I agree with Dach, i have spoken to many male friends who were shunned/ignored after a miscarriage or after prostate or testicular or fertility issues. I think part of it with miscarriage is people don't know how you feel so they don't know what to say. I have had everything from "i'm so sorry" to "It must be a relief" in response to my miscarriages, because my pregnancies were unplanned. I know some women who WERE relieved to lose an unplanned pregnancy they hadn't decided to keep yet anyway. And some women are gutted by a 5 week loss, whereas others don't feel the same connection until the 2nd tri. It's very personal and people don't want to get into it.

When my mum died work sent me flowers and when i returned my boss took me out within an hour of my arrival to let me talk out what had happened and how i was going with it all, but after that i was treated completely normally. TBH i was grateful that a blind eye was turned to my random tears for the first few weeks. I didn't want to have to keep saying what was wrong.

Same with mental disorders. It is as if there are some things which aren't in the realm of normal daily discourse and when the problem lies with those things, well, people don't know how to approach it. I know one man who was dismissed by other men on an AC board because he had RE (retarded ejaculation) and so they had to have IVF, with a needle aspiration to get his swimmers. The view among the other men was that there was nothing "really" wrong (they had various other types of issue from varicocele to azoospermia) and he just didn't fancy his wife enough or something! Even having a medical problem themselves didn't give them compassion for his problem - they could all ejaculate and saw the problem he had as "his fault" or something. Ridiculous!

So no, i don't think it's a "woman's" thing, but a "suitable for conversation" thing. If you never talk about cervixes, the first time being about a cancerous one is going to be hard.

Bx