People’s ideas about kids (or a million other life choices, for that matter) can evolve and adapt to changing stations in life. Being in disagreement now doesn’t mean you weren’t perfectly compatible in the past.
In my case, my wife and I married 9 years ago, in our early 20s, with the not-much-debated assumption that we’d have kids in a few years. We both agreed that’s how it would happen, but I think most of that was because it was the “default”…it’s just what people do. We had each grown up with this basic understanding and expectation that we would be parents ourselves one day, so that was the end of it.
As we moved along into our middle 20s, setting up a home and getting careers underway, the idea of introducing a kid (or kids) to the equation started seeming further removed from where we were. It was still a “one day” kind of thing, but it was also still a few years away. Always a few years away.
Enter the late 20s. At this point, we’re comfortable DINKs, enjoying the time, money, and freedom that comes from being two working professionals and no “real” responsibility outside keeping our jobs. By now, we’ve grown into a mindset of “Well, maybe we never have to have kids. Let’s retire early and move to Hawaii when we’re 50!”
Then, almost overnight, my wife did the classic 180 on the kids thing. The alarm went off on her biological clock, and suddenly the “convincing” began. I shared no sudden change of heart, and had gotten pretty comfortable with the idea of not taking on the hassle of being parents. In fact, about the time she flip-flopped so abruptly, I had almost written off the possibility of ever having to worry about it. The next couple years were characterized by a real underlying friction, because for the first time we found ourselves on different sides of that argument. We started off on the same page, but then our feelings diverged long after our marriage started. I felt duped, and she felt frustrated.
I was never dead-set against kids. But I felt like if I was even 50/50, that tie should go to the “no kids” side. It’s not something you want to go into all half-assed. But she kept discussing it, and I started to convince myself that when you averaged my “sitting on the fence” with her “all-in” position, the result was a net “yes”. It took a while to get there, but in the end I relented. I wasn’t dragged kicking and screaming into trying for a kid, but I’ll admit I was doing something for us that I would never do for me.
Fast forward to the present day, and we have an awesome 8-month-old son, Evan. I do my best to be a good, involved, and enthusiastic parent, and I believe I’m succeeding so far. I love him to death. I’ve come to realize that most of my reservations and worries were unfounded…or at least they don’t seem to matter now. I’m a convert, I suppose, to the ideology of parenthood. I’ll always miss being a DINK household, and I’m sure I’d have been happy in a different way if we had stayed that way. But this gig is pretty good, too.
That’s why people in a relationship would talk about the issue – to avoid making assumptions.