BellaOnline Forums Relationships Married No Kids Don't know how much more I can take...

misstalia......you are not being rude....LOL. All of the points you made and more have gone through my mind over and over again. My ex-husband's actions prior to and since the divorce have been ridiculous. What's more, his own family, at least the older members, do not like this new woman he is with. I think he needed a "mommy" and now he has one. You could say he really left me for her, but the baby thing in his mind is not over, I don't think.

I asked him last year, when we were still on speaking terms (we aren't now thanks to her....she is very controlling and insecure in their relationship.....you have no idea the trouble from her I have had to deal with) I asked him if he still planned on having a baby or was he happy with just helping her raise her own kids. He told me that having a baby was "on the list." I thought that was a weird way of putting it.

He has known this woman for about 7 years. He used to work in the same building she did, and unbeknownst to me he kept in touch with her even when he moved on and worked elsewhere. Supposedly they have been "friends" for a long time. I think more than friends, apparently. I guarantee you that she had a hand in wrecking our marriage. I think she saw dollar signs written all over his forehead. He had just gotten a great paying job the same year our relationship started falling apart. After 8 years of school he finally got lucky. And at the time I was laid off and she is a paralegal. I think he saw dollar signs on her too. Money became so important to him all of a sudden.

So there is that, and also the fact that a friend of my ex-husband's (he used to be a friend of mine too but not anymore) was on his second marriage and he never had wanted kids. Low and behold he goes through a mid-life crisis (just like my ex-husband) and all of a sudden he wants kids. His wife was 40 yrs old and she already had 4 kids.......three grown and one a teenager. So they tried and could not conceive and then went through lots of invitro. The cost of that is phenominal. Eight years later she has twins at the age of 48 because both embryos survived....usually only one survives when doing invitro.

So of course they rubbed these babies into my ex-husband's face.....called him "uncle" which he is NOT, and pretty much made the entire thing a fantasy that also helped to end my marriage. So do I think my ex-husband wants a baby from his new wife? Absolutely. He is a follower, and he probably thinks that if his friends can pull it off even in their late 40's than so can he. Throw caution and risk to the winds.....

I do believe that the road my ex-husband has chosen to get what he wants is the wrong road, and it leads me to believe that he has more emotional problems than I even knew about. Since his new job and since I have been out of his life, I have been told by his friends and family that he does not keep in touch with them anymore, he is self-centered, and he is pretty much a pompous @ss. This is not the man I was married to.

My opinion is that the two of you need to sit down and have a serious conversation about this issue. Not just passing comments, but an all-out civilized discussion. You have stated that you do not want to have children. If he is not completely okay with the idea of never having children, then your relationship needs to end now since it will not lead to marriage. Staying together because you agree on everything else, but knowing that you will never agree on this, the relationship will eventually end because eventually he will want to have kids. Staying together for years until that point is a waste of both of your times because you may miss out on meeting someone who would be a perfect spouse - for both you and for him. Staying with him is just delaying you ending up with someone who shares your outlook, and it's delaying him ending up with someone who wants to have kids with him. I know first hand that it's very difficult to break up with someone when everything at the moment seems fine - I had to do it once myself and would not be giving this advice had I not personally been in a similar situation in the past. You have to look at the big picture and life down the road - not for small issues, but certainly for major ones such as whether or not to have children. You both owe it to yourselves and to each other. Regardless what you choose to do, I truly hope everything works out for you.

Freedomgirl,you make some good points! Cassie, it sounds like that woman probably did have a hand in the dissolution of your marriage. As for your ex husband with his friends child...you'd think a 40 year old man would realize the difference between uncle and father. I know it's tricky because you went into the marriage thinking you were on the same page, but your ex was so unkind to you, and sounds foolish in his actions. I'm glad you're moving on and be sure, if he by some small miracle has a child with old momma, that you buy the baby a pair of those cute little sunglasses for the extra set of eyes that'll probably grow in the back of it's head lol. That was mean...and a joke, but I just hate how you were treated. I hope the original poster finds the right match so she doesn't have to go through any of the nonsense that you did!

Crocus.....you not wanting to have a family of your own is not an unpleasant character flaw. As I re-read your post I got upset thinking about how you must feel when your boyfriend insinuates that something is wrong with you. You have thought out the issue very carefully and responsibly and you have made the decision to choose another lifestyle, one that best suits who you are. I commend you for that, and for not just caving in to what society seems to demand from women. The option of not having kids should be as accepted as the option to have a family.

Like you, there is nothing about having babies and raising a family that I can relate to or want.....the diapers, the smells, the sleepless nights, grocery shopping with the screaming kids, school activities, teenage years, etc. I can see how my entire life would be dedicated to child rearing with nothing left for myself. I don't want any of it, but I can admire women who can pull it off and do a great job at raising a family. It is a nice ideal but having kids is not for everyone.

I went through the same thing you are now when I was married in the early years. I had changed my mind about having children soon after the wedding day. This upset my husband greatly, and he took out his resentment on me. I asked my husband to divorce me if he wanted a family. I should have been the one to end the marriage because he did not have the nerve to (he thought I would change my mind back to wanting kids as I got older....this I found out years later). If he and I would have had such differences in opinion about having a family before we got married, I never would have married him in the first place, as much as I was in love with him.

Freedomgirl has a good point.....this issue will never go away. Please learn from my mistakes and have that talk with your boyfriend now. If he is dead set on having children and you are not, then you have to end the relationship now. So many years of my life was wasted because I was with the wrong man and in the wrong situation. As much as I was still in love with him on the day he divorced me, and as much as we got along well and had fun doing everything together, it was his need for children that finally did the relationship in.

Misstalia.....there is a lot about my relationship with my ex-husband that I didn't talk about, but yes, he was very unkind and was outright cruel to me at the end. I was still not working because of him (the depression as a result of the impending divorce was paralyzing to me). I had wanted some alimony from him, because in 16 years of marriage I felt I deserved something. And believe me, I didn't ask for much. For 8 yrs I sacrificed and always put him first because he was in school getting two masters degrees so the both of us could have a better life down the road. I won't benefit from any of that now. He had said to me, "You are the lowest form of existence to me right now, standing there with your hand out looking for a free ride." That in response to asking him for a small amount of alimony when he is making a very good paycheck now, a paycheck he would not be making if it was not for my support all of those years.

Another thing, he had wanted dogs for years. I never wanted the responsibility so we did not get them until 2 years before the divorce. I finally gave in to be kind and loving, and we got two lab puppies. Of course I did all the raising and training because my ex-husband worked long hours far from home. He got to enjoy the fun times with the dogs while I did almost all of the work. They became our "kids" to a degree, and these are dogs he just "had to have" in order to be right within himself.

After the divorce he had his new woman move in immediately and I had monthly visitation with my dogs. She hated that. Just this year he gave the dogs to me just to get me out of their driveway once a month. So the dogs he just had to have, just like he HAS TO HAVE KIDS, got booted out the door. If I didn't take them he would have given them away to strangers just to get rid of me. His fiance has her own dogs so I guess they became more important than his dogs, and it was more important to please her than to keep the dogs he has supposedly loved for three years.

What happens when it becomes inconvenient to have a young baby? Maybe one with autism or Down's Syndrome? What is he going to do then? I look at my beautiful dogs and I can't understand how he could have let HIS precious dogs go. What is he going to do with a child?

It's funny reading all these posts, but I always find a common thread - that women ( in general, but all of us here ) try really hard to make things work. Especially in a relationship, when our senses are telling us things aren't right, or a particular trait in a partner is bad, and causes us hurt and upset. - and we keep coming back for more.

It seems to be a personality trait that we don't want to seem like we've failed, and will go to any lengths to stay with a partner, even though deep down we know it's wrong, deluding ourselves that the 'good times' are worth all the bad.

I read an article recently about a woman who'd had 2 divorces - it was about how marriage is most difficult when kids are young, and the couple are juggling childcare, lack of sleep, change in roles ( woman often gives up her job, and the man takes on as main breadwinner ) and stress of finances.

She had 3 kids to these men, and she said she'd tried so hard not to split, but that they resented not getting the attention they'd once enjoyed before the children, and neither helped in the home much. her final comment ( she was 55 and had not remarried )was that she had just chosen the wrong men in life, and when asked if she'd still be married if she hadn't had kids, she really found it hard to call. maybe, she said.

I am really not a man hater. I have some great male friends, and I do enjoy being married.
BUT...
I truely believe men are very different to women. It's in their makeup, just as our traits are in ours. the difficulty comes in making decisions that will cause pain - we worry ahead, of all the many negatives it could bring, instead of just changing a bad situation, and believing things will get better.

Cassie, do you regret now that you didn't split from your ex all those years ago ? from the sound of him I really believe you're better off without him. - even with all the pain.
One of the comments from the article was she regretted spending most of her life on men who weren't worth it.
the trouble is, as they say, life isn't a rehearsal, so how do we know at the time, what is right for us or not ?

I believe I would be divorced now if I'd had kids.
Getting back to my point in a roundabout way, Crocus, you really need to take a long hard look at where you're at in your life. good guys are out there, my advice - start looking.
Don't stick with something you know deep down will bring you heartache. You're young. Go girl.

Gaynor.....Funny, I don't regret not ending the marriage years ago when I could have. I was so very much in love with the man and at the time I did what I thought was right. I offered him an out, and if he did not take it then it was more important for him to be with me than to be without me.

We had lots of difficulty during our marriage......financial, medical, emotional, his infidelity and porn addiction, family issues, job stress, several job layoffs (mostly his), and then years of school for him while he was working full time. For years we did not take vacations together because we just couldn't do it with his busy schedule. I was willing to make the sacrifice for the eventual payoff in the end (which now will never happen for me) but it was hard for me in a lot of ways. I put him first and did all I could to help him because he was so busy and tired all of the time.

If we had split years ago maybe my life in general would have been happier and less stressful. I don't know. I loved him with all of my heart and we always had an affectionate relationship, but for years we didn't have sex because I was afraid to get pregnant. That really hurt the marriage and I didn't know how much damage it had done until it was too late. I had hoped he would get a vasectomy because he came to agree with me that we were better off without children. He said he would but then he never did. He lied to me and to himself about the issue of having children.

If he had been mature and we had a better financial situation I may have considered having a family with him, but I could not trust him to be responsible, and I was not up for doing all the work myself for something I really did not want in the first place. I feel like I raised him. I knew him since he was 19 yrs old. It was really too much to ask me to have a family with this man.

My regrets today have to do with the failure of the marriage itself and the dreams I had of growing old with my soul mate. Obviously he no longer felt the same about me, and that is a regret of mine. I lost the man I love and a part of it is my fault, but I didn't know what else to do to ensure that I didn't have babies. Without intimacy he drifted away from me.

I really miss him. I know he sounds like a real jerk now, but the man I knew up until a year before the divorce was a kind and sensitive person. I miss that man very much. He really knew and understood me like nobody else. We had been through a lot together through the years and we had a history. Things were supposed to start finally turning around for us for the better when it all crashed and burned.

I am still so very sad over it. I have moved on with someone else now but I know I will never be loved the same way again, and I won't be able to give so much of myself in that way again. Because my ex-husband wanted kids and I didn't I was obviously with the wrong person, but in every other way I think we should have been together until death parted us. Unfortunately he changed so much just before the divorce. I really don't know who he is anymore. Maybe his true colors finally came out.

To the OP, if you are still checking this thread:

This man will not change his mind and his views are just as valid as yours. Wanting/not wanting children is a primal instinct. As unfair as it is for him to harangue you for not wanting them, it's equally unfair for you to ask him to give up something he obviously wants deeply, if not more so. There are plenty of men who don't want kids, let this current man go and attempt to find a man who wants what you want. To continue this current relationship is a waste of both your time. Let him go find a woman who will have his kids and pay his bills... unless you want that life, right?