Partner ended engagement at 22 weeks pregnant and now will not speak

[CharlieBrown123]

I am 22 weeks pregnant and my partner broke up with me a few days ago and now won’t talk to me.

We met in December, and the pregnancy was a complete accident - when I found out I was pregnant I felt really upset as I wasn’t sure how a termination would affect me emotionally, but after talking it through with him he was really keen to support me and for us to have the baby together despite only having known each other a short time.

I was invited to move into his house and we started going to all the appointments together, he would cry at scans saying I was his forever person and he was so excited to have a family with me. He proposed and the wedding was set for the 1st July so that we’d be married before the baby came along. A couple of weeks ago he took me to Norway to meet his family and nephews who were so excited to have a new cousin.

We did sometimes argue, well it was more a case of me just randomly crying, particularly in the first trimester, but I was assured this was a normal part of pregnancy and he was generally supportive.

On Wednesday, on our morning dog walk and quite out of the blue he broke off the engagement, he then told me I had to leave the house that day. When I tried to have a conversation about how I could survive financially through maternity leave he said he would not be providing support as he would get lawyers involved to ensure he had 50/50 custody. I have barely heard from him since apart from a few messages about arranging to have my belongings delivered back to my flat.

I have sought the advice of a solicitor and now know what my rights are, and a lovely lady at universal credit helped me understand how to support myself through maternity leave so I know that from a financial and legal perspective, everything will be fine. Emotionally I am still so shocked and confused by his behaviour, and not sure how someone can go from one day saying how becoming a family is the best thing that’s ever happened to them, to the next not even wanting to know me.

Has anyone else experienced anything similar? Does pregnancy sometimes have this effect on men? I really feel like I need some answers but I know I won’t get them from him.

Who says she needs to recognise it? You, because you’ve decided she must? Get over yourself. She asked for help with the practicalities, not for a sermon.

LOL why are so emotional about responses on this specific thread? She did not ask for help with the practicalities. Go and re-read the post.

Plenty of posters saying that the OP should not put his name on the birth certificate because he is a waster etc. It punishes the child to never be given the chance to find him

A mother who is not married can't "put his name on the birth certificate". If parents aren't married the father has to attend at the registrars or complete a statutory declaration of parentage. Your mother likely had no choice in the matter.

I’m not emotional, I’m angry. Angry that a clearly upset woman with autism has posted that she’s just been left by the man she thought she’d marry while she’s 22 weeks pregnant and other women have decided that she should be slapped down and criticised and told she should get an abortion and told she’s tanking her life with no thought to what she will feel reading their comments. If you can’t genuinely see why that’s wrong and hateful then you must be made of stone.

That’s a nice story but also the reason OP is currently pregnant and you’re not!

I don’t think she should’ve got an abortion, that decision was hers alone to make.

But I think there’s a climate of being fed up of the state being forced to pick up after people’s very very obviously bad life decisions coming home to roost.

I don’t blame OP for wanting a baby, if she had gone down the sperm donor route and planned her mat leave properly this would be a nothing conversation.

Ok she’s just one person, but they all are, and together they make up a culture of a laissez faire attitude towards contraception and having babies which inevitably results in benefits, a fatherless child and a mother struggling to cope. Having a baby is HARD, let alone with money struggles and no joint parent to lean on.

What’s best for her is for everyone to say ‘awww hun, what an arsehole, see what you’re entitled to’. What’s best for the child is to drive home the message that contraception is of paramount importance unless you are BOTH ready to take the step of having a baby together, and financially ready for this.

Sorry OP, I feel that nobody has really answered your question!
My situation isn't identical but similar.
I was a 40 year old single mum with a 9 year old. Was introduced to a man by a mutual friend and we started a relationship. He lived 50 miles away and I quickly decided it was never going to be a long term thing. He was younger, had abandoned another woman who had his baby years earlier and was generally bad news. However he would constantly say he'd love to have a baby with me so when I found myself unexpectedly pregnant I thought he'd be ok.
He changed overnight, went cold, started being unkind etc I told him I was having the baby and it was up to him if he stuck around. After all I'd been raising a child alone already so I wasn't scared from that perspective. He chose to stay, moved in and was pretty well absent the entirety of the pregnancy. And after our DD was born. We split up a few weeks before her first birthday. He didn't really make much effort to see DD.
He moved in with a woman he'd been having an affair with soon after. They're still together 13 years later. He pays maintenance but isn't exactly father of the year. I never stopped her seeing him but she doesn't seem to want to see him much. He lives close by.
You can do this and you will be ok.
Know your legal rights, find as much emotional support as you can and don't be intimidated by this man. Don't put him on the birth certificate and then he has to go through court if he wants to be in your child's life. He seems very controlling. Make sure you're calling the shots.
Ignore all the negative comments- I still get judged for having 2 kids alone and by different fathers, I couldn't care less what people say and you won't after a while. Look forward, never backwards and focus on the positives in your world. It will be hard and some days will seem impossible, especially at first. Nothing prepares you for being a parent and it's exhausting, but you will do it.
And congratulations on your pregnancy!

You think what’s best for her is a pile on to point out the error of her ways? What’s best for her unborn child right now is for a bunch of strangers to post a load of bile that might send her stress levels soaring? The contortion you are doing to justify the nastiness would be hilarious if this wasn’t someone’s actual life we were talking about.

You are also massively stereotyping lone parents here as benefit scroungers. OP has said she has a job. She might be entitled to more maternity support than the statutory minimum but she’ll be going back to work afterwards.

Op is now reliant on benefits for her maternity leave - she says this in her OP. She can’t afford it.

It isn’t just OP reading these responses. Perhaps somebody in the early stages of dating has had a reality check and gone off to book a contraceptive implant. Who knows.

Perhaps then, your point shouldn’t be that women who get pregnant and are let down financially by the father must go and get an abortion before they seek financial support from the state, but why maternity pay is so low in the first place that it does not cover household bills?

Because, like NMW, the country cannot afford to make it higher. We can’t blame all our life decisions on a lack of a utopian system that cannot exist.

As is regularly publicised, birth rates are in decline which is bad for the economy. Therefore would it not be better to balance the books another way than putting new parents in poverty? Are you an economist? Do you have suggestions other than expectant mothers having abortions if they are let down by their partner, or is that your best idea?

Don’t start that. You can’t swerve all personal responsibility by blaming the state.

Oh my God, this thread. 😂

This man is a Grade A shit, a monster, a textbook narc, the OP needs to file a police report on him and do a Clare's Law request.

Seriously.....all for the crime of changing his mind about wanting to commit to and marry a woman he's only known for six months. If he'd love bombed her and begged her to let him get her PG, promising love and devotion forever then you might all have a point, but that's not at all what happened, is it? And he says he intends to have a close relationship with the child, so it's not as if it's a case of complete abandonment of them both.

Would he be more or less of a 'monster' if he'd just levelled with her from the very beginning? Did what most blokes would have done after a few weeks and said 'look love, you are nice and we were having some fun but a baby already? You've got to be kidding me. I barely know you. I can't force you to terminate, but I'll be honest, I'm not on board with this at all. I'll fulfil my financial obligations towards the kid but don't expect any more from me than that. I'm offski. Let me know when it's born, we'll sort a DNA test and take it from there. Nice knowing you.'

@cookbookjunkie i think leading somebody on that they will get married and have a cosy family is mean, and ghosting them without explanation is even meaner. Neither have taken the appropriate steps, at any point.

But OP can't "put his name on the birth certificate" - as they are not married he has to agree to come to the registrar appointment.

OP and her ex-partner did use contraception (a condom) so this was a genuine accidental pregnancy. Maybe if the father of OP's child hadn't been such a shitty future faker by pretending that he wanted the baby and wanted to marry her when she told him she was pregnant, OP may have considered a termination at that early stage.

There is no way that she should be guilted into terminating her pregnancy at 22 weeks to save the Treasury the cost of her maternity pay and maybe some Universal Credit.

OP will go back to work after her mat leave and will be paying taxes again.

@Walkyrie, he is mean and there are many mean people out there. I do wonder why people expect decent behaviour from mean people and then post on MN about the bad behaviour of such people.

Maybe the validation they get from the PPs
that say poor you, he did wrong, you did nothing wrong allows for deflection from their own responsibilities and accountability. As parents we
must take both these characteristics very seriously. A baby is about to be born into this mess, unless both OP and the father decide to tone it down and put the well being of the baby first, be it through mediation or the legal process.

Both OP and the father of her child were irresponsible. But anyone that goes against the accepted, expected narrative is said to guilty of a
pile on and is lacking in sympathy. Rather than it sometimes being considered good old advice and common sense.

I don't think it's mean. I think he probably did really like her, convinced himself he could make it work and wanted to be a decent guy doing the right thing. He was stuck with the situation of a baby on the way regardless, so I suppose he thought he may as well give it his best shot. I'm sure he didn't intend to 'future fake' or lead her on with promises he had no intention of keeping.

But as time has passed he's got to know her better, realised it isn't going to work and thinks it's better to rip the plaster off now than do it when the baby's born, which would be worse.

Also he's NOT ghosting her without explanation AT ALL. He hasn't disappeared out of her life without a trace. He told her face to face it was over and now he's putting some distance and enforced silence between them, because sometimes, when you are breaking up with someone, you need to do that to get the message through. If they are confused and devastated and they beg and cry and want to endlessly debate it and try to talk you round, it's the only thing you can do. Anything else is just prolonging the agony for all concerned. I think he's doing it this way now to make it clear to the OP that he absolutely means it and he's not just having a temporary wobble. I imagine he's thought long and hard about it and it hasn't just come out of the blue. They both sound like mature, intelligent people.

Perhaps he will talk to the OP a bit more about how they are going to make this work going forward once the dust has settled. But right now he's making it very clear that she has to move out and it's not up for discussion. If he was too soft about it she'd still be living there in a month's time. She'd be on MN saying 'I've got a baby due in a few weeks and my DP is messing me around saying he doesn't know how he feels and he's not sure he's ready to commit, one week he breaks up with me, then we get back together, then he breaks up with me again...'

Look, there is no way in which he can do this that won't seem harsh and cruel. Breaking up with someone is always going to be shit when they didn't see it coming. Asking them to move out and calling off a wedding is really shit. Doing it when she's pregnant is shitter still, for him as well as her. He's hardly getting off emotionally scot free himself.

Something has obviously happened since he took the OP to meet his family that has made him realise that, try as he might to convince himself otherwise, this isn't what he wants. He owes it to all concerned to be honest sooner rather than later.

Good grief, that's cold. She's mourning him, and you don't even care. All you do seem to care about is telling people what to do, and it is not helpful or pleasant.

You can't name a father on a birth certificate unless you are legally married when you register the birth or he is there with you to register the birth and consents to his name being added.

She hasn't asked for help with practicalities at all, actually. She seems to have the practical, legal and financial things all sorted out.

She wanted to know if other people had been dumped in similar situations and if pregnancy often affects men like this. In other words, scares them witless and sends them running for the hills when they weren't expecting it and barely know the mother.

She's been told quite plainly that yes, both those things are pretty common scenarios. For a moment there she thought she was going to be an exception to the general rule, but sadly not.

Or perhaps you could cut the misogyny down and stop with your fake moral outrage? Men are as equally, if not more, responsible for contraception as women are. Any time a man has sex with a woman, there is a chance of pregnancy happening; the only 100% reliable form of contraception is abstinence. Who said anything about the state picking up the slack? And even it did, so what? Isn't a gauge of a safe and prosperous society one where the mental, emotional and financial needs of parents and children taken care of? What is it to you, seriously?

Lucky you have contraception you can use though.
Any hormone base contraceptive makes me deeply depressed.
The copper coil had to be removed due to pain (‘interaction’ with a fibroid).

We need to be very careful not to assume that only using condoms = careless.

👏👏👏👏