Marriage: husband wants kids, wife doesn't

In My Humble Opinion
1

Don’t need answer fast. It’s not a personal situation, just one I’ve wondered about. One hears about the reverse from time to time, but not about this situation.

How does a couple resolve such a situation? What are the likely thought processes they’re experiencing?

In this hypothetical situation, I guess one has to assume the husband isn’t an idiot and married someone incompatible. So let’s go with “they got married both not wanting kids, but ten years later he realised he did; but she still doesn’t”.

Gotta be tough on the relationship, I imagine.

2

Not to hijack the thread, since you’re entitled to draw up your hypothetical case any way you want.

But a LOT of people who aren’t idiots still get married even though they know full well that they disagree about somethibg rather important.

People who want kids often marry people who’ve made it clear they don’t, either hoping or assuming “She’ll change her mind” or “Once I get pregnant, he’ll come around.”

Sometimes, people do change their minds or “come around”… but sometimes they feel unforgivably betrayed.

3

I would imagine there could be as many possibly resolutions as there are couples.

  1. She changes her mind.
  2. He changes his mind.
  3. He spoils nieces/nephews/neighbors as surrogate kids.
  4. He volunteers as a Big Brother or a mentor.
  5. ???

I expect a lot would have to do with why the wife doesn’t want kids. Does she not like kids? Is she afraid she can’t handle it? Does she not want to lose her figure (a friend of my sister held this position.) Did she come from a dysfunctional home and not want to repeat it? Is she just selfish?

Not a question with an easy answer.

4

Oh, I hear about it a lot, as it’s the case for a dear friend of mine. Her husband desperately wants kids; she doesn’t want them. It’s sort of the opposite of the case in your OP, as it was more that she wanted them in theory when they were married, and still does sort of think she should have them in theory, but in practice she’s having a very hard time with the idea. She doesn’t feel terribly maternal, she doesn’t particularly feel her biological clock (I think he feels her clock more than she does), she doesn’t want to be pregnant or give birth, she doesn’t feel the need to have a child of her own.

She is also very dedicated to her career, and there’s no good time for her to have a kid in terms of her career advancement. And as she progresses in her career, she sees the career-minded women around her falling into two categories: either they have to be less career ambitious once they have kids (she probably feels I fall into this category, as I cut way back on hours once the Little One was born, though I was never that ambitious to begin with), or the husbands complain a lot and it takes a toll on the marriage. (Note: her husband is a really sweet guy, much better at domestic tasks than the vast majority of the guys either of us know, and I think that he wouldn’t complain so much since he wants the kid, but it’s something she worries about after seeing what her colleagues have gone through.) And she and her mom have a somewhat fraught relationship, so she worries that her hypothetical child will have the same issues with her, and in general that she won’t be a good mom. (Again, I think this is a bit of an overreaction, but I’m not the one worrying.) She is also very cognizant, for various reasons, of all the things that could go wrong physically and developmentally.

Anyway. Yes, it’s tough, and definitely a major issue for them. She’s currently trying to work through all these issues, and I think they will probably end up trying to have at least one kid, since after all they did kind of agree on it before all these issues came up. But I suspect if they encounter any difficulties at all (e.g., with fertility), she’ll probably see it as a reprieve and not consent to doing any fertility treatment or adoption.

5

By “not to hijack the thread” do you mean “I’m going to hijack the thread”?

6

Two very good friends of ours just separated over this very situation. :frowning:

7

My brother and his ex-wife tried for a few years for children. I won’t go into details, but after certain personal events she told him she’d changed her mind about wanting kids. They divorced about a year after that, in large part because he still very much does.

8

Yeah, it’s one of those dealbreaker topics that should be fleshed out before the marriage. I’m sure it’s very painful to break up with someone you love, no matter what tears you apart.

9

Having kids is one of the few areas where compromise doesn’t work. The person who doesn’t want kids has the final say. They should not compromise to have a kid unless they truly want to have a kid and be a parent. Having kids can be incredibly stressful. If a parent is not fully onboard, the stress will likely cause severe problems in the marriage.

If one wants and the other doesn’t, the only solutions I see is that they go childless or get divorced.

10

No- I merely quibble with your stated assumption that only idiots would marry people who didn’t share their desire to have (or not have) kids.

11

I sort of went through something like this. I’ve been wanting children for some time now but my husband is a Ph.D. student and isn’t comfortable taking on that role yet. It could be another 3-4 years before we have children, and even longer if we go through with our plan to adopt.

It only really became a big deal in late 2010, when we were planning to get pregnant for about three months, and I had put a lot of effort into working out the budget, doing research and figuring out how it was going to work. Then at the last minute he said he wasn’t ready. I yelled, I cried, I received some good and some terrible advice on the Dope, and I realized that the absolute worst thing to do to a child is bring him into a home where he’s not wanted, and the worst thing for me to do to my husband would be to pressure him into something he felt unprepared for. When we do it, we’re going to do it right, and we’re going to be awesome parents. In the meantime I’m just trying to live my life to the fullest and appreciate what I’ve got now.

Some people here told me I should leave my husband, which leads me to believe that some people want children more than they want that relationship-and that’s totally understandable. But as for me, I’d be childless for the rest of my life if that’s what it took to make this relationship work. No-brainer.

If it matters, I am female and 29 (ugh) years old. We married at age 23.

12

I was just trying to head off a predictable thread direction by absolute moralists at the pass by eliminating it from consideration.

13

Moved MPSIMS to IMHO, our forum for opinions.

14

For the two people I know in this situation, the woman has the say, since it’s her body and everything. Very sad for the guy, of course.

The woman in one situation doesn’t want them because she’s stubborn to a fault and simply wants to spite his parents, which I think is a crappy reason and it’s something I’m sure he questions a lot, since he’s not stupid. She refuses to get married to him for this reason too. I do sometimes wonder why they’re still together.

15

I know of 3 situations where this has happened:

Work colleague who married an older man with kids already, who told her he was past having another young family. She eventually had twins, and basically parented them herself, as he wasn’t really interested. Not sure what happened to them.

A good friend who got married without having the kids discussion first (clearly a mistake). He wasn’t that into kids, which made it harder when they had problems conceiving. Finally she got pregnant and he seems happy enough, although hard to tell.

My sister, with a longterm boyfriend who was adamant he was not interested in kids. They discussed for several years, tried breaking up, and then he decided it was worth the compromise to keep her happy. Baby #1 is now just over a year old and he is completely smitten with her, light of his life and he really acts it. They are planning to start trying again soon and I’m really happy for them.

Clearly the thing to do is to have the talk (amongst many other topics) BEFORE they get married, and decide whether it’s a dealbreaker or not.

16

I know a couple with the rolls reversed - i.e. woman wanted kids and man didn’t.

She went ahead and got pregnant and they now have one son that the man likes quite well (although mom is the much more involved parent). I think she hoped for basically this exact scenario - she gets to be a mom and he stuck around despite not wanting to be a dad.

So, they resolved it by deceit, lies, and half-truths and for some wack-a-loo reason that seems to have worked for them, although I don’t recommend it.

I do know when she started making noises about wanting ANOTHER child he pretty much said point blank he would leave her if she got pregnant again.

17

Hoookay, so now I’m wondering which of my co-workers raspberry_hunter is, because those are all the reasons I give my work acquaintances for not wanting kids…
In reality, it is a little different for me and my husband. While all of what R_H said is true for me, I truly don’t want kids for two basic reasons:

  1. A really bitching phobia of medical institutions and doctors.

  2. Bad childhood experiences - My mom… lets just say she’s not very good with stress, which is like 98.7% of parenting.

Logically speaking, I’m pretty sure I’d be a good mom, I like the idea of kids, and I (due to the whole bad childhood thing) already have lots of experience as the primary caretaker of infants and children. If I could do it at 13, then I can damn sure do it at 30.

That whole emotional-mental block is pretty tough tho. If I were on my own, or with a partner that didn’t give a shit about kids, I’d just be happily traumatized, keep it all unresolved, and just not have any kids, saving myself lots of money, effort, and therapy.

But… he wants to be a parent. Badly. And his family is awesome, and my mom is less horrible now that I’m an adult and can deal with her shit, and if I’m being honest, “unresolved PTSD” really is a lame reason for not having kids.

So I’m working through things, slowly. We may never get to the point that I’m ok with having kids, but I am honestly trying, and that’s all he’s asking of me. I actually do hope that I get my ducks in a row before my eggs dry up (hows that for a barnyard metaphor) because I think he’d be an awesome dad, and we’d have super-genius kids. :wink:
(And for the curious, he knew this about me before we married - hell, before we started dating - and was totally ok with it. We were both painfully honest, and we cried a lot, and decided that we loved each other enough that we’d work something out together.)

18

As was said upthread, there is no compromise. Ethically, you either decide not to have kids and the relationship is worth it anyway, or you decide to split up.

Or, you get accidentally pregnant or have some other event where you acquire children. This can be “accidentally on purpose” - which I think is a violation of trust, but which does happen and does sometimes work out (and sometimes it doesn’t), or truly an unplanned event - I have a girlfriend who didn’t want kids (married), had a birth control failure, didn’t choose an abortion, and has a daughter. Or you end up with a niece or nephew when your sister isn’t a fit parent and its a better choice than foster care.

19

I agree, but there can be degrees of “not want” on the part of the non-parental person. Not everyone who doesn’t want children is totally 100% gangbusters against the idea.

If I didn’t have my specific hangups, I have a feeling I would actually fall into the “meh, take it or leave it” camp, which (in my opinion) isn’t quite the same as the “not want” camp. That’s why I’m willing to work on it.

I agree with you that if either partner is totally against the idea, then there shouldn’t be an expectation for them to “compromise” their firmly held beliefs.

I do have to wonder how many women are more ambivalent about motherhood, but just trend more negative because there is such a strong cultural bias towards assuming that just because you have girly bits, you’re going to A) want to, and B) as soon as feasible, begin popping babies out like clockwork.

20

I could see some people using the “I want kids, my spouse doesn’t” argument to get out of a marriage they don’t want to be in anymore anyway.