Brian Dowling’s husband Arthur Gourounlian has opened up about their struggle to start a family.
The couple, who tied the knot in 2015, are desperate to have children – but they’re finding the process extremely difficult.
Speaking to the Irish Mirror, Arthur said: “It is our dream to start a family. I wanted three kids and we started meetings in America.”
“We were looking at adoption but with Covid everything stopped. We are trying to start looking at adoption here in Ireland but honestly, it is heartbreaking how difficult it is.”
Arthur explained: “First of all we are getting too old. Second of all, there are hardly any kids to adopt so we are struggling on that front too.”
“It is breaking our hearts because I know that Brian and I would give the best life to these children.”
“We are exploring every area now… The reason I don’t want to go down the surrogacy route is that I don’t want to spend $150,000 because of my background as a refugee.”
“I simply cannot justify spending that kind of money. It doesn’t matter how much I earn in life, when I was growing up I didn’t have any money so for me to spend that amount of money on a kid, I physically feel sick,” Arthur confessed.
“It may come to the point where it is our only option and Brian has told me I may have to swallow our pride and just go with it. But having children is something we want to do.”
Arthur also opened up about his life as a refugee, after he and his family were forced out of their native Armenia when he was 12.
“I am Armenian and we left back in 1992 over the conflict with Azerbaijan,” he said. “They were trying to kill all the Armenians and we had to escape because it was so dangerous.”
“I nearly died because it was essentially a war of ethnic cleansing. I was 12 years old and my parents told me to pack a bag as if I was going on holidays and we took a train to Moscow.”
“You had to say you were going on holiday otherwise you risked being sent to prison. We went from Russia to Cologne and then to Brussels where we claimed asylum and it was just so difficult. It was just my parents, sister, my aunt and my cousin.”
Arthur said he and his family were taken to a refugee centre in Brussels, before they were re-homed in a small Belgian village by the Salvation Army.
“I was only 12, my sister was 10 and my parents did everything they could to shield us from the pain and hurt,” he said.
