Unspoken grief childless men

[Needanewnamebeingwatched]

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/aug/28/unspoken-grief-childless-men

What are you thoughts on this report from a man who never had children and regrets it bitterly

Usual MN misandry!

I agree with this. However I think it's also to do with expectations from society. People on mn always go on about it being stupid to have kids before you can reasonably afford to. It's not ideal to have them before saving for a house as its hard to do it at the same time. You need to be able to afford childcare so have a minimum of 1.5 grand disposable income a month. You likely aren't going to be able to do that until you are a chunk into your career etc etc. So you are looking at 30 before you even start thinking about it for most. Let's hope you have met someone too!

I feel sorry for anyone that wanted kids and didn't or couldn't have them. If that's all I knew about matey in the article then I'd probably feel sorry for him. Then I read the article...

I'm struggling to see how you can get a book out of a few poor decisions and a heap of self pity.

Yet this site makes a big deal when women can't have children. What's the difference?

George Clooney of Milton Keynes made me chuckle. He does sound a bit like the man in the guardian article!

Some men do know they have the same time limit as women but just can't seem to find a partner. Call me an old fogey but I feel like OLD has so much to answer for, in keeping people unhappily single. I reckon things were easier before it was invented (I can't explain why but I do).

Your George Clooney probably has a few younger beautiful women swiping right on him once in a while, feeding his delusions, but who wouldn't actually want to settle down with him

I don't know how much sympathy I have really.

There are tens of thousands of women on this site giving their child rearing years to feckless lazy shitbags, eternal Peter Pans who never want to grow up, who spend decades keeping all of their options open until one day - some options start to come off the table.

He made his choices then looked up in his 50s only to discover that women in their 50s are done with babies, and he wasn't a great prospect for women in their 20s and 30.

What else is there to say 🤷🏻‍♀️

I can’t feel sorry for any man who’s always been reluctant to commit, and only realises once he’s older and no longer attractive to women of childbearing age, that he’s going to be a sad old bugger on his own, with nobody to give a toss whether he lives or dies.

But of course that won’t apply to every man who’s childless through no fault of his own. I dare say it’s true of a good many, though.

This is how feel too. Also in my 50s. I always imagined that I'd have children but circumstances got in the way. It makes me sad sometimes and I don't see why men shouldn't feel the same way.

Easy for people saying they have no sympathy to say 'They've made their choice' when they have no idea what they would do in that person's gender/shoes. If you were born a man, socialised and brought up in the same way and attracted to women, who'd to say you wouldn't some of the mistakes you find so disgusting? I feel compassion for anyone who has regrets about their life choices. Most people have a past and certain regrets. I'm not so self-righteous as to think I'd necessarily do any better.

I do find his comments about 'no-one to look after me' distasteful though...but I think it's sad in general when men miss the opportunity to have children, as it is for women.

I can explain why I think modern dating has kept a swathe of the population unhappily single. There's too much choice. People used to settle down with Terry from down the pub or Jill, a friend of a friend, or John from work, or Sarah from uni. I'd love to see data on how much further the individuals within the average dating pool from OLD have strayed outside their regular social circles vs those who have dated more local people who they've settled with. There's also something fascinating I've read ages ago about how if you couple up from within your social circle, there's more social pressure to stay together vs two strangers who don't have much social equity to lose by calling it quits.

It is sad when anyone's life doesn't turn out how they want, and that can be from one small decision, one big decision or hundreds of little choices. There are likely women in his past who would have been happy to settle down and that he wasn't ready for commitment with.

We have a lot of friends, all now in our mid 30s. Once the 30th birthdays started rolling in, perspectives shifted - those who had denounced online dating suddenly started, or took up new hobbies to meet new people, or accepted blind dates whereas they'd have previously declined. Sometimes to find the right person and by extension, pursue the option of having kids, you have to make that the focus.

I agree about the men on OLD. I never actually went dating, but when I was looking there were loads of men 40+ and up to their 60s, saying they wanted kids. Sometimes in a very relaxed “I want to be a dad one day” way as if they had endless time. Yes it does happen, I know a man who married a much younger woman and had his first DC at 59, but they’re not entitled to it - but many act like they are and that just being willing to have a baby will bring all the broody young women running, whatever their other qualities or lack of.

Well that’s not true and at the same time they’ve just ruled out the older age range of women who’ve had kids and don’t want or can’t have any more, or who are childless - so they massively slash their chances of any relationship.

I do feel sorry for anyone male or female who wanted kids and it didn’t happen, and I agree it isn’t talked about much regarding men. So articles like this are good for helping younger men to give it some thought.

I do feel sorry for him, because I know that was my DH’s fear. He always wanted a family and as he got older, he genuinely started to get depressed that it wouldn’t happen for him. We met when he was late 30s and there was and is nothing wrong with him - he just didn’t have any confidence when it came to women after years of rejection.

Just like women, there are men who are decent people (ie didn’t waste their youth on meaningless relationships) and meeting someone just never happened for them. Men are entitled to grieve on not having the life they hoped, just like women.

I know two lovely men who haven’t been able to have children because of their wives’ infertility. It is a real tragedy for them as well as their wives and I always feel upset when I see how brilliant they are with my kids.

He left it too late. Some women do the same. By the time they feel they are ready It's too late. No I Don't feel a lot of sympathy.

This is true. However, what some men do with this knowledge is potentially self sabotaging. Put bluntly, if they want a family in their mid 40s and older, they need a younger woman. And they really can't assume this is necessarily going to be an option for them.

I think you're right. OLD has the potential of 'gamblers' appeal - always the potential of something better around the corner, hitting the jackpot of Mr or Miss Perfect, so some people are unwilling to 'settle' for any kind of compromise, when the reality is that perfection is unlikely to exist.

Strongly agree with @Cakesandbabes. We need more open discussion of this issue and how delaying the decision can affect non-celeb men.

I'm a slightly older parent (had my first baby at 36) and remember that from about 30 onwards starting getting the dreaded 'don't leave it too late comments' when people would point out my advancing age and biological realities. I remember my similarly aged boyfriend saying that nobody had ever made a comment to him about not leaving it too late! We discussed the huge sexism of it at the time. It was always an annoying/hurtful conversation yet I guess I wasn't allowed to bury my head in the sand in the way he was.

Not saying we should be reminding people of declining fertility - and some people are in very unfortunate circumstances and need no reminder - but I'm inclined to think men need more of a reality check. As an aside, in my social circles the trend is for attractive, educated women to date/partner with slightly younger men rather than older. I don't know why this is but I wonder if any preference for older guys is going out of fashion as we become better educated.

I also hear that a lot of men feel they need to 'provide' and reach a certain income level before having a family. Yet rising living costs/expensive housing is making the ideal more difficult.

Eek, mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand I have huge sympathy for anyone who is involuntarily childless. That grief is so totalising. On the other hand, by this man’s own admission, having children wasn’t a priority for him and he didn’t even think about it until his early 40s 🙄. He then claims to have suddenly discovered that women the same age as him either already had, didn’t want, or couldn’t have children. Everybody fucking knows that early 40s are the absolute limit of a woman’s fertile years. I agree with a pp that what he actually discovered was he couldn’t after all find a hot 20 year old to breed with him as he fully expected. Men like this are very much part of the problem, and why so many women suffer the pain of involuntary childlessness despite making finding a partner to have children with a huge priority. So it’s hard to have sympathy in that respect. On the other hand, it’s so important that more men come out and talk about this regret (I think it’s so much more common than we realise) so younger men finally start to buck up their ideas.

I found several threads in the article fascinating. I wonder what this one is about?! Why would married men with kids find his pain threatening?

”Married men don’t want to hear it either: I’ve had men with children react with anger, as though they feel threatened, when I’ve tried to talk about my pain,”

I also think this is so true and so relevant:

Being a father is a marker of status in many countries, said Hadley, but not in the west. “While there has recently been a lot more public discussion about how to be a good father, we still don’t have any narrative or celebration about how important it is for men to become a father in the first place,” he said

Someone shared a heart-breaking article here a few years ago about men and women who’d ended up single and childless. I wish I could find it. I remember one man who said he’d spent his life waiting for something he knows will never come and that “all I ever wanted in life was to be a husband and a father”.

One of the men in the article (possibly the same one), said he’d had women friends over the years, but had never felt able to make a move romantically in case it would be have been unwanted and made the woman feel uncomfortable.

I felt very sorry for all the people interviewed regardless of whether they were a man or a woman. The loneliness was palpable.

However, if there are men out there who put off commitment and children until their forties, because they assume they can pick up a much younger woman whenever they choose, then my sympathy is very limited. Especially if they dated a woman their own age and strung her along for years, making all the right noises with no intention of committing.

@Sugarcoatt are you still with him?

Re: care in old age/expectations of children stepping up. I think it's less about practical care and more about having younger people who will just help you to navigate things as you get into old age. My DM's old school friend never married, didn't had kids, was an only DC and when she got dementia and needed to go into a care home it was my DM, her old friend, and a guy who was her financial advisor who sorted it all out for her.

If you don't have a partner or a family, particularly if you don't have siblings or they predecease you, it's really easy to end up alone in old age, with no help or support other than whatever scant resources are provided by social services. And you still have to request those - or your GP does - which requires you being able ask for help in the first place.

I wondered thar too @Tandora tje only thing I could think of is that because men without children are supposed to have “escaped”, no dreadful woman had been able to “trap them” into kids 🙄 that he’s supposed to have an amazing brilliant life with no complaints

by telling them actually he’s miserable without a family, he’s going against the whole narrative about single men without kids live the best life & that actually it’s fathers who have it bettsr

i dunno - it’s the only thing I can think of

maybe it’s a bit like when in the past I’ve talked to mothers (not all mothers!) about being childless and they say “ooooh you can have one of mine/at least you get a lie in” implying my life is something they want when you know full well their children are the centre of the life & they’d rather die than be without them

Yes I agree with all of this.

The social pressure to stay together that you mention - it's more positive than that though, you could argue that it's social support too. For example if you are married to a friend of a friend, and he's going through a lazy shitbag phase, you might have a mutual friend who'd have a useful word with him (say).

I have a similar theory about having more guests at one's wedding and apparently there's a correlation with how long the marriage lasts (I read this in Brides magazine though so can't rely on the source lol). More pressure/support to stay together.

I do think that you'd be more likely to take a risk on Terry from the pub if you knew lots of mutual friends: they could vouch that he doesn't have a gambling/drugs problem or a secret wife and kids etc. On OLD you know nothing of this so you're more wary of "red flags" which could turn out to be red herrings.