I've noticed a number of people on this forum say they don't have kids. Perhaps financial considerations played a role, or it's that simply not having kids makes early retirement easier.
I'm 33 and childless, and am looking for some reflection from those who have decided to not have kids and are now decades into that decision.
Why did you decide not to have kids, and do you regret the decision? Has it made socializing much harder? Do you ever feel like you missed out on a major part of what it is to be human by not experiencing parenthood?
But at the same time, I am getting older, and my hopes, in years past, of finding a woman I loved who didn't want to have kids seems like it may have been unrealistic.
I wonder how much happiness I sacrificed with my my past girlfriend, who I was very compatible with in almost every other way. and who I would have been happy to spend my life with.
So...yeah. tell me about your experience. How did you come to your decision, and what have the ramifications been?
I'm 47/DH is 56. We're been together since I was 20 and he was 29. It wasn't so much that we 'decided not to have kids'. Having children always struck us as one of the hugest opt-in decisions of life there was, just like choosing a spouse, deciding to move to another country, we had to actively WANT it and commit to it. Just 'stumbling' into such a life choice b/c it was the next 'step' wasn't how we approached it. Both of us had been around babies and helped care for infant siblings as teenagers, and that was fine. DH was ok with school age kids, I was ok with teenagers in certain settings, but neither of us had much interest in kids in general. Also, human population numbers/ecological impacts of child-bearing, especially beyond replacement rate, we viewed as extremely morally problematic. So it was a default 'no' unless something happened to turn it to a strong 'yes'.
I was told by many that my bio clock would kick in at some point, and did see this happen with some friends, but for me...never. DH and I revisited the topic every few years through our 20s and 30s, and it was always a huge 'meh'. When DH turned 40, he said he did not want to be an 'old dad' and we should make a final decision. He got a vasectomy. At the same time, during all those years, we were confident that if an 'accident' had happened (and we had one serious scare) we'd have taken on parenthood with as much grace as possible, and we suspect it would have been fine.
Is it harder socializing? It's hard to tell...we aren't hugely extroverted to begin with, and our social crowd rapidly became very diverse across age categories b/c of academia and research opportunities. A very large chunk of our friends and family also don't have kids for various reasons; in fact, being childfree/less is so common in our social context as to be unremarkable. We never socialized much with people with young kids, but that was mostly happenstance b/c our close friends of that age range lived mostly in other cities. And now the oldest of THEIR kids are starting college :boggles: One local couple in our circle had twins, but we had never been 'hang out weekly' type friends. So we saw the mother less for a few years as she found other friends with babies and small kids. Makes sense. We see her a bit more now as the kids get older. A number of our friends had high school age kids when we met them, so they were past that time-intensive stage. To sum up: my sense is there is a 5-10-year window when kids are very young, where your friendship with their parents will be affected by their 1) limited time and energy; and 2) their natural desire to seek out people in a similar situation; 3) your intrinsic interest in being around/helping directly with very small kids.
Do we feel we've missed out on a major part of the human experience? Yes, technically speaking, a major experience but certainly NOT an essential one. We don't really experience it as a lack. It would have been a profound experience, for sure, and probably but not necessarily a good one. We're likely slightly different people than we would have been had we parented, but then EVERY life experience alters you a bit. It isn't something we think about much :shrug:. There's a million 'roads not taken' in every life, after all.
There are two elements related to 'no-kids' that I sort of regret: one selfish, one not. The selfish one is simply practical: Aging is going to be somewhat more difficult without kids to call on. However, I watched both sides of my family severely damage formerly close relationships during the 'kids caring for aging parents' phase. I would have hated to put that kind of burden and possible inter-sibling etc. conflict onto kids of mine.
The second element is not selfish, but just general regret that we haven't had much opportunity to been around people of that stage of life (see above), and thus have not experienced being a 'fun aunt/uncle' or a 'auxiliary adult' to a young generation parented by close friends or family...perhaps that would have been to our liking! DH has a lot of nieces and nephews, but he isn't at all close to his family so he doesn't know most of them. Whereas, I'm very close to my siblings, but they are also child free (one of them still has a possible child bearing window...but it's not likely). And as stated above, we were never in proximity to our other close friends with young kids. So that's been kind of sad, though it won't necessarily be YOUR experience.
Finally, you are worried about partnering as a CF person, but remember you are currently in that deadly 'middle window' after the first round of marriages but before the first round of divorces, to put it somewhat jokingly. I know quite a few people in this position. But in a few more years more people will be coming back onto the market, many with alternative views of life paths, past ideal childbearing years, or with older kids from previous marriages. If you are flexible in those terms, and aggressive in putting yourself out there, I would not give up hope of finding a good partner.