Commitment-phobic men are often the reason that women 'delay' starting a family

[Petal02]

A lovely friend of mine is in bits because her latest relationship has broken down. She is 41, would love to settle down and start a family, but has been unfortunate to have a string of boyfriends who didn't know what they wanted, or wanted to keep their options open, or didn't want children now but might have wanted them in the future. You get the picture.

She was 'told off' by her GP about 6 months ago (when she mentioned the subject of conception) for 'hanging around too much and not getting on with it.'

Yet you read so much about women who allegedly decide to wait til their 40s before starting a family; I suspect some of them would have started far earlier if only there weren't so many idiotic men about.

Sorry, just wanted to offload. Makes me very sad.

People not choosing to have kids is also a growing trend ( which I am part off) and I personally think both sexes are realising that you don't have to have children if you don't want them. Although I totally disagree that either sex should string the other partner along though.

I do understand where you're coming from Petal - back in the 50s at least there was an expectation that you met a nice boy / girl, got married, got a house & had kids. It was expected that the man went out to work and took on responsibilities and that the woman stayed home with the children.

Personally I'd find it suffocating and would hate it but I can understand the appeal, particularly if you're wading through the latest lot of Peter Pans...

Oh, my mum constantly says that, petal. It does help that when my parents had children, it was relatively normal to have your own house at age 25. Arguably you had more financial stability earlier on?

If you know its the one why worry about what they think of you as they wont judge anything you say if its the right man. We had decided ideal age gaps, names, how many etc right from the off. I know not everyone would go that far but at a whole year in I think its crazy not to discuss it.

Petal - life was certainly simpler in my parents day.

My mother 'fell pregnant' then she 'had to get married'.

Thing is OP, your friend was 37 when she started her last relationship, she didn't have time at the start of that relationship for "some point in the future" she should have been pushing for a firm commitment to start for a baby within 12 months, rather than faffing about for 4 years. Faffing about for years is something you can do in your 20s, I'm always shocked that there are educated, sucessful woman in their late 30s who don't understand this, who are all coy about putting their cards on the table and saying what they want and the time frames they want it in, and accepting some wishy washy "at some point in the future" because they think it's the man's decision.

It's not unacceptable, all the woman I know who were single in their 30s who wanted DCs did spell it out to the men they were dating early on, 1 dumped 2 very nice and otherwise perfect men around 36/7 until at 38 she met the man she's now just had 2DCs with.

Freakoid - that's only reasonable if you decide it is, if you say "ok, I'll wait until you're ready" not "Well, I want to be starting to try for a baby in 6 months time, if you won't be ready by then, I will start looking for a new partner". 20-somethings can wait until XYZ, late 30-somethings can't.

It's just not complex, it's about taking control of your own life, it's deciding what you want and making sure you are in the best position to get it, not sitting around hoping that someone else decides to gift you what you want.

Oh yes, it was lovely and simple when women were officially the servant class and couldn't even open a bank account without permission from their male owners...

as per Birdinthebush, it is my understanding that more and more people are weighing up the costs and benefits of having children and deciding not to.

Why this presumption that it's only women who aspire to be parents?

I personally think all this 'my biological clock is ticking' stuff is not instinctive or innate, rather it is women conforming to cultural expectations.

Both genders benefit from the fact that women have babies, it's not just something that women do to indulge themselves.
Ultimately if we stop reproducing the birth rate will drop and the population will go into an exponential decline.

At the risk of sounding flippant, maybe you should all be internet dating and putting your cards on the table before you even go out to meet somebody to make sure you're on the same page from the start.

If only it was that easy though..... are there just more women around than men? It feels that way.

I think I must have been very lucky, we didn't even mention children until we'd been married for about five years and then it was just 'shall we have a baby'? 'yes alright'. I can't even remember which one of us suggested it.

I would agree with Electric about Oktowonder, you've still got time. Don't hang about though.

SGB is right - couples got married young because you couldn't live together without being married, and sex outside of marriage was frowned upon. Men didn't get married younger because they thought commitment was a good idea, they got married younger for sex. Couples didn't always plan to have children younger, contraception was crap so there was a lot more happy accidents.

It always shocks me how much attitudes have changed in such a short time. My parents got married in about 1979. My dad actually gave my brother and me little lectures about the sanctity of marriage (he's not remotely religious) before we each got married. He sees divorce as something faintly shameful and always deeply, deeply regrettable. It was expected you got married, and then you had children. And then you stayed together.

I don't think he would begin to understand the concept of leaving someone just because you weren't totally happy with the idea of having children yet, and he would find the idea of leaving someone you'd have children with very worrying. So in that sense, I expect there was much less of what beta describes with 'stringing along'. It is frightening to think of.

Artex I would also add, it's very easy to lay the law when it all worked out for you.

Petal thanks very much for your good wishes :) And fwiw I agree with you re our parents' generation.

Well I agree.

I'm 37 and single, haven't met a nice man to stay with, not my fault but I've had problems with illness etc. and it's difficult to meet a man just for dating let alone for a relationship with.

I really would like the time to meet a decent man, have a good relationship THEN have a child when the time is right, but there isn't time to wait anymore.

PS. I would have a child on my own but I don't have the money or the stable mental health to be a single mother.

What brokenhearted55a says is very telling.

There are a lot of future-faking men out there. They can future-fake
because

Men don't get pregnant
Men don't have a biological clock
Men can go on dating sites and get numerous women contacting and interested in meeting them so there's a sense of loads more choice out there these days; some men simply won't make a choice as they don't actually feel they have to

Im not talking about good, decent men. They're still out there. But there are an awful lot of messaround men out there. I don't think women are inherently silly or naive when it comes to men. But it needs to be recognised its not always a case of a woman foolishly 'wasting time' on a man. Men who don't have integrity don't come with 'waste of space' stamped on their foreheads. They can and do lie very well, and for a very long time, when they want a woman to pass time with them. & sadly, women can bear the brunt of that.

I totally take issue with more beta's statement that equality has come back to bite women! Ugh.

Now women can have their own careers parental leave can be shared from 2015, if you split then whoever is the non resident parent pays child support to the one who the kids live with. Those steps towards equality make it LESS of a burden for young men than supporting a housewife for 10years 20 years to raise the kids and who has given up her career to do so thereby demanding alimony.

The only situation where the latter description is more "equality" for women is one where men could just fuck off and leave with no responsibilities.. Oh wait that still happens!!

I would say young men should be feeling less pressure to be the breadwinner these days and they less likely to have to "support" a woman through kids - all because of progress towards female equality.

Yeah, it's the future faking that's the problem.

It's perfectly reasonable not to want children or to want them late in life (if you're a man). It's not reasonable to pretend that you could want them any day now if you know that's bollocks. I'd also argue it's not reasonable to stay with a mid-30s plus partner for years and years if you know she's not the one and she's desperately hoping she is.

I think men don't know how sharly women's fertility declines but some know enough to take advantage. They know that it's a gamble for a woman to leave and start again, especially as they have collective bargaining power if you like and seem to be holding out on mass. And if they don't understand fertility, why else do you think the late 30s/early 40s guys are all looking for 29 year olds?

Solid gold brass

Aw thanks Artex :) :) :)

maybe i'm naive about the "future fakers". I can't believe men are so calculated about it. I just think there are a socially expected list of priorities people try to emulate.

A lot of my friends traveled after university...started out trying to forge careers...became disillusioned and go travelling again. My facebook is full of my peers travelling around the world in their late 20's early 30's. They will come back and have to start all over again where most people used to start off in their early 20s.

If i look at my closest friendship group 3 of us have settled down with young families and 3 are still travelling.

I have slight twinges of jealousy but i'm a dad at 28 and starting a family youngish and establishing a good career were always my priorities.

I did things in a very socially unacceptable way, like others on this thread (I think we'd discussed opinions on Gina Ford, public breastfeeding and home-education long before ttc. Possibly before having sex! ) so I do and don't feel stern. On the one hand there's a feeling of "well, I did it, so why can't they?" But on the other: well, by the time we get to adulthood, we've all experienced wildly different influences, haven't we?

As an adult, I ended up in a figurative set of opinionated bossy boots, absolutely convinced that I would rather be alone than put up with someone whose views annoyed me. In those shoes (for which I didn't really do anything to earn or pay- they simply developed around me), it was easy for me to dismiss the prevailing views that LRD summed up so accurately up above. However, lots of women don't find themselves in such a great pair of shoes. They find themselves wearing inherited slippers (did you know that slippers cause lots of household accidents each year?) of enforced fluffy passiveness.

I think I pushed that metaphor further than it should ever have gone.

Apologies.

Men don't have a biological clock

But they do.

And some of them find out about it too late, and it's sad.

tilly, I love your metaphor. I think (to push it further), I have been wearing four-inch heels of the kind certain fashion magazines suggest make you kick-ass and powerful, but which one suspects may be more than a tiny bit of a patriarchial conspiracy.

Well - it is all very well saying I have time, but I am 33 next month.

I have to actually physically meet someone (no mean feat) have The Talk and secure a relationship steady enough to have a child.

Threads like this are juxtaposed against "I know someone who had their DCs at 43 and 45" and it is confusing. I never really know what to think. But it does annoy me when the "oh, be a single mum," is trotted out blithely. It's a lot to take on.