, so arm yourself with knowledge of this condition and you will be far better prepared to deal with its effects.