AceShowbiz - Colton Underwood has opened up about his "shame" over his fertility struggles. The 32-year-old "The Bachelor" star and his husband Jordan C. Brown, 41, are yearning to start a family together but Colton admitted their fertility journey has not been easy.

"Well before our wedding, we started all of this. And going through this journey for me and him too, it's really emotional in many different ways that we never really thought [it would be]," he told Parents magazine.

"When we first went in [to our fertility clinic], we went in sort of skipping, holding hands, all happy. We were going to give our sample and freeze our sperm - day one of starting our family - and I got my sperm results back, and I had four sperm. Three of them were dead. One was barely moving in my sample. It was one of those things where [I was basically] considered technically infertile. I was like, 'This sucks. This is hard.' "

"It is hard, and it's so intimate. I had so much shame around it. I felt inferior. My ego took a hit, because I pride myself on being a healthy athlete. All of a sudden, you can't do the one thing that you really want to do and produce sperm."

Colton - who came out as gay in 2021 and tied the knot with Jordan last year - also revealed that the pair knew from the beginning that they wanted children together. He said, "One of the first things that Jordan and I bonded over was our want to be fathers."

"That was especially important because, as I've been on my coming out journey, [wanting to be a dad] was one of the factors that kept me in the closet. I didn't really know it was possible to build a family as a gay man, until I came out, until I started having more conversations with Jordan and started educating myself."

"My greatest hope is that everybody will treat people with kindness and love and treat them as human beings. Everybody deserves a family - and we're trying our best."