I never ask married couples if they have children. That was such a painful question for me when my husband and I were enduring fertility treatments. We had already been married almost 5 years when we started seeing a fertility specialist and were in our late twenties, so people were constantly asking us about why we did not have children yet.

There was no good way to answer that question. I was not going to lie and say yes, but saying no invited a terrible round of inquiries. If you just say no, then there are always follow up questions or comments, such as the following:

• How long have you been married? Well, what are you waiting for?
• Kids are great. You really should consider starting a family.
• Don't you want children?

I tried to think up a script to tack onto the "no" to prevent the inquiries, but none worked very well. If I said, "Not yet," then that would lead to questions about when we planned to start a family. If I said, "We're not ready to take on a baby just yet," it would invite an entire sales pitch about the virtues of babies.

On my Hoping to Adopt blog, I put together a comical formula for keeping nosy people from butting into your life. See Unsolicited Comments About Your Family Planning for a comical look at how to avoid these inquiries. The point is that you cannot avoid them if anything in your life deviates from what society views as "the norm." Since "the norm" seems to be making a baby within two years of marriage, anyone who has been married longer than two years and is childless can count on being asked this awful question repeatedly.

My husband and I had many conversations about how best to field this question. Each time we came up with a new answer, we found that it only led to more nosy inquiries. I finally just settled for the truth and would say that we had been trying for a while but that we weren't having any luck conceiving. Of course, that led to the detailed recitation of every infertile couple's journey that the person knew.

I still do not have the right answer to that question. Do you have an answer that works for infertile couples? If so, please share it in the comments so you can spare others from these painful inquiries. And remember to never, ever ask a couple if they have children.

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