This is a long story but here goes…I finally plucked up the courage to try dating two years ago after many heartbreaks and scares. After two years of losing the will to live punctuated by nice but boring dates, a guy sent me a message on a dating app last Summer. It was a lovely complimentary message - a rarity on dating sites. So I matched with him to reply. I thanked him for the compliment but told him we would be incompatible as I want children and he had stated on his profile that he didn’t want anymore. He told me he did want more, but with the right person and there wasn’t an option to clarify this, so for simplicity, he selected the option that he did not want anymore. When I told him this wasn’t true, and he could in fact select the option that. he would consider having more, he seemed confused and said he hadn’t realised.
Against my better judgement, he managed to convince me to go on a date with him. We unexpectedly really hit it off. Sparks flew, I felt hope like I hadn’t experienced in years. I have significant trauma in my past and I didn’t have a relationship for years. I had been to years of expensive therapy to even get the courage to date again, so this was a thrilling, euphoric, liberating time. I did things with him I would never usually do - like stay at his house, let him prepare my food and drink, make time to see him regularly, and have unprotected relations with him. All was going really well and we had the talk and decided to be exclusive. This was also a very difficult relationship because from the beginning, he constantly compared me to his kids and emphasised that I would never come first and I would never compare to them.
This started to get me quite down. I was confused and hurt at the double standard that he wanted me to make him a priority in my life but he wouldn’t be willing to make me a priority in his at any time. It sounded like he was using his kids as an excuse to behave badly because everyone has important things in their lives, whether they have kids or not, and it felt unreasonable to me for this man to tell me that he wanted a relationship with me but expected me to settle for not being prioritised. I’m not saying I expected to come before his kids, but I don’t understand why he would set up this hierarchical system from the beginning when this is not applied to other relationships and everyone knows a romantic relationship is a relationship like any other and if it’s not prioritised, it won’t last.
Anyway, I unexpectedly found out he was exploring other options on dating sites while telling me he wanted to be exclusive and when I confronted him, he ended it over text. During the time I was shocked and heartbroken over this, I tried to reconnect with him and repair the relationship. He strung me along for four months and I later found out that, during this time, he was in another relationship and when it ended, he asked me if I’d like to meet up.
When we met up, he explained that he had been talking to someone from a dating site but only because they bonded over having kids.
We have since rekindled the relationship and we were talking again about my plan to have children of my own in the future. Out of the blue, he told me that he had a vasectomy while we were split up. I feel totally confused as if he had told me from the beginning he didn’t want kids, I would have never pursued anything with him, which I told him at the beginning.
i just feel like he never wanted kids in the first place and felt ok to mislead me about this as long as he got what he wanted. I just feel like maybe he doesn’t care about me or value me. Yet I’ve totally fallen for him and it’s so confusing how easily I’ve connected with him. He is caring and treats me decently, but I just don’t know if his motivations for this is to get things his own way.
I know I can’t persuade someone to have children with me but am I being unreasonable to feel hurt by his actions? I don’t know whether to stay with him because it’s the closest thing I have felt to a connection in years or if i am wasting my final fertile years on someone who is happy to let me do this because he already has his own kids with previous partners and he has already made it clear that I don’t fit into this picture
On a positive note, we laugh a lot, we can talk for hours, we feel comfortable with each other, but I can’t help feel he doesn’t see me as important enough to make me part of his life. Am I being unreasonable to feel this way?
I don’t know if it’s better to hold on to what I have rather than to let go of it in the hope I might meet someone who will want to have children with me knowing I may risk having nothing in the end. Bearing in mind, it has been over ten years since I last met a man I liked