I’ve known for a while that I didn’t want to have kids, but it never really came up in “potential relationship polling” before. Usually it was something mentioned a few months into a solid relationship, and even then it was not a huge deal.
I do, however, check out a guy’s reply to the “Have/want kids?” question on personals ads. I don’t bother to message them.
Recently I started talking to a dude I met via Craigslist. In our second chat we brought up the kids issue and he wants to eventually have kids. Basically that knocked the potential relationship excitement down a few pegs. Since we’re both the nerdy, logical type we’ve already decided after a week that “no kids” means “no future” and thus “no relationship.” We still chat and hopefully will be friends but that’s about it. I don’t feel too bad about it and neither does he, I don’t think.
Anyway, I feel really old now (I’m 29). I’m at the age where I’m not a viable partner for someone who wants kids and guys are starting to make that concrete decision. I feel really weird about it but…it does make sense.
So does/did anyone else do this? I’ve always approached relationships as a possibility to marriage but now it’s like … more real? Marriage AND family. That’s a whole future package right there that you can’t walk away from.
In my experience, men who want kids are far fewer than men who don’t want them or are OK with it either way. So I wouldn’t worry too much about it if I were you.
Plus, I envy you your strong decision. I never really could make up my mind about wanting 'em or not, so I just let it go until it was no longer a viable option due to age. And I’m OK with it. Just wish I’d figured it all out sooner.
I started paying attention to that sort of thing at 21 (24 now), when I dated someone that decidedly didn’t want children. I decidedly do, though not soon. We were very wrong for each other in a lot of ways, but one of the deciding factors in ending it was that he didn’t seem like he had any interest in changing his mind and neither did I. It’s a pretty fundamental conflict.
I also have a low tolerance for relationships that I don’t expect to work. Or maybe I’m just that family minded?
I wouldn’t ask about children right off the bat for fear of scaring the guy off, but I suspect that by now, most people I’d date have some idea whether they are at least open to the possibility of having children.
I wouldn’t feel weird. I think it’s great that you realize not only that you don’t want to have kids, but that it’s an important thing to share with someone before things get too serious.
I have always known that I don’t want them. As much as I don’t want them, I know there are many men who want them as badly as I do not. It isn’t fair to them to think that things might work out between us when clearly it would not. I feel like it’s something I want to share pretty quickly in a dating relationship as not to waste anyone’s time.
I have always hoped to have a kid by the time I’m 30. For me, the guy’s view on kids became a real concern by the age of about 23 (partially due to having tried to a date a guy who didnt want kids right before that and then later realizing what a mess that could have become if things had worked out with him).
My current boyfriend and I were friends for a long time before we began to date, so he already knew before we got together that I want kids sooner rather than later. Luckily for me, he feels the same way. One of the things I find attractive about him (though by far not the only thing) is that I can picture him being a kind and good dad to our eventual kids.
Even with that being said, there is a part of me that finds the concept of actually getting married and having kids soon-ish to be very strange. There is a part of me that still feels the same as I did when I was 16 and it somehow is hard to believe that I really am a true grown up now.
I don’t want kids and was clear about it with my previous girlfriend, who agreed that she did not want any either. She lied. It’s now sixteen months later and she has an almost six month old boy who I spent most of a year thinking was mine. I did what I could to be a father but somewhat bitter about both the idea of being one and the circumstances surrounding my becoming one, but here was a paternity test in June and it was found he wasn’t mine.
I got the results at 2:00 AM on a Saturday and woke up my entire family to tell them, as well as a couple friends, and couldn’t stop shaking for a good half-hour after. I thought I had accepted my fate and my viewpoint on children has changed somewhat (I used to be almost completely opposed but I did grow attached to him and can see myself agreeing to having a child if I wind up with a woman I truly love) but this definitely reinforced my No Kids rule and I will be a lot more emphatic and discriminating in future relationships.
Just a quick question, hopefully without hijacking the thread - to those who are absolutely certain they do not want kids: why not get fixed? That’s what we did.
It was not hugely important either way to me, although I had a no-kids preference when I married at 29. My hisbands was a bit stronger on no-kids, although either one of us would have gone with it if the other had been strongly for it. Once we both determined that we’d rather be childless, getting snipped was an easy decision with no regrets after 15 years. We only opted for him rather than me because it was cheaper and far less intrusive.
Aesiron that’s a horrible story!! I am trying to avoid just that by at least being honest about it.
Mrs. Cake as far as I know, doctors won’t “tie the tubes” of women under a certain age who have no children. I know I don’t want kids but I think I’d rather be with a partner that is on board with that first before I go doing something so drastic.
Yep, that’s been my experience. They want you to either already have kids or be “of a certain age” which keeps getting moved up higher and higher since women are having children later and later.
I’ve known for years that i didn’t want kids, although for quite a while it wasn’t a particularly strong objection, because i was young and the issue didn’t really come up.
I only found out how strongly i felt about it when i was about 28 and had been going out with a woman for a couple of years, and we started talking about long-term plans for marriage, etc. I knew she wanted kids, but initially i thought that i could have kids if it meant being with her, and i told her that.
Then, after thinking about it for a few months (we still weren’t living together or anything), i decided that, in fact, not having kids was a deal-breaker for me, and i really didn’t want them with her or with anyone else. I told her this, and we broke up.
I was pretty conflicted about the whole thing for a while, because i really thought we were going to be together permanently, but in the long run we both made the right decision. She’s now happily married with two kids, and i’m married to someone who, like me, is happy without kids. I’m still friends with the original woman, although we live in different countries and see each other very rarely.
It’s probably one of those cultural things, but I knew I didn’t want to have kids (1) since before I started having periods; since I grew up in a place and time when there was a clear divide between the college-oriented (marriage after college if ever) half of town and the never-leave-town-except-for-the-nearest-beach half (marriage at 19-22), it was inevitable that I’d realize quite early how much this influenced my dateability. Not only did I have no interest in being married at 20 and done with childbearing at 25, I had no interest in childbearing, ever, period, so any guy who spoke fondly of the things he wanted to teach his kids went off my list.
(1) to be completely exact, I was terrified of screwing up some innocent’s life as much as Mom screwed up mine and the Grandma from Hell screwed up Mom’s and Aunt’s. The ability to screw up one’s daughters’ life seemed genetic to me. I have now realized that I might not necessarily have done things as bad as they did, but I’m also perfectly fine with not having “a family of my own.”
I think I always assumed I’d have kids but never gave it much thought. Then I got serious with someone who cannot have biological children. It forced me to think about whether having biological kids was really important to me. Ultimately it wasn’t. We might adopt one day if the circumstances are right, but to tell you the truth, the older I get the more ambivalent about kids I become. And adoption is not something you can do half-heartedly.
I feel sorry for my poor middle brother (call him “R”). He had a long-time gf/partner - over a decade; when they started, the issue of kids was a non-issue for both of them, as they were both very career-oriented in careers that required a lot of moving about and dedication.
Then my other brother and I both had children.
R lives out of the country, but he sometimes came back, with his gf, to visit. Their reaction to my child was very instructive. He couldn’t get enough -you could see him taking the baby on his lap, cuddling him, talking to him - just the joy on his face was wonderful to see.
His gf on the other hand - you could tell she wanted nothing to do with a baby. Her body language alone told the story. She was stiff and uncomfortable around the baby. She did not appear to want to hold him or play with him. When invited to hold him, she was uncomfortable.
I thought this would lead to trouble and I was right. R decided that he wanted a kid after all. His gf did not. Sadly, they had to break up, and it did not go well. Her partiing shot at him was something like ‘maybe one day I’ll want kids but not with you’ which I think was just anger talking - up 'till then their relationship had gone well as far as I know (but that last shot wounded him deeply).
He’s around 44 now, his then-gf almost a decade younger. He now has a new gf I haven’t met (nor do I know her attitude towards kids).
Except for the plumbing issue, I could have written the OP - right down to the city. I’m 30 now, and I’ve never wanted kids. When I was younger, I was open to changing my mind - knowing that a lot of people don’t want kids when they’re young and wind up having them anyways. But now I’ve got cats, and my friends are starting to have kids, and I prefer my responsibilities to theirs.
It is an issue for me when I’m dating, but coming from the other side of the gender gap it’s a bigger issue for me than it is for ZipperJJ. A lot of single women my age either have kids from a previous relationship, or hear their clocks ticking and want to have kids in the very near future.
Been there, done that. Only in my case, it was want-marriage vs. no-marriage that tripped me up, long before want-kids vs. no-kids ever was a consideration.
The only thing worse that nipping a new relationship in the bud because of different long-term goals is going ahead with it anyways, only to find out a year into the relationship because the fact is, you just can’t compromise on certain things like kids or marriage. Either you do, or you don’t. Period.
There’s actually a certain comfort that comes from knowing that my SO feels exactly the way I do about the fundamentals. To be honest, one of the things that attracted me most to him from the get-go was discovering that we were so incredibly in-tune when it came to all the big issues - money, religion, kids, marriage, career, politics, bagels… the works.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that as freaky as it is to realise that despite the fun exterior, dating is really a serious audition process for your future life-mate, the end result is totally worth it.
I’ve always known I didn’t want to be a mother. I didn’t want to saddle a child with all of the shit I had to deal with growing up [being heavy, mentally ill and very, very shy] and the older I got, the more cemented in my position I became. When I met daHubby, the first thing he said when we got to talking about important stuff in a relationship, the first thing he said was “This might be a deal-breaker for you, but I wouldn’t be a very good father. I wouldn’t want to have kids if we got that far.”
So he got fixed about 4 years ago and that’s that. Anyone who decides to have kids is a brave individual indeed!
Don’t feel weird. It’s a personal decision which you have every right to make for yourself. Attitudes towards childless couples are becoming more relaxed, but there is still a huge societal push for women to marry and procreate.
I’m 33, female and made the decision not to have children of my own very early in life. I’ve been told by many that I’ll - grow out of it, change my mind, etc… These comments always came with a silent, “she just doesn’t know what she wants” vibe. I’ve grown, I’ve thought about it here and there and I still feel that I don’t want children of my own. I have a partner that feels the same way, yet we both haven’t ruled out adopting a child in the years to come.
Again, don’t feel weird, believe in what you feel and go from there. There are plenty of men out there who feel the same way.
I don’t particularly want to have children. I think my issue with it is mostly that I NEVER want to give birth, though, and not so much a dislike of children. I’ve often thought it would be nice to find a man who already had kids so he wouldn’t be determined to fill my uterus with babies. I keep being told that I’ll change my mind and want to have kids of my own but I really don’t see that happening at any point, though stranger things have happened I’m sure. My current boyfriend is diabetic and doesn’t want to pass that down to any kids he may have so he would want to adopt if he ever decided he wanted kids, which works out perfectly for me!
To make myself clear…I don’t feel weird about my decision not to have kids. That’s a topic we roll out every so often on the Dope and plenty of folks feel the same way.
I feel weird because it just dawned on me that I am in a new part of my life where “I do not want to have kids” is so much more than just a thing to say to nosy neighbors and doting aunts. I’m at the age where I have to totally and completely back that statement up with actions and work it in to my future plan.
I feel weird because it is an honest-to-god dealbreaker when it comes to potential mates. The same as it would be if I said “I definitely want kids.” More than just “I am looking for someone who lives in or wants to live in Ohio” or “I am a white person” when it comes to describing yourself and your wants. The kids thing seems to be in its own league.
I’m just feeling strangely grown up now, that’s all.