how can I persuade him to get me pregnant before the wedding?

[hensnotpens]

We want to have a baby and are so ready but....

DP runs a company that booms at Christmas and he works 3-5 days a week for all year in the gear up to Christmas and then works 6 days a week from August and 7 days a week from October to December 24th with very long hours.

I don't want to give my child a Jan or Feb birthday as I know those who have them and they hate the time of year. It's dark, close to Christmas. I also know I will get little support if I were 8/9 months pregnant as my partner is busy over Christmas.

We rely on this income and I encourage him working it.

Because DP is so busy over those 4 months we are trying to time having a baby.

I figured March/April/ May would be a good time and if we started trying to conceive for these dates, statistically it's likely we will be able to. He donated sperm as a student and had two successful pregnancies from that so we know he is fertile.

Problem is that he doesn't want to conceive before marriage (he is pro sex before marriage but his culture is more traditional) and we are getting married this year in the last week of August. If we conceived on our wedding night (which would be very lucky and unlikely) the baby woudl be born late may.

A baby born later May means he will start to get busy before the baby is even 3 months old and I will be quite alone with a newborn. Neither of us want that.

So instead of conceiving before marriage. He wants to wait a whole year. But I am so ready for this baby. I so want to have one already. I really don't want to wait a year.

With my plan I will be less than 12 weeks pregnant before the wedding (I don't drink so that doesn't bother me)

How can I persuade him to get pregnant before our wedding?

Bottom line, you can't. If it's a strong cultural belief of his I think it would be quite wrong to try.

You can't guarantee timing, I was lucky to fall pregnant on my first and second tries, but miscarried the second one.

I was also lucky in terms of pregnancy symptoms and would still hate to be pregnant at my wedding.

Is there a reason that you are so eager to move from marriage to baby? Unless there are pressing reasons to expedite things, it might be worth making sure the first is going well before ploughing on.

Wow. All this planning sort of take the joy out of anything.

Just wait until you’re married. You’ve no idea how you’ll be during pregnancy, you could be horrifically unwell and your wedding day will be miserable.
your OH could end up resentful that you pushed for something that ruined your wedding.

youll be and cope just fine if you conceive immediately by the time his busy period ramps up and if you don’t conceive straight away you take a break a bit later to try to avoid the busiest period.

I just posted above on the baby point, but there’s also the point that if his culture is traditional, you might want to respect that because there may be elderly relatives from the mother country who would find a pregnant bride truly scandalous and so it may count strongly against you or be a topic of conversation that clouds the day.

Are there other ways in which he is traditional and have you talked through how you will be as a wife/mother vs his expectations? If you’re expecting 50 percent of the housework and childcare from him and he’s expecting you to
handle all the housework even after having children it might throw up some challenges. (It tends to anyway…)

It's a gamble whatever you do. No certainty you will get pregnant when you want to. Reading these boards prove that. Sadly for some folk it can take a long yime. It's not like ordering a book from Amazon to make sure it doesn't arrive when you are on holiday.

A birthday on Christmas Day, or New Year, might be difficult. However, I have an early February birthday, and I always liked it.
I love winter, and as a kid, I used to see it as something to still look forward to after Christmas (plus, I if I didn’t get a present that I wanted at Xmas, I would try again for my birthday😁).
I also appreciated that it meant I was never the youngest or oldest in my class (for some reason that always mattered to me!). I never had issues with kids not being able to come to my parties (my mum has a birthday in the summer holidays, and always complained that it meant nobody from her class ever remembered!).

The first term of pregnancy sucks shit. You're nauseas and vomiting, exhausted, feel like shit. I wouldn't want to get married at 12 weeks pregnant. At all. You wouldn't enjoy it. You wouldn't look your best, you won't feel your best.

This level of planning is over the top, imo. I think you need to try to relax and kind of let things happen a bit more naturally. As a February-born child, I can tell you that I never minded being born that time of year. That was the only time I could be born, since if my parents had conceived at a different time, I wouldn't have been me (different egg, different sperm).

You're massively overthinking this.

(I do, however, think it's a bit odd that your husband-to-be was fine donating sperm if he's traditional enough to not want a pregnancy out of wedlock.)

You've had a conversation with your partner and he's made it clear that he doesn't want to try for a baby until you are married. Trying to persuade him shouldn't be an option, because that means you aren't respecting his choice. You want a baby now, but you aren't married, so therefore having a baby now isn't an option. Unless you are older, then I don't see the issue with waiting for a year once you're married. Perhaps your partner would like to experience the start of married life, with just you, before a baby comes along?!

You have mapped everything out, and seem to be expecting life to run to your timescale. Life doesn't work like that! You're rushing ahead with your own schedule, because it's what you want, but there's little thought to your partner. You want to railroad over his thoughts and opinions, because you want your own way!!

Do you have a spreadsheet, you sound like you do. Stop overthinking everything. Get married and have a baby in a few years...you know nature has its own agenda 🤔

Me too!

You really need to stop this nonsense now. You are really hugely overthinking it.

You simply cannot time to perfection when to have a baby. In fact, you can probably much more easily time when not to have one (using contraceptives) than when one will happen once you start to try.

Many women don't become pregnant as soon as they start trying. There are some that do of course, and others are still trying months, even years down the line. Then there are those who miscarry, sometimes repeatedly, an others who might have a stillbirth. They would probably find the tone of your post jarring and inconsiderate if I am honest.

I’m not sure that’s a point in reality- if you are pregnant on your wedding day who cares what some old aunt thinks?
Clearly his family is likely where his conservatism has come from, but if they did want to be pregnant they shouldn’t be taking this sort of judgement into their decision making process.

Is this a joke? Conception rarely works like this, particularly when you’re trying to achieve it within a certain time frame. My husband and two sons have end of December, New Year’s Day and January birthdays and we deal with it.

I do think it’s a fundamental part of who you are about whether you’d get pregnant before marriage. You don’t even need to be majorly religious to have those beliefs. I wouldn’t have ttc before marriage and I’m not religious.
I think planning to degree you are is setting you up to come down with a bang. You can’t control everything.
I’d concentrate on getting married and then see.

You can't time it. Ok, I'm sure some people get extremely lucky and have their baby arrive perfectly healthy and exactly when they want, but for the rest of us it's months/years of trying, miscarriages, tfmr, secondary infertility...get married and then shoot your shot and stop worrying about the timing. That's small fry compared to having a healthy baby.

I too think you are being naive in your plan to work out exactly when you’ll conceive - and I conceived very easily (2nd month on my first pregnancy, first month on my next two and a single time having sex in a month when not trying for my 4th pregnancy ). My second pregnancy resulted in a missed miscarriage. I was at 12 weeks when that happened and I ended up in A&E as I was in agony, passing huge blood clots, losing a hell of a lot of blood and I was in pain for hours before being admitted. The miscarriage wasn’t complete and it took nearly a month to finalise. In my first pregnancy I was extremely sick until around 12-14 weeks. In my third pregnancy (second child) I developed sciatica on both legs around 15/16 weeks and was unable to walk further than my living room to the kitchen next to it. I was in agony and housebound my whole pregnancy. My fourth pregnancy (third child) I suffered with back pain again, although not as bad but enough to get signed off quite early. They were also very concerned that i was at risk of premature labour - so once again on ordered rest.

So if you were to fall pregnant before your wedding, you would be risking being too unwell to attend your own wedding anyway!

Besides all of that, you should try to talk someone into having a baby they aren’t ready for. Imagine the uproar if a man came on here trying to talk his soon-to-be wife into getting pregnant now when she had made it clear she didn’t want to try for a baby until after she was married.

That’s true, but given he doesn’t want to be pregnant it would be an added factor.
I walked down the aisle five months pregnant but it wasn’t with my husband feeling embarrassed about it in the face of family criticism.

Get married in two weeks time in your local registry then?

I just wanted to say I’m so sorry to read this about your daughter, and I hope that, in time, she is able to conceive again. How very hard.

Well this is weird

February is a lovely month, full of spring promises! 🌻
The trouble with younger people, they want what they want, and they want it now. You can't plan a baby like this!!!
Also, his culture requires marriage but I bet it doesn't allow sperm donation and who ever gets to find out if it is successful or not?? I think he is lying TBH

Yup, took me 7

You seem extremely sure of your own fertility, OP...