what are the odds?

[metaphortunate]

I know seven het couples, including the one I form a part of, that got together and got serious despite both of them knowing at the time that one half of the couple wanted to have children, or at least a child, and one half strongly did not.

All seven of those het couples currently have one child, and I happen to know that at least one of the others is currently working on a second.

Possibly there are tons and tons of couples who get together despite this discrepancy and many of them end up with no kids but it just happens that the seven that I know all went the other way.

In four of them the guy was the one who wanted a child, in three it was the girl.

I don't know any of the people in the other couples well enough to ask them if they got pressured. (I feel like you would have to know someone really fucking well to ask that question. Or, not at all. I've had some hella deep conversations with people I knew I would never meet again.) I know that I was never pressured, that I changed my mind, and didn't tell Mr. E until it was almost too late, because it's such a difficult thing to change your mind about. I wonder how it went for other people.

I'm sure a lot of people get together but don't get serious because they don't agree on this issue. I wonder whether there is any correlation between getting serious and secret doubts about one's position. At the time we started getting serious, I didn't have conscious doubts. Still, I'd never seriously considered getting my tubes tied. In retrospect, I wonder about that. My brain does a lot of shit it doesn't feel the need to let me in on.

I don't have any conclusions, but I think about it a lot.

Have a couple of links:

"No Children", by the Mountain Goats.

"The Ghost Ship that Didn't Carry Us", by Cheryl Strayed.

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

That's interesting — my boyfriend apparently recently realized that he's not actually at all attached to the idea of having children, he just sort of osmosed it from me, because I had all these big, concrete life goals, and he didn't really have them. We'd just been going along as if my goals were The Goals, because I'd somehow won him over to my side. I know initially he was opposed to the idea of children, and then to the idea of more than one child, but that was a long time ago (college), and I'm not going to bring it up if he's not.