Beware, father-to-be!!

Pregnancy itself lets the ladies brag themselves to heaven that they are one facing the real deal all by themselves. They're not wrong in bragging. The whole deal of being gravid definitely took them in for a rollercoaster ride filled with danger and not to mention, the agony of pain, one way or another.

As for the husband or the male partner (if one not married) takes the toll mainly from all the psychological stress due to emotional rantings or the never-ending effort of getting palatable dishes to fulfill the exceptional choice of food during pregnancy. I am making a general statement after talking to several fathers-to-be, definitely without any special reference to myself.

However, something that is for real. Of my knowledge, the male partner can also suffer from

1. Couvade syndrome - excessive vomiting when wife's in first trimester (first few months of pregnancy) - well, at least I had known two of my colleagues had it...

.. Studies have shown that the male partner cohabitating with a pregnant female will experience hormonal shifts in his prolactin, cortisol, estradiol and testosterone typically starting at the end of the first trimester and continuing through several weeks post-partum. Suggested explanations of how and why this occurs include an interaction of factors (some of which are little-researched) such as pheromones, circadian rhythms, simple stress, and mitogenetics. It has been suggested that spouse sleep disturbances may affect the neurohormonal. One possible mechanism is the increased basal estrogen levels from peripheral conversion of testosterone by adipose tissue. To date no biologic target has been identified as a cause of this pain syndrome levels...

2. Male postpartum depression - depression after wife's delivery.

... We don’t know the exact prevalence of male postpartum depression; studies have used different methods and diagnostic criteria. Dr. Paul G. Ramchandani, a psychiatrist at the University of Oxford in England who did a study based on 26,000 parents, reported in The Lancet in 2005 that 4 percent of fathers had clinically significant depressive symptoms within eight weeks of the birth of their children. But one thing is clear: It isn’t something most people, including physicians, have ever heard of....

.... By far the strongest predictor of paternal postpartum depression is having a depressed partner. In one study, fathers whose partners were also depressed were at nearly two and a half times the normal risk for depression. That was a critical finding, for clinicians tend to assume that men can easily step up to the plate and help fill in for a depressed mother. In fact, they too may be stressed and vulnerable to depression....