I've been in a relationship with my wife since middle school. I am 27 now, she's 25. For the most part we made it work because we were both extremely stubborn and we love eachother, and rely on eachother. She's vegan, I'm not. She's pretty liberal, I'm very conservative. She is almost always in a bad mood, or tired. I've told her that she's a hypochondriac and she takes great offense to that. She is a somewhat boring person but I still love her deeply. After all, I'm pretty boring myself.Kids have always been a sticking point between us. I come from a big family, I want lots of kids. She wants nothing to do with them. She has some health problems which makes this conversation more difficult, but still not impossible. Recently I've been feeling my age more, and I've been doing what I can to change her mind about kids, sharing videos with her, reassuring her that it wouldn't be that bad, trying to find other people who have more positive views of pregnancy for her to talk to. 2 days ago she sat me down and told me in no uncertain terms that she will not have children any time soon. she saw how I was trying and doesn't want to waste my time. Maybe things could change in the future, but that's years away in her estimation. Part of me believes the more masculine thing to do would have been to just try harder to change her mind, but I didn't do that. I took her at her word, and told her that if that's the case, there isn't really a path forward for our relationship. We are getting a divorce. I just can't imagine being happy with my life at 50 or 60 years old if I'm not a father. Adoption isn't a substitution for me either.
>>34492627We were in eachothers arms crying opn the couch tonight. She says that If I want kids, and she can't give them to me, then that must mean my plan is to have them with some other woman. It fucked me up. I don't want any other woman. I would give anything to just change her attitude, to make her feel like pregnancy isn't this scary thing, but just her body acting as it's supposed to. I still want to be with her. I'm relatively confident I'll be able to find any number of girls who would tolerate me, and if I look hard I might even find someone who I'm somewhat compatible with, but I don't that. I'm beginning to second guess my commitment to being a father, for the sake of preserving our relationship. Maybe if I show her that she, the person, matters more to me than her reproductive capability (whatever of it remains after a decade of hormonal birth control) she might change her mind on the whole thing. Maybe if I just made more money or could find the right combo of performance/date nights/acts of love like prince charming her feminine instincts would finally kick in and she would have to say yes. I am daydreaming. I just can't stay.
>>34492627>>34492633>Part of me believes the more masculine thing to do would have been to just try harder to change her mindYou can't change people's mind, they change their minds theirselves, there's nothing much you can do.But remember, the clock is ticking, don't live thinking you have all the time of the world, our time here is limited.
I'm sorry anon but it looks like a break up is the right thing to do here. You will end up resenting her if you stay. It's going to be really hard, but it will get better. You both deserve great happy lives, and will both find happiness
>>34492633Cute rightoid brain.Highly delusional in this case.
fwiw your wife sounds very similar to me and i was 100% certain i didn't want kids at 25 and i changed my mind at 28, so it's not impossible. of course it depends on her reasoning, my hangups were also related to my health and a fear of pregnancy but as i got older the grimness of imagining a life without children started to hit me and my instincts to be a mother started to override whatever selfishness i had that kept me from being willing to make the sacrifices requiredimo you should give her a few years to change her mind, if you really only want to be with her. your time isn't running out yet, you still have a good decade to find someone else to start a family with if it comes to that
>>34492633Pregnancy actually is dangerous. More than 1 in every 5000 births results in the mother actually dying; and the percentage that causes serious permanent damage to the mother's body is MUCH higher. You're not the one who is going to have his perineum ripped open and stitched back together. You're not the one who is going to piss himself everything time he laughs for the rest of his life - that's really common in women who have given birth. You're not the one who's going to be vomiting for months, then constipated with severe lower back pain, swollen ankles, and possibly short-term diabetes. It won't be you with cracked nipples. Pregnancy puts an enormous strain on the body, and if your wife is already in poor health, she is absolutely right not to want to through it. So, you need to accept the fact that you are not going to be able to change her mind on this, and that it's wrong of you to even try. Now, whether divorce is the right option for you now, I have no idea. Only you know whether you love your wife more or want kids more. That's your decision. But before you make your mind up, think seriously about adopting a child. Or if you're too selfish to consider saving a child from being brought up in care, then at least seriously consider surrogacy. Have a conversation with your wife about those options and see how she feels.
>>34492774>you should give her a few years to change her mind,(NTA) He's been wanting kids since they were in middle school and she has been not wanting them all that time. She's not going to suddenly change her mind now.
>>34492802Untrue, it often starts changing around late 20s for women.
>>34493063>Untrue, it often starts changing around late 20s for women.This is one of 4chan's weirder delusions. If you actually talk to women, you'll find this virtually never happens in the real world.
>>34492799Dubs of hard truth
>>34492774It's torture to hear this becaue it's exacty what I'v ebeen hoping to happen for the last few years. Was there anything, any experience in perticular that set your mind to really start thinking about it? When I ask her what she wants her life to look like in the next 5 or 10 years, the only things she can come up with is "I want to get my health in line"(her health has been a problem all her life and she's been in and out of the doctors for years), "I want to keep riding my horse"(she doesn;t ride often enough), and "I want to have a garden"(not a big ask, we could get that set up tomorrow). When I ask her about what she wants her life to look like past those easy things she just freezes up, like she's never considered the possibility of turning 40. I've expressed that she needs to tell me the moment her feelings start to change on the topic, because I would leave any woman in a heartbeat if it ment being with her agian. >>34492799I just kind of refuse to engage with this concept of pregnancy. It's reproduction. It's necisarry for humans to continue existing, it happens every day all across the world. It is the human body working in exactly the way it was designed to. I understand the difficulties and I understand that I'll never ever know what they're like, but I don;t want to even engage with the idea that it's a harrowing gauntlet. It's beautiful and now is the safest time in all of human history to be pregnant. I've been through the foster care system as a child, not as an adoptee but as a ward of the state. I might foster a child, but I need some blood connection for it to feel real. I will not consider renting out another womans womb.
>>34493220I understand if you believe this from a statistical perspective, but there's a post just above you who said she went through precicely that. I for one believe that the biological clock is ticking for 90% of women (and probably a majority of men too for that matter), and it's only a matter of time before an accident happens and they decide not to abort, they relent and give into instinct, or they grow old and regret it.
>>34493969>Was there anything, any experience in perticular that set your mind to really start thinking about it? there were a few things. figuring out my health issues was really important. i don't know your wife's circumstances but could she have trauma from her childhood? if she's always tired and has a lot of inexplicable somatic symptoms then it could be unprocessed emotions she needs to work through. learning about how trauma affects the body has helped me a lot in that regard.my advice would also be to be supportive about her health issues. even if it's "not real" it still feels real to her and feeling alone in it will just make it worse. something to consider is that a lot of women have very sensitive stomachs and it can be hard to diagnose. if her health issues are related to stomach pains, fatigue, headaches etc. you could encourage her to eat a healthier diet. cut out refined grains and processed foods to start with and see if she feels better.>When I ask her about what she wants her life to look like past those easy things she just freezes up, like she's never considered the possibility of turning 40.i relate a lot to this. i would avoid thinking about the future because i couldn't picture one where i was happy, i just didn't know what it looked like. i was depressed and i felt stuck without any way to solve the issues i had. and at 25 i still felt like a child. but i think with 30 rapidly approaching i couldn't keep living in the fantasy that i'd be in my 20s forever and being an adult finally started to feel "real" and so i really had to ask myself what i wanted my future to look like, and how i could become the person who could have that future. and btw, my sister also changed her mind at 26 after being adamant she wasn't having kids. i think for a lot of women it just kind of happens as you grow older and start thinking about the future more.
>>34493969>>34494387cont>I want to keep riding my horse"(she doesn;t ride often enough)sounds like she's worried about not having enough time for her interests and she might feel bad for already not spending enough time on them. likely she'll feel more motivated for it if her health gets better, but if not then you could encourage her to do the things she likes and do it with her. take initiative to get the garden going. if she feels like she can't do basic things like that, how can she feel like she can be a mother? sounds like she has a lot she worries about and that kids would just be another thing, at least right now. if you gradually help her see that she is capable, and she can be healthy, i think the maternal instincts would naturally start to kick in
>>34492799Yea if preggers is that bad for you you prob shouldn't be reproducing in the first place with those shitty ass genes and whoever selected for you to bear children with also shouldn't be reproducing those dumb blind ass genes>>34493980Of course biological clock is ticking for everyone but that doesn't mean those people care about it>>34494387But that too a lot of people are dumb and don't realise they'll be hitting the wall real soon till Hella later>>34492627Why the hell are you with someone you fundamentally disagree with, y'all settling hard for each other.>After all, I'm pretty boring myself.Yes. During that 10 year duration you were with her you could've found hundreds of better people for you to monkey-branch to
>>34494387>>34494393you're a kind person for writing so much, thank you. I hope you find what you're looking for.
>>34493969>I just kind of refuse to engage with this concept of pregnancy.Then you are refusing to engage with objective reality. That is not a helpful thing to be doing. Of course, being the man, when your wife is puking her guts out with morning sickness you can put your fingers in your ears and say "La la la la la! This isn't really happening! It's so wonderful and beautiful and amazing and magical!" But she, the one crouched over the toilet retching, won't have that option. And the same applies to all the other unpleasant aspects of pregnancy: you can refuse to engage with reality, but she can't: she has to live in the real world, even if you don't.>It is the human body working in exactly the way it was designed to.This is one way in which the human body is extremely *badly* designed. The fundamental problem is that we walk upright. For an animal to be able to walk efficiently on two legs, there is a sharp limit to how wide its pelvis can be. This creates a massive design trade-off: ideally you want a newly born animal to be mature enough to be able to function by itself, and for the pregnancy to last long enough for that to happen. In most other placental mammals, a newly born animal can walk within a few hours of being born. Ideally, a human pregnancy would last nearly two years, so that the child could be walking and starting to learn to talk as soon as it's born. But because humans walk on two legs, a woman's pelvic girdle is far too small to allow a baby that size to pass through it.(to be continued)
>>34496629(continued)So we end up with an extremely unsatisfactory compromise: the baby has to be as large as possible, otherwise it will almost certainly die shortly after birth; but if it becomes too large, it will jam in the birth canal and kill both baby and mother. Evolution has pushed the size of the baby to the absolute upper limit of that range. The end result of this is that pregnancy, and the process of giving birth, is much, MUCH more painful and dangerous for human females than it is for any other animal species on Earth. Female human bodies are very, very badly designed for giving birth to a baby that big. And it's for precisely for that reason that complications from pregnancy and giving birth are so much more common in humans than they are in other animals.For the mother to actually die in childbirth is relatively rare now; as I said a little over one in five thousand live births results in the mother's death. But it's unusual for a woman *not* to be torn up so badly that the doctors have to stitch her back together. 85-90% of first births require stitches afterwards. Her perineum being torn open is *normal*, not a sign that things have gone wrong. Somewhere between 30 and 50% of mothers experience urinary incontinence (unintentionally pissing themselves) after giving birth. And in 10-20% of cases, it's permanent.Again, you can refuse to engage with this, and say "no no no, it's beautiful and magical!" because you aren't the one pissing yourself. But your wife won't have that option. Don't blame her for living in the real world.
>>34493969>I will not consider renting out another womans womb.Then you're a fool.
>>34496631Do you believe that if all women were "educated" about pregnancy in the way you'd like them to be, that very many of them would choose to become mothers? No matter the biology of us giving birth so early as a spiecies, if the information that youve given here would cause so many women to catagorically refuse to have children, despite the opportunity to bring new life into the world, then it should be treated like a cognitohazard. And that's not even arguing the legitimacy of your perspective, which is way too modern for my taste.Either women will continue to have children, or we will be replaced by a culture that, somehow, does convince their women to have children, by whatever means.
>>34492633i understand that the idea of this life would be wonderful, but i don't think is worth to continue into going with children if your wife doesn't want to. That's selfish. You love her so much that is not worth the risk to going with another woman, you won't find anyone like her right?I would just accept it. There's nothing you can do. It's not a bad thing tho. One day she'll change her mind, being in the 30s it's still young.
