How to (Not) Have Children - Part 4

Finding a mate who also doesn't want kids

[cont'd from "Dealing with the opposition," here]

You would think the absence of children in a relationship would mean the absence of children in a relationship, but apparently, they’re part of it one way or another.

When you don’t want kids, finding someone to be with long-term might not be as easy as it sounds.

First, I should say Ian isn’t someone I ended up with after launching an all-out quest for a husband who wouldn’t try to get me to have babies. I’ve known him since we were 17. I saw him at school in the hallway, wooed him with secret admirer notes slipped through the vents of his locker, became the best of friends with him, and loved him evermore. It took eleven years to get together, and I consider myself extraordinarily lucky that the one person I most want to be with happens, by fortuitous coincidence, to not have that undeniable longing to be a parent.

I hate to think what it could mean for us if he did.

That said, I should also mention he’s not the only person I’ve been married to, and that my feelings about parenthood contributed (in their own way) to the demise of prior relationships.

Popular culture would have us believe women are the baby-crazy sex, but a surprising number of men – as vehemently as they might deny it – want families. It seemed like it should be an easy thing to find, a man who didn’t want kids, but it wasn’t. The more I got to know my male friends, the more they would reveal small traces of daddy-in-the-making, even with such off-hand remarks as, “When I have kids…,” which takes for granted they’ll have them. Someday.

A woman who doesn’t want children has surprisingly limited life-mate options.

Which isn’t all bad, really. Break-ups can be messy when they’re cluttered with differences in moral beliefs and/or hobby preferences. The child argument is, if nothing else, almost indisputable, the break-up faultless. No one is really being rejected, so it’s hard to be justifiably angry.

But, oh, is it easy to be unjustifiably angry.

I married for the first time at nineteen. Bill (whose real name is not Bill) and I were too young to get married, and we were also too young to know that before we married we were supposed to talk about things like religion, kids, finances, and anything else people planning to spend their lives together should know about one another.

The reason we didn’t work out is simple: we weren’t right for one another in a number of ways, only one of which was how we saw our future. He saw me having babies in it; I didn’t. And the more we argued about things that meant little more than that we weren’t happy, the more I – young and non-confrontational as I was – thought about children, the fact that he wanted them, and the fact that my not wanting them was a clean way out.

“I don’t want kids” is, as a popular TV show host might call it, a deal-breaker.

[to be continued...]