The American Masculinity Podcast is hosted by Timothy Wienecke — licensed psychotherapist, Air Force veteran, and award-winning men's advocate. Real conversations about masculinity, mental health, trauma, fatherhood, leadership, and growth. Each episode offers expert insight and practical tools to help men show up differently — as partners, fathers, friends, and leaders. No yelling. No clichés. Just grounded, thoughtful masculinity for a changing world.

Every fertility journey hands men a job to perform: stay steady, fix what's fixable, keep providing, don't fall apart in front of her. Each role promises the same payoff: do it well, and you've held up your end. But underneath the role, the actual fear rarely changes. Most men white-knuckling their way through infertility aren't really trying to be supportive enough; they're trying to outrun the suspicion that their body, their luck, or their worth as a man has failed at the one thing no one ever doubted they could do. Swap the role for the next one, and the same dread keeps driving from underneath.

In this episode, Timothy sits down with Dr. Clay Brigance. He is a licensed professional counsellor, a Level III Gottman Method couple therapist, and the founder and clinical director of Shiloh Counselling in Ballwin, Missouri, where he and his team have spent over a decade helping couples through infertility, miscarriage, and reproductive loss. He hosts the podcast Love and Infertility, and his research is drawn from clinical work and interviews with more than 1,000 couples. All has been published in journals including The Family Journal and Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. His forthcoming book, Couple Therapy for Reproductive Grief, is due out from the American Psychological Association in early 2027. His core premise, deliberately at odds with content that treats infertility as primarily a woman's medical and emotional burden, is that men's reproductive grief is just as real and just as capable of either fracturing a marriage or transforming it, depending entirely on whether a man learns to put his armor down before it's too late.

Together, they unpack:

• Proving you can still protect her versus proving you're enough: Clay's own qualitative research found a recurring theme in men going through infertility, a quiet belief that their emotions matter less than their partner's, so they push their own needs down and try to be "a solid rock" instead. The episode traces how this well-intended chivalry gets expressed as practical support (paying for treatment, running errands) when what's actually being asked for is presence, and how that mismatch leaves both partners feeling isolated from each other.
• The double-edged emasculation of virility and provision: Infertility threatens two masculine identity pillars at once, the ability to father a child, and the ability to provide for a family. The conversation follows Clay's own memory of borrowing money from his father-in-law for treatment, which felt like a second blow stacked on top of the first, and unpacks why so many men respond to helplessness by working harder rather than showing up.
• The Four Pillars of getting through it together: Clay built this framework specifically because he found existing couples-therapy models missing what's unique about infertility's stress. Mindful attunement, navigating decisional conflict, uncovering each partner's disrupted vision of parenthood, and keeping physical intimacy alive together, his research suggests these don't just prevent damage, they predict genuine post-traumatic growth.
• The Dobby Effect and the self-harm conversation no one's having: Clay names the pattern of mentally punishing himself after giving his wife fertility injections, a need to "make it equal" when he couldn't otherwise share her physical pain. Timothy connects this directly to the broader, rarely discussed risk of self-harm in men moving through fertility loss, and the two land on a simple, urgent ask: find one person to talk to before it gets that far.

Guest Information

• Licensed professional counsellor, Gottman Method couple therapist, and founder and clinical director of Shiloh Counselling, a group practice built around couple therapy for infertility, miscarriage, and reproductive loss. He also hosts Love and Infertility, a podcast created with fellow couple therapist Ginny Lupka, LPC, and is the author of the forthcoming book Couple Therapy for Reproductive Grief, set for release through the American Psychological Association in early 2027.
• Clay has worked almost exclusively with couples navigating reproductive trauma for over a decade, founding Shiloh Counselling shortly after completing his PhD in Counselling at the University of Missouri, St. Louis in 2023. The practice has since grown to ten therapists, and his research, drawn from clinical work with more than 1,000 couples and published in journals including The Family Journal and Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, has shaped his Level III training in Gottman Method Couple Therapy.
• Known for grounding clinical research in lived experience, speaking openly about his own and his wife's infertility journey rather than keeping it at arm's length, and naming specific, often-unspoken patterns like well-intended chivalry and what he calls the "Dobby effect" that make the male side of fertility grief speakable instead of something men quietly carry alone.
• Focus areas include why some couples grow closer through infertility while others separate, the compounded threat infertility poses to virility and provider identity, his Four Pillars framework for navigating reproductive grief as a couple, hidden self-punishment and self-harm risk in men, and male friendship as a precursor to vulnerability within marriage.

Note: Dr. Clay Brigance appears in this interview in a personal and professional capacity. The views expressed are his own and do not represent Shiloh Counselling, the Gottman Institute, or any other affiliated institution, clinical body, or organisation.

Here is our affiliate link to buy the books discussed from a local bookstore in your area: https://bookshop.org/shop/AmericanMasculinity

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Connect with Dr. Clay

Website: https://www.drclaybrigance.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clayton-brigance-phd-lpc-99a4381a4

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Dr.ClayBrigance/videos

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_claybrigance/

The following are the facts that were checked against research papers:

1. Couple outcomes after infertility/loss (25% / 30%)

What Was Said: “I use that metaphor to describe the 25% of couples that turn towards each other [in] their grief experience… but then there’s a full 30% that separate because of infertility… because of the stress that infertility and miscarriage has put on their relationship” (Said by Clay).

Status: Needs clarification.

Details: Clay is Dr. Clayton Brigance, a published infertility researcher (e.g., a 2024 study of 903 couples in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy). That broader body of work supports the general claim that some couples grow closer through infertility via shared-meaning and relational resilience, while population research confirms infertility is a major strain factor linked to elevated dissolution risk. However, the specific 25%/30% split is his own simplified, repeated marketing framing for his practice rather than a single verifiable statistic from a peer-reviewed paper; no published source reporting that exact breakdown could be located.

Sources: Brigance, C. A., Waalkes, P. L., Freedle, A., & Kim, S.-R. (2024). Gottman’s sound relationship house and relational resilience through infertility for couples. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 50(4), 933–952. https://doi.org/10.1111/jmft.12736 

Why It Matters for Men: It’s reassuring that growth through shared grief is a documented phenomenon, not just a feel-good story, but men shouldn’t take the precise odds as settled science.

2. “Well-intended chivalry” pattern

What Was Said: “We push our own needs down, we’re trying to lift up the needs of our partner… a lot of times it leaves men feeling [isolated], and [leaves] their female partners feeling like pushed away” (Said by Clay).

Status: Directionally supported.

Details: This matches Clay’s own qualitative interview research with men navigating infertility, and it aligns closely with independent academic findings: men’s online forum accounts show them framing themselves as the “silent supporting partner” who suppresses personal emotional needs to focus on their partner, often at the cost of accessing support themselves. This pattern, practical support substituting for emotional presence, is a documented theme in qualitative infertility research, not an idiosyncratic clinical observation.

Sources: Hanna, E., & Gough, B. (2017). Men’s accounts of infertility within their intimate partner relationships: An analysis of online forum discussions. Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology, 35(2), 150–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/02646838.2017.1278749 

Why It Matters for Men: Practical help (paying for treatment, logistics) isn’t a substitute for emotional presence; partners often need both, not one instead of the other.

3. Sex-for-pleasure narrative

What Was Said: “I think there’s a narrative that men are into sex just for the pleasure, and that’s totally not true. Certainly a big part of it, but totally not true” (Said by Clay).

Status: True.

Details: The most cited large-scale study on sexual motivation identified 237 distinct reasons people have sex, spanning physical, emotional, goal-attainment, and insecurity-related categories. While men endorse purely physical motives slightly more than women on average, the large majority of top reasons for both sexes, love, commitment, self-esteem, and connection, overlap. This directly contradicts the simplistic “men only want sex for pleasure” stereotype that Clay is pushing back on.

Sources: Meston, C. M., & Buss, D. M. (2007). Why humans have sex. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 36(4), 477–507. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-007-9175-2

Why It Matters for Men: Reducing male sexuality to “just pleasure” flattens a much more complex emotional reality, one where connection and reassurance matter as much as physical desire.

4. Shame as motivator

What Was Said: “I actually learned that [shame] is a motivator” (Said by Clay).

Status: Needs clarification.

Details: Mainstream shame-and-guilt research draws a sharp line Clay’s framing blurs: guilt (focused on a specific behaviour) reliably motivates reparative, approach-oriented action, while shame (focused on the whole self) is consistently linked to withdrawal, avoidance, and worse psychological outcomes. Notably, Clay’s own example, “if I don’t try, I don’t have the possibility of failure”, is a textbook avoidance response, which the literature would call a maladaptive shame pattern rather than a constructive motivator. Brené Brown’s popular framing of shame as “healthy” reflects a clinical-practice perspective that diverges from the dominant empirical consensus.

Sources: Tangney, J. P., Stuewig, J., & Mashek, D. J. (2007). Moral emotions and moral behavior. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 345–372. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.56.091103.070145

Why It Matters for Men: If shame is pushing you to avoid trying rather than to act, that’s a sign it’s working against you; guilt about a specific situation is the more useful, change-driving emotion.

5. Self-harm risk during fertility struggles

What Was Said: “There’s definitely some self-harm aspects that don’t get talked about enough when guys go through fertility stuff” (Said by Tim).

Status: Directionally supported.

Details: A systematic analysis of male-factor infertility confirms that men experience significantly more depression, anxiety, and general psychological distress than fertile controls. A 2025 cohort study of infertile couples found 9.6% of men reported suicidal ideation. Most large mortality-specific studies (e.g., Danish registry data) have focused on women, so direct male suicide-rate data are thinner than the distress/ideation evidence, but Tim’s underlying point, that this risk is under-discussed for men, is well supported.

Sources: Biggs, S. N., Halliday, J., & Hammarberg, K. (2024). Psychological consequences of a diagnosis of infertility in men: A systematic analysis. Asian Journal of Andrology, 26(1), 10–19. https://doi.org/10.4103/aja202334

Why It Matters for Men: Men’s distress during fertility struggles is real and measurable, even though it gets far less research and clinical attention than women’s.

6. Virility and masculinity

What Was Said: “Virility is so indicative of masculinity. It’s kind of the universal, right? A man can father a child” (Said by Tim).

Status: True.

Details: Researchers describe “reproductive masculinity”, the cultural assumption that men are inherently virile and should become fathers, as a well-documented cross-cultural construct. Studies confirm this assumption shapes men’s masculine identity and that threats to it (infertility) negatively affect mental health, self-esteem, and willingness to seek support. This is one of the more consistently replicated findings in the male-infertility literature.

Sources: Miner, S. A., Daumler, D., Chan, P., Gupta, A., Lo, K., & Zelkowitz, P. (2019). Masculinity, mental health, and desire for social support among male cancer and infertility patients. American Journal of Men’s Health, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/1557988318820396 

Why It Matters for Men: When fertility gets tangled up with identity this tightly, infertility can feel like a referendum on manhood itself, which is exactly why it hits so hard and why men avoid talking about it.

Full Citations

Biggs, S. N., Halliday, J., & Hammarberg, K. (2024). Psychological consequences of a diagnosis of infertility in men: A systematic analysis. Asian Journal of Andrology, 26(1), 10–19. https://doi.org/10.4103/aja202334

Brigance, C. A., Waalkes, P. L., Freedle, A., & Kim, S.-R. (2024). Gottman’s sound relationship house and relational resilience through infertility for couples. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 50(4), 933–952. https://doi.org/10.1111/jmft.12736 

Hanna, E., & Gough, B. (2017). Men’s accounts of infertility within their intimate partner relationships: An analysis of online forum discussions. Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology, 35(2), 150–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/02646838.2017.1278749 

Meston, C. M., & Buss, D. M. (2007). Why humans have sex. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 36(4), 477–507. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-007-9175-2

Miner, S. A., Daumler, D., Chan, P., Gupta, A., Lo, K., & Zelkowitz, P. (2019). Masculinity, mental health, and desire for social support among male cancer and infertility patients. American Journal of Men’s Health, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/1557988318820396 

Tangney, J. P., Stuewig, J., & Mashek, D. J. (2007). Moral emotions and moral behavior. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 345–372. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.56.091103.070145