My wife Terri and I began trying for a baby after we got married. I was 34 and she was 29; we were both healthy, non-smokers, fit and rarely drank. We didn’t expect to have any problems, but we couldn’t fall pregnant. After a year and a half of trying, we went to the doctor to see if there were any underlying issues. It didn’t take long for the results to come back.

I was told I had poor motility, which means the sperm don’t always move forward freely; poor morphology (shape); and a low sperm count.

New research shows I am not alone in this. Sperm counts from men across Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand have halved in less than 40 years, with much of it linked to our lifestyles, from stress and diet to pesticides and plastics.

For me, the news came as a total shock. I had no idea that I had any issues in that area – especially as I’d always been fit and healthy – and I felt absolutely awful when we were told that it was highly unlikely we’d ever be able to conceive naturally. I felt so guilty that I couldn’t “come up with the goods”, as it were, and I had to try and deal with that while helping my wife. I focused entirely on her, and completely closed off to the idea of talking to people who had no personal experience of infertility about how I felt.