Although Lauren Burnham and Arie Luyendyk Jr. are happy to be expecting twins, Bachelor stars say they used “the wrong approach” for design.
The couple, who got married in 2019 after meeting on the reality show’s 22nd season, shared in a YouTube video on Monday that they had sex for 18 days in a row while trying to get pregnant. “We will tell you how to make a baby!” Burnham, 29, owner of the Shades of Rose clothing line, said.
In May, the couple (who shares their 21-month-old daughter Alessi) experienced a “miscarriage” that happens when an embryo dies but is not expelled from the body, according to the American Pregnancy Association, a type of loss usually detected for lack of fetal heartbeat during an ultrasound scan or absence of pregnancy symptoms. Sometime after the abortion, Burnham said, the couple was released to try again.
“Trying was fun,” admitted Luyendyk Jr., 39, with Burnham adding, “For a while. It was fun until it wasn’t.” The couple decided to use daily ovulation strips, available over-the-counter, to assess Burnham’s fertile period. Women are generally more fertile about six days before ovulation (when an egg is released for fertilization, which occurs about two weeks before menstruation begins) and one day after ovulation.
“And then it was like, every day, it seemed like a day of high fertility,” recalled Luyendyk Jr. “… It was 18 days in a row.” The couple admitted that their approach may not have been scientifically sound. “Maybe for the first two weeks we were just having fun,” said Luyendyk Jr.
“At first, we thought, ‘We’re just going to have sex every day …'”, he said, what Burnham called the “wrong approach”, adding, “My doctor said, ‘Hey, you need to calm down. ‘”She said,” Arie is like,’ No. I’m not on board for that. I am worn out. He’s like, ‘This isn’t fun anymore. Do not count on me.’ I was upset. “
Eventually, the couple decided to stop stressing (“We kind of gave up,” said Burnham) and had sex every day for a period of five or six months, during which Burnham also took prenatal vitamins and an essential oil ( their doctor rejected the latter as effective) and, in December, they became pregnant with twins (a boy and a girl).
While the journey to make babies can be equally fun and stressful, daily attempts are unnecessary, according to Dr. Christina Jung, a complex family planning fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Each woman is different, but the days before ovulation are generally considered to be the fertile period,” she told Yahoo Life. Jung adds that an 18-day fertility window is unlikely, noting that some ovulation tests can produce false-positive results due to certain medical conditions, irregular cycles or if the tests are done at different times of the day when the results may fluctuate. “It is also possible that people may not interpret the results correctly,” she says.
Since sperm remains viable for about five days in the female reproductive tract, couples must have sex a few days before the woman releases an egg for fertilization, explains Jung. “Once the egg is released, it is only viable for about 12 to 24 hours – then the likelihood of pregnancy decreases.”
Ovulation strips can help couples determine their fertile period by measuring the luteinizing hormone (commonly referred to as LH) in a woman’s urine, the amount of which occurs before ovulation, according to Jung. “You want to identify the ovulation window – so if you are likely to ovulate on Friday, you might have sex on Wednesday,” she said. “We also recommend keeping an ovulation diary and allowing two or three cycles to pass to collect historical data.”
There are other low-cost methods for tracking ovulation, such as monitoring a woman’s daily basal body temperature (according to the Mayo Clinic, ovulation causes a small temperature spike, so tracking that increase over time is a way to predict when ovulation occurs) and monitor the cervix mucus, a more meticulous approach to observe small changes in cervical secretions around ovulation. “However, these methods are only useful if there are very regular cycles,” says Jung.
If couples want to have sex every day, that’s fine too, and no method of conception is foolproof. “Sometimes couples can do everything ‘right’ and not get pregnant, while others use protection and still get pregnant,” says Jung. “There is still a lot for scientists to learn, but so far, these [principals] guide our care. “
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