‘Labor of Love’s’ Kristy Katzmann broke up with Kyle Klinger to pursue motherhood on her own: ‘We weren’t compatible’
After the “it’s you!” reveal, the Fox show splits from the usual script: The happy couple heads straight to the lead’s fertility specialist. This was to be expected in the rare show in the genre where the protagonist was a woman in her 40s looking for a partner who was ready to have children.
“That was literally at 3 a.m.,” Kristy Katzmann, 41, recalls in an interview of the show’s final scene, where her fertility specialist tells her and Kyle Klinger, 38, to start trying for a baby the old-fashioned way. “This is really good preparation for motherhood,” Katzmann told herself while filming that scene at the end of a very long day.
Katzmann and Klinger dated for a few months after the show wrapped in April 2019. But shortly after she moved from Chicago to Austin to give their relationship a shot, “it became really clear we weren’t compatible,” Katzmann says. “We have different personalities and different timelines.”
Katzmann and Klinger did not freeze embryos together, so they’ve avoided getting into a Sofia Vergara-Nick Loeb scuffle over who gets custody of their joint genetic material. “I would never go down that road if I wasn’t sure about the relationship,” Katzmann says of her decision after the show to retrieve more eggs that would be fertilized later, rather than create embryos with Klinger right away.
While Katzmann says she was “certainly disappointed that I didn’t get the love story that I wanted, I really loved the story that I am having,” that of becoming a mother on her own. She’s found that taking a break from dating to focus on getting pregnant through in vitro fertilization removes the pressure of looking for love while on a tight timeline.
After looking at donors whose genetic testing aligned with hers, she says she had a gut feeling when she landed on “the one.” “It’s kind of the same as when we’re dating … you’re going to choose the person that you have that ‘it’ factor with,” she says.
“I thought as soon as I decided I was ready, I would get pregnant,” Katzmann says, later realizing that it can take many tries over a long period. Her first round of IVF didn’t take and her second try has been delayed because of covid-19. She’s in the process of moving from Austin back to Chicago so that she has a larger support system around her as she prepares to become a single mother. “I’m going into this next round feeling more supported,” she says.
In the meantime, her Instagram account has been flooded with direct messages and comments from women telling their own stories of how they became mothers or have struggled to get there.
“You almost should be starting these things before you think you’re ready,” Katzmann says, adding that she hopes her televised quest to get pregnant will help women and couples dealing with infertility talk about it more.
In the meantime, this is the first time in her life she hasn’t cared about dating — and she finds that freedom incredibly refreshing. “My mind and heart is somewhere else right now,” Katzmann says. “I’m really focused on motherhood.”
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