I basically stole the advice from an episode of How I Met Your Mother. Pop culture teaches you everything you need to know.
If this is all that’s keeping you from enthusiastically saying “yes,” tell him so. It’s completely reasonable for you to be unable/unwilling to enter into a marriage until you both know whether he wants kids.
You are unsure.
Do not marry, until you are sure.
You may never be sure, and you do not need to marry to have the life you want, from the sound of it.
(Full disclosure, 27+ yrs together, resisted all attempts to push us into marrying. Somewhere inside I knew walking down that aisle would change everything. It would turn me into a ‘wife’. That was not a positive for me, for the same reason it’s not for you. Even if it wasn’t I would feel imprisoned. (More than willing to own this as my issue, self awareness is sometimes everything.) No slam on marriage for people who feel it. I didn’t, and am glad I resisted.)
Agreed. If you’re sure enough that you don’t care what we think, then you will. But if you’re asking other people…
Oh, hell, I don’t know anything. Please don’t hold me responsible for whatever decision you make.
Good luck, and peace. I acknowledge it’s a hard decision.
“Generally” a good guy, “Essentiall” a good catch. It sounds like he really loves you. The questions is…do you really love him in return?
If you are unsure…listen and trust to your intuition.
I agree. And you should definitely find out if his “I don’t know” is if he truly doesn’t know if he wants kids, or if he’s just saying that. Some people get into marriages saying what their partner wants to hear and think they’ll be able to change their partner’s mind later on. You want to be sure that if y’all get married that he won’t later try to convince you or guilt you into having a kid. Or that he won’t quietly resent you for it.
As others have said, make sure you’re on the same page for the important stuff (money, kids, careers, etc).
But another question - are you already living together? Are your lives already intertwined financially?
Because getting married won’t change a damn thing. At that point, it really is just a piece of paper - a nice one to have - I’m happy that I’m married for lots of reasons - but it won’t make him less [insert annoying thing here] or more [insert things you like here] or make him do [chore he already isn’t doing]. If you are happy now, marriage won’t change that. If you are unhappy now, marriage won’t change that either!
Marriage has very little to do with your wedding day. It has to do with all the other aspects of your life, and if you aren’t on the same page there, then there’s really no point. If you are already sharing your everyday with him, and are happy, then go ahead. Otherwise, don’t expect anything to change once you’ve signed those papers!
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say, he knows that he wants kids. He is afraid of scaring you off, and he’s hoping that he can convince you to change your mind.
You’ve been together a fair length of time now - you shouldn’t have to talk yourself into marrying someone. It should be something that was basically decided by both of you before the asking officially happened, because you know that you want to spend your lives together.
I’d suggest that the answer you really want to give him is, “I love you, and I want to stay with you exactly the way things are now. Maybe we can re-visit marriage in a couple of years, but we’re not going to re-visit kids, because I’m not going to have them. I hope you can live with this, because I really do want to stay with you, but I’d understand if you didn’t.”
I suggest you make an appointment to get your tubes tied …
What she said. The kids issue is important - I don’t see a way you can compromise on this issue. There are no “test run kids,” so it’s not like moving somewhere short term to give a new city a try, etc.
I knew I didn’t want kids, and my husband thought maybe he wanted one, or at least it’d be nice to have a kid. When we got married at age 27, I told him I would keep an open mind about the possibility of my mind changing, and he thought being with me was worth that. Years pass - and he’s the one who changed, he no longer wanted kids at all. We’re 41 now so it’s not likely anyone is changing their mind again.
As for the actual act of marrying - it only has as much “power” invested in the act as you give it, if you already have finances intermingled. Issues like debts will factor in after marriage (but IIRC only for debts incurred during the marriage), etc., but the very act of getting a marriage license doesn’t wreck what you have.
If you don’t trust him to not be telling you the truth about his real feelings about kids, don’t marry him. If you don’t trust him to not go out and rack up shared marital debts or start doing drugs or whatever after you marry, then don’t marry him. If you think he expects you to turn into a stay-at-home wife with designs on Mommy-hood, enlighten him - then don’t marry him if he doesn’t get it.
It’s all very romantic to propose out of sorta-nowhere, but a more practical and useful thing would have been to discuss reality rather than play “let’s pretend.” Sounds like you need to have a discussion about where to live, kids, working/careers, etc.
don’t get married until the kid thing is worked out. either of you being unhappy about that issue can lead to trouble. his thinking it might be nice, might just be the presentation now and he really knows it has to happen for him to be happy.
I don’t often get to say this, but I agree with Shodan. I’m with everyone else who thinks that the OP’s boyfriend most certainly does want kids, but is being deceptive about it because he knows she does not, so he’s trying to sneakily change her mind about it.
I don’t think this is a good sign for a lasting relationship, personally. I’m not saying to dump the dude immediately, but you definitely need to work out the kid thing before agreeing to get married. You also need to feel sure. If you have any little doubts or second thoughts or feelings of terror or fear or worry, just don’t do it. It’s normal to feel a little nervous about getting married, but your biggest emotions should be positive, not negative.
Good luck, OP.
Mr. Tao proposed to me under similar circumstances. It really wasn’t unexpected, I guess; we’d known each other for years, lived together for 2 of them.
My response? I cried for 4 hours straight.
I told him I couldn’t say yes, but I didn’t want to say no.
Smart man that he is, he backed off, realizing that at 44, with several engagements behind me, and me breaking it off every time, that what we had was better than no ‘us’ at all.
Within a year I proposed back to him; couldn’t tell you what changed, I just needed time to get used to the idea, I guess.
Hopefully your guy is smart enough to recognize that you need time and space and you guys probably need to fully talk it out, before you can make an honest decision.
Can I pick out this?
Are you really against having children or are you against what you see as being a mother means?
You do realise that you don’t have to be a housewife when you’re a parent, don’t you? Have you considered the possibility of him being a house-husband? Daycare? Or hiring help? A good friend was slightly younger than you when she had her only child and went back to work very quickly. A decade later she was board-level, and her son has turned out very well.
Sounds to me more like a guy who used to not want kids, but has recently started to want them, and is trying to figure out how to handle that.
This is all very true, and I know several couples where it’s the mom with the demanding career and the dad who is the “go-to” parent, but it takes a LOT of negotiation between spouses, especially since it’s still not the cultural norm (and also especially if you breastfeed), and quite frankly if you’re still working out whether to have kids or not and whether one should propose out of the blue or not, I’m not sure that the communication skills are there yet (though of course I’m making assumptions here).
And even then, a kid basically disrupts your entire life. Although my husband dearly loves the Little One, and although our deal when we had her was that (since I was the one who desperately wanted a kid) I would do the bulk of the childcare (that is, the bulk that isn’t handled by the nanny/daycare), I think left to his own devices he’d still have chosen not to have a kid.
Without the ability to get inside the guy’s head, I guess there’s really no way for an observer to tell the difference.
Do you honestly, in your heart of hearts, believe your parents’ relationship would have been any happier or their break-up any less acrimonious if they hadn’t been married? Or would they have been just as young and ill-prepared for facing life together and had as little in common? It’s not being married that makes people unhappy, it’s being married to someone who isn’t suited to them. Marriage is neither a poison for a happy, well-suited relationship nor a panacea for an unhappy, ill-suited one–you’ll by and large be about as happy married as you were dating.
That said, you guys shouldn’t get married, at least not at this point. You need to iron out this kids thing, and your feelings about marriage in general, and a lot of other issues.
That’s always my motto in these things. You two did not mutually arrive at this decision. You are being pushed. If you can’t immediately say yes because you were in the same place as this man, you are not in the same place. You would be stretching. Trust your inclinations and go forward as is or not at all. Everybody does not need to be married. Some folks must be married at all costs. Anything with pants gets the nod. You got this far by being an independent thinker. continue the good work.
Lots of great advice here. I want to address the whole “marriage = unhappiness” concept.
My Mom has been married and divorced four times. I have seen a significant quantity of relationships fail spectacularly. I couldn’t have had a worse role model for how relationships work.
I am married. Going on six years now. And we are ridiculously happy, and healthy, and in love.
One thing I have learned by observation is that marriages don’t make people unhappy - bad relationships do. People don’t need a piece of paper to fuck up their partnerships or to create amazing things together. And whether you have a good relationship or a bad relationship is 100% under your control - by you I mean both of you. It’s not like you’re some helpless agent in all this, you flick the marriage switch and things start falling apart. Already you have a great idea of what potential conflicts could be coming down the road - kids, for instance. You can set the stage for the rest of your relationship by how you handle this situation.
So, go talk to him. Tell him how you feel. Share your fears and concerns. Let him do the same. Figure it out together. Because that’s what a good marriage is.