Reader Doesn’t Want Baby writes,
I’m a self-made man in therapy who is currently in the throes of attachment panic due to being forced to confront the decision to have children! I have a lot of faith in you from reading you blog and hope you can help me.
My girlfriend and I are in our mid-30s and have been together five years. We have always disagreed on whether to have children but were optimistic we could resolve this over time, and were due to start couples therapy soon. However, this week she stopped using birth control and delivered an ultimatum: get her pregnant or leave. She insists that she won’t leave me and that I am the one who must choose. She also says if I do leave I will have robbed her of her last fertile years and she will never forgive me.
This feels like a no-win situation for me. I would love to make my girlfriend happy and I feel like I owe it to her for putting up with me so well until now. However, I also have two huge worries that I just can’t get past.
Firstly, my own growing up (I would struggle to call it a childhood) was horrendous and has left me intensely uncomfortable with the idea of children. I have done lots of therapy and other self-development work over the years, and in her nicer moments my girlfriend can be very reassuring and encouraging, saying what a patient and empathetic father I’d make and things like that which makes me feel brave enough to contemplate having a child together. I’m just not sure I’m there yet, and may never be, which is exactly not what my girlfriend needs to hear over the ticking of her biological clock.
Secondly, and I think this is my real sticking point, I worry intensely about not getting my own needs met in a relationship with children. I am a clingy preoccupied, and rely a great deal on sex to feel soothed and loved. A child’s needs would rightly need to be prioritized over mine, and I am self-aware and realistic enough to know I would probably not cope very well with the effect of that on our adult relationship, especially because my partner is more avoidant and our sex life was already on life support because she (understandably) felt pressured by my intense needs.
When things are at their worst, like they are right now, our relationship looks like an adult version of the still face experiment – she completely shuts down and withdraws into passivity, binging on Netflix and mobile phone games in bed while I become quietly hysterical with cravings and frustration I can’t express for fear of pushing her further away. You will not be surprised to hear this scenario feels very familiar to me, nor that I am not coping well with the lack of sex.
I love my girlfriend and don’t want to leave her, but I also worry that this is a really unhealthy dynamic in which to raise a child, and that I would ultimately end up feeling like I did in childhood, bearing huge caring responsibilities for my tired, touched-out and overstimulated girlfriend as much as for the baby, while also feeling neglected, lonely and miserable. I don’t know what to do and I feel very frightened and alone.
Dear DWB,
Since you’ve cited my article on the decision to have kids above, I figure you’ve read the part where I say that if you have unresolved issues with your own parents and/or a primary focus on sex to feel close within your relationship, you’re likely to find the early stages of childrearing fairly stressful. In your case, you seem to be alluding to an abusive or neglectful childhood, and profound preoccupied attachment issues in relation to your girlfriend. You become obsessed with her and with sex because your attachment needs weren’t met in childhood, and thankfully you are cognizant of this.
I fully agree with you that it sounds like fatherhood would not be your cup of tea, now or in the future. In fact, this entire relationship sounds extremely dysfunctional. Even leaving your issues aside, your girlfriend sounds like she is struggling massively with her own issues. She is putting you in a no-win situation and acting like a martyr, refusing to make her own decisions and then blaming you for any outcome that isn’t the one she wants. I am guessing she had a pretty rough upbringing herself, because she is a classic codependent who is unable to make the fairly glaringly obvious next step of leaving you if having kids is important to her.
You have gone through therapy, you are aware of your issues, and you are aware of the significant issues that already exist in the relationship. You seem to have found a passive-aggressive, avoidant partner who, with your complicity, is replicating the rejecting, abandoning dynamic that you experienced as a child with your parent(s). You are well informed about the reasons underlying your behaviors within your intimate relationship, and very insightful. And you are 100% accurate that bringing a child into this union would not be a good idea.
Your predicted outcomes, that your sex life would get even worse post-baby (since it’s already bad), and that you would be filled with resentment, are on point. And let’s not forget that you would then be dealing with your girlfriend’s resentment when you don’t magically morph into a guy who focuses solely on the baby, embraces fatherhood completely, and stops caring about sex. She would be comparing you as a dad to all her peers’ husbands who actually may have wanted kids in the first place, and any ambivalence you show in the dad role would seem even more disappointing.
Since your girlfriend is taking the passive, martyred role of making you be the one to end the relationship, then I think you owe it to her to do this while she is still in her childbearing years and can find another man. After you recover from the break, and when you start dating again (I give you a couple months max with your need to connect; even without your specific issues, it seems that men get back on the market quicker than women post-breakup), I would urge you to make it clear, beyond the shadow of a doubt, to any prospective partner, that you do not and never will want kids. This is only fair. (I know you weren’t sure when you met your current girlfriend, but I am just advising you on what to do in the future.)
Best of luck, and I commend you on the self-awareness that will hopefully prevent anyone else from having to struggle with divorcing with kids, which is pretty unpleasant for everyone involved, and why I wrote my book. Till we meet again, I remain, The Blogapist Who Says, Know Thyself.