If you’re not willing to entertain the notion of taking control of your relationship and getting what you want out of life, there’s not much point in asking for advice, in my opinion. There’s not much else you can do here – he’ll either come around to the idea of having kids with someone who doesn’t believe in God or he won’t, and if he does it’ll either cause major conflict or it won’t. You can’t really change his mind on this – issues like religion and how one’s children should be brought up are fairly fundamental to how we define ourselves. They may or may not morph over time, but it’s a fool’s bet to plan one’s life around the hope that they’ll change in the direction you want them to in the near future.
Another thing that concerns me about this situation is his age. Guys between the ages of 21-24 tend to go with the flow when it comes to relationships. Spending a few years in a relationship with no long term potential is no big deal at that age – he knows he still has lots of time to find someone to have kids with.
Honestly, I think you’re setting yourself up for a situation where you’ll let him string you along for a few more years, after which he’ll go find someone who believes in God to raise kids with and you’ll be left feeling bitter about having wasted so many years with someone who had no intention of marrying you. I hope you’ll have a serious talk with him about your future, and break up now if it turns out you guys don’t have one together.
Why not? I do it all the time. What do you tell them when they ask if there’s a Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, or Easter Bunny? It’s exactly the same thing. Exactly.
Look, people are giving you some good, smart advice. The thing that jumped out at me is that he’s not willing to see a pastor about this issue. He’s not interested in compromise nor is he interested in marrying you. I’m sorry, but I doubt he ever will be.
Well, no, because those are all eventually revealed as phonies. It’s a game you play with kids. Belief in god doesn’t equate to any one of those, because it’s not like you reach some stage of development where you realize it’s a game. At least, that’s not what MOST people are going for when they try to instill a belief in god (although perhaps what Zsofia would be going for).
IMHO, you’re young, and he’s young, too. There’s A) plenty of time for him to change his mind, but B) plenty more fish in the sea. Three years together isn’t a very long amount of time, although 21-24 is, for him, a big developmental phase. It would hurt to break up, but it always hurts to break up. I would urge finding someone whose goals are more closely attuned with your own instead of spending another three years beating your head against the wall, by which time you’re in your thirties and feel a little more desperate to settle down.
He should get over the “I don’t want to have my kids confused” part. The answer to that question is “Some people think so, some people don’t.” The kids, especially nowadays, will be exposed to all sorts of religion and non-religion. He won’t be able to protect them from alternate views for long, and kids who grow up without training in logic and skepticism might fall prey to cults or other scams. If he believes his religion is justifiable, he shouldn’t be scared of other views.
We raised our kids without god but mostly to think logically. They both went to various religious groups their friends went to, and managed to resist (quite easily.) Lots of people I know who were raised religiously started experimenting with all sorts of weird creeds.
So he should give his hypothetical kids more credit.
Oh? I did. I was quite the believer when I was young, but when I started actually reading about the Bible I found it was basically a game. Though it is easier when you’re Jewish and grow up regarding the majority religion as just being wrong. Not that everyone does this, but my oldest figuring out for herself that there was no Santa was very similar to my figuring out that there was no god.
I feel like people are going to jump on me for saying this, but get out now.
Because you’re 28, and he’s 24. And he’ll basically string you along till he’s in his late 20s/early 30s and ready to settle down and make babies. With a believer. At which point the chances are high he’ll just leave. And by that time you’ll be in your mid-30s with a reduced dating pool.
It’s tough to cut off someone you’ve been with for a while and share a history with but if your long-term goals are marriage and children, the chances you’ll have it with this guy are lower. Not impossible, but lower.
Also, when men tell you something like “I never want to get married” or “I want to be with someone Christian” take them at face value. I haven’t seen a single woman win by waiting for the other person to “come around”. That strikes me as being dangerously close to thinking you can change someone. People will change small things for one another, not major philosophies/life patters. Just MO.
Not to be sexist but these scenarios are typically a lot more problematic in real world terms when the woman is religious and the man is not. A household with kids generally arranges itself around raising those kids and previously “flexible” ideas about religion tend to become a LOT more concrete and less flexible once kids enter the picture.
A kinda sorta theist man with an explicitly non-theist girlfriend will still tend to let mommy take the lead in raising the kids. A strongly theist man will not usually be marrying an atheist woman all that often.
A kinda sorta theist women will tend (generally) to become more theist after kids enter the picture, and most will tend to assume that hubby will come along for the ride and go through the motions unless he is militantly anti-theist. And regardless of whether it sounds arrogant or presumptive to assume this, for the most part *they’re right * and a kinda-sorta non-theist man will often come along to church and behave themselves if asked nicely, and made to understand how important it is to the woman.
On the flip side with a non-theist mom she will tend to be considerably more presumptive than a non-theist man about her central role as the arbiter of her kids moral and ethical education, and the chances of her “going along” the way a non-theist man would are relatively slim.
People understand this aspect of human nature somewhat intuitively and you will see a lot more strongly theist women willing to take a chance with non-theist man they like re kids and marriage, vs a strongly theist man being willing to take a chance re marriage and kids with a non-theist women.
If you’re going to roll the dice on this you need to gauge fairly precisely not only how strongly theist he is, but how strongly theist his close relatives are. If they are strongly theist even if your SO is not going to push the issue I guarantee your kids eternal souls will become a “project” for strongly theist relatives.
And it also sounds like wishing thinking. The OP wants to gamble, which is cool and all, but it’s a gamble with terrible odds. When the most likely outcome arrives, not only will she have to deal with that disappointment, but she will also have to live knowing that she has only herself to blame. Surely that will suck.
I mean, it’s not like he’s leading on her on and giving her false rays of hope. His position seems really clear and unmovable.
That’s something I’ve known all my life - not just his parents, my parents are also strongly religious. I’ve always wondered what the hell is going to happen when Grandma and Grandpa want to take the kids to church. In fact, I’ve always thought my parents have been just assuming I’ll get the Jesus back in me when I have kids. (Which is, I know, not at all unusual. People do come back to the church when they have families.)
I’m not an atheist, though, I’m agnostic. A secular humanist if we’re splitting hairs. I really do think “What do you think?” is the strongest weapon in a parent’s ignorance fighting arsenal.
And I guess it probably is dumb for me to stay with him, but I just don’t think I could imagine leaving. I don’t even know if I want kids, although I do think I have to kind of make my mind up in the next five years.
You say “What do you think, moppet?” and engage in an age-appropriate discussion with your youngin’ (which means you don’t laugh when she mentions clouds and unicorns and angels in her idea of Heaven). And when she presses you on what you think you say “I think you’re a very smart little kid and your ideas about God sound wonderful” and give them a hug.
You don’t need to have all the answers to your kids’ questions. They can think for themselves. There will be a lot of instances as they grow up where what you believe does not match what they believe and unless what they believe is going to cause someone some harm you should just revel in the idea that you raised some free thinkers.
Zsofia, the way your OP reads, you’re basically in the box aptly described by YWTF above. I fully agree with what other people (like Leaffan) have said, which is that in real life, sticky religious questions can be endlessly sidestepped, with only small amounts of lying. But if you can’t get the fellow to commit to marriage, you haven’t even gotten to first base.
Seems to me he’s basically refused to marry you unless you recant.
And when she says “But what do YOU think, Mommy?” Because “I don’t know, honey.” is not what he wants to tell the kids. Personally, I think it’s good for kids to see that grownups can disagree, even about big stuff, and it’s okay. He thinks so too, except for this one issue.
ETA - I think to him my nonbelief is sort of like my money skillz - he knows intellectually that it’s quite possible to spend money you don’t have, but he doesn’t get how a normal person ever would. To him, theism is so evident that he really doesn’t get how anybody could think otherwise. What really irritates me is that he calls me an atheist all the time, which I used to think meant he didn’t care about what I really thought, but now I realize that he honestly doesn’t see how you could doubt an obvious truth and not be an out-and-out denier. He says stuff like “How can you stand an absence of afterlife?” and I have to tell him that just because something’s nice to think doesn’t mean you get to give up intellectual rigor to believe it.
Don’t fool yourself into this thinking that “when you have kids, you work things out”. It doesn’t work that way.
My husband and I are very different, including religious beliefs, but we were always able to work around our differences. Until the kids came along. At that point, the upbringing of those two kids became the most important thing to the two of us, and our differences of opinion on how to do it created incredible obstacles in our relationship. For us, religion was the easy part of it, but other differences made the last 18 or so years of our marriage extremely rocky. We are still together and things are a little better now that the kids are more or less grown, but our battles created rifts between us that will probably never heal.
Kids are not the answer to “working things out”. You have to have a solid relationship before the children come along.
This sounds very likely to me. I’m not going to tell you to get out now because I don’t do that over the Internet with near-strangers…but looking at it with cold hard reality, this is probably what will happen IMO.
He doesn’t actually go to church? That surprises me, most people I know who would make an issue of this do, in fact, go to church at least occasionally. And sure, there are believers who don’t think you need a church to commune with God, etc, but such people generally take the outlook that you don’t need a church to tell you what to believe, and along the same lines the child does not need the parent to tell them what to believe. So I think the ‘excuse’ explanation has merit.
My BIL just broke up with his girlfriend. There were issues, but here was mine (not theirs, mine).
He is 40 and has been married twice before. He does not wish to get remarried. Or at least, she isn’t the girl who has changed his mind about that.
She is under 30 and has never been married. And wants to get married and have kids.
As long as they are together, one of these people was going to get screwed in the end. No one should stay in a relationship where the only possible outcome is someone gets screwed later. (Well, not that kind of screwed).
You are 28. Your fertility is peaking, your adoption doors will start closing as your fertility declines (the cruel truth about adoption is that by the time you figure out you are infertile, there are often not many adoption avenues left open). Every year you waste hoping he’ll change his mind makes it less likely you will get married and have kids if he doesn’t.
The Unitarian thing can teach you respectful ways to say “Mom believes this, and Dad believes this - and both those are OK” - but your problem is that he doesn’t believe both those are OK and its a dealbreaker for him.
Or, perhaps, you aren’t the girl to make him change his mind about it.
I think I agree with anu-la1979 but it may just be the bitter old lady in me talking (ok, I’m only 28 myself).
I also see the potential for you being there for him at the start of his business and giving him a great business deal on the office with the hopes that it will have many happy returns for the both of you when he finally “makes it” and as soon as that happens he takes off, citing the religious stuff and you being left with a really bad investment and a feeling that you were duped.
Now, I don’t wish for this to happen and I am absolutely not saying that it will, but it’s stuff like this that I personally think of when it comes to relationships these days. I tend to shy away from guys who aren’t financially stable at the time we meet because I am not ready to deal with the potential feeling of being duped.
To be fair to him I really think you need to put your cards on the table re your expectations. I don’t want to sound harsh, but in today’s world at 24 a man is not likely to be thinking marriage as the next necessary step, and your decision making time-line re kids etc is significantly more compressed than his. If at some point he feels it’s necessary to move to the next level in his life, and he starts evaluating your “mommy” potential he may decide he loves you, but it’s just not going to work. It’s far better if you understand his attitudes on this NOW than when you are 33 at which point both your fertility and your marketability may not be as optimal as they are now.