Too often, labor and delivery nurses encounter no-good birth partners, and in some cases, they'll intervene.

Giving birth is already one of the biggest challenges in a person’s life, but an unsupportive birth partner can make it even worse.

Take it from people who see this dynamic every day. While labour and delivery nurses are there in the room helping pregnant people endure the pain of contractions and epidurals, they are also sometimes dealing with bored, judgmental partners.

“A lot of times, you just are making eye contact with the other nurses in the room. Like, ‘Can you believe what is happening at this moment?’” said Yancy Guzmán, a North Carolina-based nurse.

“Labour is where partners rise to the occasion or fail miserably,” said North Carolina-based nurse Jen Hamilton.

“I see it all the time where people have so much hope that their person is going to just step up to the plate ... It’s just so devastating to watch somebody who you know had these really high expectations and then they weren’t met.“

And the nurses interviewed, who have seen hundreds of births, said this unsupportive behaviour is exclusive to heterosexual men.

Although they cannot predict whether couples will divorce, several of the nurses said they know when you should divorce, or hope you will. “I never know the end of people’s stories, but I feel like I can make a very educated guess on whether or not their relationship will stand the test of parenthood,” Hamilton said.

Washington-based nurse Alyssa Richard said that during labour, nurses see who men “authentically are behind whatever facade they may put up in front of people”.

Here are the biggest offences nurses say they’ve seen from men while their partner was in labour.

1. They sleep through active labour

Richard said men sleeping through their partner’s active labour is the most common unsupportive behaviour she sees that frustrates her the most.

“If there’s an emergency, and if the baby’s heart rate drops, tons of nurses will come running in and start doing all kinds of stuff with the mom, and the dad’s just over there sleeping, or pulls the blanket over their head so they don’t have to be bothered by what’s going on – that’s my biggest pet peeve, that’s crazy,” Richard said.

Hamilton said she recently had a woman who was screaming during........

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