I'm 20 years old, away at university and have been with my boyfriend of the same age for three years. While I have been away at university he has been left at home, and is unhappy with where he is in life. He works in a bar but hates it, and some days he has flashes of motivation to get out of the bar and into a job with more prospects, but other days he just doesn't care and has no motivation to make something of himself at all.
When he is in a good mood we have so much fun together, and I love him dearly but recently he is often in a bad mood, and that does not make for nice conversations or much fun at all. But still for me the good outweighs the bad, and so I can deal with the times when he is unhappy. And I do want to be there for him and I want him to feel like he can talk to me about what's going on with him and to feel like he can lean on me.
However, in one of his bad moods the other night, he blurted out to me that he didn't want kids. He knows that my two main goals in life are to be a teacher and to have a family, and until now he'd always been really supportive of my ideals and what I wanted. We would often discuss the future, specifically our future although now I have thought about it I guess those conversations had become fewer and farther between more recently.
I'm only twenty, and kids are not on the table right now. But they are definitely on my table for the future, but he says they are not on his at all. And I am completely conflicted. And I'm not sure whether I haven't left him because I am scared to, or because I actually really don't want to. But now every time I think about him I get close to tears, because having children is so so important to me. Is it possible that when he gets older and more stable and more mature that he will want children, or is this the kind of thing that people decide and stick to?