Hilarie Burton became the "worst version of herself" during her five-year battle to fall pregnant with a second child with husband Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
The stars, who were together for a decade before tying the knot in October 2019, tried to conceive a second baby with little success after welcoming their first child, son Gus, in 2010.
And opening up about the difficult time in her new memoir The Rural Diaries, Hilarie admitted that both she and The Walking Dead star Jeffrey struggled to cope.
"I had been the worst version of myself," she wrote. "Jeffrey had been distant and unreachable... I was spending hundreds of dollars on ovulation tests... I was peeing on sticks... even looking at moon cycles.
"There was no romance. The whole thing had become a science experiment. He'd feel used and wouldn't respond to me, and then I'd feel hurt and rejected. It was a vicious, unhappy cycle."
After eventually falling pregnant, the One Tree Hill actress suffered a tragic miscarriage, which led to her marriage coming "undone".
"We didn't know how to talk to each other," she continued. "The things I needed to hear, he didn't know how to say; and the things he needed me to be, I couldn't be... I was just a vessel and I was empty. Any energy I did have was going to Gus; I had nothing left for Jeff."
But after a long discussion, the pair managed to get their relationship back on track.
"We talked about our grief," she explained. "We talked about how we both felt like failures. We talked about how lonely we were... He was incredibly vulnerable. He talked to me about how much he valued me and that this was home and that it was worth any fight. There had been so much sorrow in the previous few years, but Jeffrey and I had made it through together."
Hilarie had two more miscarriages before eventually falling pregnant with daughter George, who was born in February 2018.
