- I’m well educated. So don’t need to rely on anyone else for income.
It's not just about the size of your income though. If you fell ill with something serious and chronic and could no longer work you'd go from hero to zero very quickly on that score. Besides, parenting is about so much more than having sufficient money. In my opinion a parent who has a decent career with a good income cannot do both jobs as well as they could do, without quite a bit of support. You either slacken off in your job or your slacken off in your parenting. Unless you have someone to share the burden equally you can't be absolutely great at both. You just can't.
Think about what it means for a child to spend the majority of its waking hours in some form of childcare, being dragged out of bed really early every day so you can rush them out of the house in time for the office, then home really late because you can't pick them up until 6. then in childcare every school holiday. Never managing to have play dates because it doesn't suit your schedule. This is the reality for lots of kids with two working parents, but between them they manage.With just one parent it's very very hard, and you will never get a break between work and parenting. Don't kid yourself it's going to be easier - it won't.
It won't be a bed of roses for the child either. Some women have no choice though. They didn't go into it thinking they'd end up alone.
*- I have savings and I’m saving up enough to buy a house and get a mortgage which will be 100% mine (then passed on to my kids later).
- I’m planning on living off my savings for maternity leave then returning to work after 6 months to one year.*
Well great, but that's a reason why it will be financially easier, not a reason why you should do it.
- it’s patriarchal, marriage was designed by men to control woman’s sexuality (my opinion)
And why would they want to do that, do you suppose? Might it be because it's a good idea for all children to be supported by two parents, because in days or yore one of them needed to work and put food on the table while the mother was tied to the house for years at a time between pregnancies, childbirth recovery, breastfeeding then child rearing? Because before birth control that was the reality for human beings. Someone had to be held accountable and take responsibilty for all the other stuff, and why would you want to do that if you couldn't even be sure you were the father of the child? That was also the reality for human beings before birth control. Marriage existed for good reason. The stigma of having a child out of wedlock existed for a reason.
- I don’t like the idea of becoming a “Mrs” some else’s last name
You don't have to. Millions of women never take their husband's name.
- I find the idea of marriage in general sexist especially the part about changing your name
Yes I suppose it is quite a sexist tradition. But again, it's rooted in the father 'owning' his responsibilities to support his own offspring and supporting the woman who has compromised herself by bearing children. Luckily there is no pressure or expectation to take his name these days.
- I find weddings a mixture of boring (for everyone else), cringy (for me) and expensive and I’m not prepared to waste £20,000 on one day when I could be saving up for a house deposit with that
You don't have to have a large, expensive and theatrical wedding to be married. You can do it in twenty minutes with 2 witnesses for the cost of the licence, but I'm sure you already know that.
- I don’t like the idea of your entire identity being deleted forever and getting deleted for a man’s identity
Well that's nonsense and just doesn't happen. It may still happen in some very backward thinking cultures but it doesn't happen here, now. If anything, you are far more likely to lose any identity you had through motherhood. Many a woman has asked herself after 20 years of parenting - 'Who AM I? I have no idea any more. I have given myself up to child rearing and now they've become more independent I'm left feeling like an empty husk of a woman with no specific purpose or identity.' Especially if they've been a SAHM.
I doubt many child free women have felt that way purely by dint of being married. But if your identity and your freedom to do what you want, when you want is really important to you then I'd think carefully about motherhood.
I just don’t like anything about marriage, couldn’t care less about being protected and I don’t care about having to work by myself and for myself to build up wealth for my children.
I don't think it's going to be quite as easy as you think it is, spinning all those plates alone. Plenty of women decide to do it, and it strikes me that all they do is moan about how hard it is, and how exhausted they are all the time, with no-one to take up the slack. And it can be lonely. You aren't free to do as you wish socially but you don't have the comfort and company of a partner at home either.
Well they can't say they weren't warned, I'm sure.
Honestly, I’d be quite prepared to become a single mother by choice as I feel it’d almost be easier as
- I could parent the way that I want Yes. you could. This is the first thing you've said that I can't find an argument against. I'm not sure it's worth all the downsides just for that though.
- I could sleep how I want and feel rested and relaxed during baby stage without being distracted by my husband and dealing with relationship issues
Haha. Hahahahahahaha. The idea that you'll get more sleep as an unsupported single parent than less, is naive and completely hilarious. You'll get no downtime ever, with no father around (either in a partnership or co-parenting as two single parents) to give you the odd day or weekend to yourself, or to share the night feeds or just so you can even go to the loo or have a bath in peace, or nip out to the shop or without having to drag the child with you. That won't happen for years. YEARS. Think about it.
- I don’t want to deal with relationship problems, I want to parent + focus on my work and paying the bills
That's fair enough - perhaps your experience of relationships so far is that they are always fraught with problems. Not everyone's is. Some people have very happy relationships. It seems you have a very negative view of relationships.
Or perhaps you've never actually had any meaningful relationships, so you have covered your disappointment about this by convincing yourself they aren't worth the hassle anyway?
- I get to make parenting decisions by myself
Well you do, assuming the child's father came out of a turkey baster and he has absolutely no involvement whatsoever. But that isn't always fair on the child. It's selfish and short sighted to think that it won't matter to that child in the future. Many children suffer hugely for never knowing who their birth parents are, or knowing but not having a relationship with them. It's not for you to assume it won't be an issue for them. You don't know.
Single mothers have spoken about how much easier it is not to consult anyone else and just do things
Single mothers who aren't necessarily single by choice will say all sorts of things to convince themselves that they are better off without their child's father than with him. And unless the fathers are completely out of the picture, or were sperm doners, women don't always have the ability to make every decision unilaterally.
You seem to assume that there will always be conflict and difference of opinion in every joint decision that needs taking in a partnership. That's not most people's experience of marriage nor of healthy, happy co-parenting.
I don’t have kids of my own (yet) but I’ve been yearning for my own family (children only) since I was sixteen - I even have the names picked out!
How old are you now and what's your relationship history like?
Strangely I’ve always been turned off by marriage since I was a child (even though my parents are married). It’s only recently I’ve decided it’s something I definitely do not want.
Is it marriage alone that turns you off, or committed long term relationships as well?
I know several couples who have co-habited and co-parented very happily for many years, both agreeing that marriage was an unnecessary social construct. Until they got to middle age and started to think about the complications of one of them dying, leaving the other unprotected in law. So they got married in small ceromonies without much fuss. There is a reason marriage exists. It's a legal contract that offers protection. It's not merely a romantic/religious circus.
So how are you planning on getting PG? Who is the lucky sperm doner?