This question has plagued me since I can remember- do these people think that having more kids will somehow save their already floundering unions? (I’d like to hear from people in this situation currently.)
Moved from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
Gfactor
General Questions Moderator
Maybe their problems started after the kids?
I never understood it myself. One friend of mine, married with two kids, and at the edge of divorce, both partners cheating on one another, recently revealed to me that his wife had aborted what would have been their third child just a few months beforehand. He was very upset and emotional about it. This is the same one who told me that getting married was the biggest mistake of his life. I thought, “huh??? then why would you WANT to have another kid with this woman??” I didn’t ask him about this b/c it would have been insensitive. But seriously.
I know a few people (mostly young women, 20ish) who still hold a fantasy idea of what marriage is. For them, they want to be married, and they convince themselves they are in love with the first guy that shows any interest.
So they marry young, and things go to hell once they realise that they actually have to spend time with this person, and it isn’t about the dream dress and reception anymore. For some of these, the “I want to be married” craziness is strongly accompanied by “and have kids!”, so having kids seems like it’s part of the fantasy as well, and if they don’t have kids, then that’s why everything is going wrong. So they pop out a child or two, always blaming their relationship problems on things like “well the kids are still young, and we are always tired, so that’s why we yell at each other”.
Sooner or later many of them get a clue and get divorced. Either that or they graduate from school, get a job, get a sense of the “real world” and their desperate “need” to get married seems to fade as new ideas and experiences get introduced into their lives.
Ok, so that’s a generalization, but it does describe fairly well the lives of at least 2 people I know, and I’ve heard my sister say stupid stuff like “I want to get married!” a month into a relationship with a lying drunk.
For the same reason they buy a house, go on vacation and do anything else toghether. Presumably they didn’t alway shave issues. They’re hoping that this is a bad patch and things will get better. And believe it or not, some people actually like kids, and want to have them.
My brother and his wife are going through a pretty bad time right now. they have three sons. My brother loves his kids, his wife loves the kids. Whether or not they love each other right at the moment doesn’t mean they won’t again. In my S-I-L’s case, according to her doctor she’s going through menopause early and extremely hard. She’s started on HRT and seems to be slowly improving, but for a while there she was neglectful and mean to the kids and hateful to my brother. But you just don’t bail on a commitment because it’s not rosy right now.
StG
Well, it’s one thing to stick it out and work through problems with the kids you already have, but I think the OP is referring to couples who believe that having another baby is the magical solution to their problems. Many people seem to think having a baby will bring them closer together, when a lot of times it has the opposite effect.
Perhaps also they associate having their first child with a time of happiness in their relationship so they subconsciously think that having another may fix their problems.
I have a friend who’s second child was born shortly before him and his wife separated. His reason? They liked sex and were dumb. I can’t fault him for honesty.
Even though I think it’s ultimately a bad idea, I can see the logic behind people hoping that having a kid will bring a trouble marriage closer together. Having a kid together gives you something in common to talk about/bond together, and a goal to work together on. Maybe some of them hope some of the love theirr partner feels for the kid will also extend to feeling more loving towards them for being the one who helped bring that loved child into the world. Who knows, maybe it did work to some degree with the first kid. Or maybe they just aren’t fast learners. 
Another factor might be that even if they don’t like their spouse, having (more) kids is important enough to teh person that they will settle for having a kid with someone less than ideal than risk not getting a chance to have kids at all ( I’m reminded of an article that recently was in the news - “settling for Mr. Good Enough” ). Even if things aren’t perfect, this might just be the best they (think) they can do.
Oh, and that article essentially argued that once you’re busy raising kids it doesn’t matter who you’re married to as long as they pitch in with the basic childrearing chores. Maybe some of these problem couples are just hoping more kids will mean a better distraction from their problems?
Informal surveys among my mama friends have revealed a shockingly high rate of birth control failures.
Because they are fecking morons, who declined to seriously examine their relationship before deciding to have A BAYBEEEEEEEEEE!!!. Now, stuck with the kid, they try to make a bad situation work by accumulating stuff to band-aid the wound. “oh if we only had that new car then we’d stop fighting all the time. It’s just because of the car trouble”-etc ad nauseum. Another kid is just another possession or status symbol to them.
If I could stand to be in the room with them, I’d ask my parents. They got married in the fifties when my mom got knocked up with my sister (ok, that was what you did back then), they were miserable, a year later they had my brother. They were still miserable, then a few years later they have my sister and now everyone is miserable and then, 12 years after they started this train wreck, they had me. 12 years and they can’t figure out birth control.
That is a pretty damn good generalization.
This pretty much described my life only I was 19 and knocked up already. I had no dream dress or princess wedding though. Hell he did not even buy me a ring.
I got married in January of 1988 and had my son in September of 1988. I was a stay at home mom as I lost my job because I wanted three days off to get married. After that I could not find another job as they would not hire a pregnant lady. My son got to the age that he was no longer a baby and I wanted another. At that time I did not see that it was not a baby I needed but she was born in October 1990.
Having another baby did not fix anything it just kept me with him for another year an a half.
What I really needed was to grow up, for him to grow up and for the both of us to get our shit together. My dream of being a wife, a mother and the whole “house with the white picket fence” crap was not reality.
I left him in September of 1991.
Reality came fast being a divorced woman with two young children at the age of 22.
Twenty years later it all seems like a dream. I look back on my wedding pictures of me getting married in my high school graduation dress and wonder if that was really me.
I never regret having children. I love both my children with all my heart but the only love I have for my ex-husband is that he is the father of our children.
Let me add to this one “Why do people who live like trash and fight and have too many kids and can’t afford to make ends meet…get a puppy or a cat?”
A woman I know is on the brink of divorce has the rest of us holding our breath waiting for the end and she’s constantly crying about how its not going to work and how she’s trapped…
then she shows up with the "We’re trying to have another baby " crap.
My opinion? Because they’re selfish.
The other day I read a crappy book on mothering. It started out with a story of how the author felt pregnant, but it couldn’t be because she had been on the pill for six years, but she took a pregnancy test anyway, and voila, two blue lines, and the book starts raving about how instantly, deliriously happy that made her, etcetera.
Which makes me wonder why this woman was on the pill for six years.
I think there’s another possibility: you’re deciding what “don’t get along” means. My husband and I quite often don’t get along. We communicate very differently, he’s short tempered, I’m long suffering, he’s an anal-retentive bitch and I’m a slob. We bicker a lot and rarely have sex. And yet it’s the best relationship I’ve ever had. Despite our surface “don’t get along”, inside this relationship, where you don’t get to see, we get along great. We’re aware of our foibles and our incompatibilities and we’re working on them together. We love each other and support each other and we’re growing as people together.
Having a daughter (intentionally) was another step on that path growing together. We didn’t have her to “save our marriage”. We had her to add to our family - this group of imperfect people growing together. We needed another catalyst in this great enzymatic reaction known as Life, and she was it.
I think another reason why people have kids in a relationship which perhaps even they themselves consider rocky is that it’s something to do. It’s a distraction, and it’s a joy, in a life that might not be so joyful. Even when we’re going through a rough spot, she makes us laugh together. Even if we got stuck in that rough spot forever, she would bring joy into our lives - and given a joyless marriage, who wouldn’t want to bring joy into the house?
Many years ago, a co-worker of mine was in a troubled marriage. “Troubled”=he was jealous, paranoid, and she was starting to get afraid. He’d always had a temper but he seemed to get that under control…for awhile.
One day, co-worker comes to me and says if I see her husband DO NOT assume this is a friendly visit: stay away from him and notify the office IMMEDIATELY. I can connect the dots.
Luckily he didn’t materialize (whew!) and a couple days later, everything is on the mend between them. Big misunderstanding etc. she says and all is well—I’m thinking, ‘Yeah, right.’ Fast forward a few months and she announces she’s pregnant. About nine months after the holy fuck incident, she has a child. Things are ok for awhile, and then they start going badly again. He accuses her, says maybe the kid isn’t his, etc.
Somehow I just knew she was going to get pregnant. It seems to be a pattern among people, as the OP implies. In this case, one person is insecure so the other tries to reassure, stating confidence in the relationship, which is often done with sex. Maybe that day they didn’t bother with the condom, or maybe it was their statement that they would continue in the future.
A “winning” mentality—we can fix this, everybody has problems, I still believe in the marriage, someday we’ll look back on this and laugh—is part of the scenario. Flat-out denial, inexperience, immaturity, etc. are part of it, too.
They’re divorced now. Big surprise.
Question: What happens when the kids are grown and out of the house? Seems to me that it’s (at best) a temporary fix…
I think her point was that marriages aren’t always as they appear to outsiders. Some couples that don’t appear from the outside to get along well actually do, and some that appear to get along really well don’t.
I could actually see this happening (well, sort of) to me if I got pregnant. I’d be happy, though I’ve been on the pill for the past nine years. A few seconds or minutes later, the “oh shit, what have I done, and what the hell am I going to do now?” would kick in, because I don’t think I’m ready to have a kid right now (in a contracting job, so no steady job and probably no maternity leave. And I’ve tried living on just Mr. Neville’s salary- it’s doable, but it sucks, and I’d much rather not. I suck at “living cheap”, and I suck even worse at housekeeping and other stay-at-home-mom duties. I’m good at talking and playing with kids, at least once they’re past the toddler stage, but I suck like a galactic black hole at the other stuff.).
Well, except for the “feeling pregnant” bit. I really doubt I’d notice anything up until I missed my period, since I am not particularly in touch with my body (we’re barely on speaking terms). (Do pregnancy tests even work before a missed period, though?)