Real life: he really wants a child, but I don't want one with him

Yara (29) has been together with her boyfriend Alex (31) since 2012, but a desire for children stands between them. What to do when you and your partner have a different future in mind?

‘With some women, you just feel: you are going to be a fantastic mother. It can't be otherwise. I sometimes wonder if others have thought that about me too. I don't think so. As far as I know, I behave downright awkwardly around children. I have no idea how to act. Maybe it's not done to say, but every time my friends bring their children home, I am secretly relieved. Besides, the whole ‘you turn 30 and now you definitely want children’ story really overwhelms me.

Alex wants nothing more. In fact, the point has been between us for years. When we had been together for two years, he called me, while we were tipsy on a terrace in France, ‘the mother of his future children’. Something I thought sounded very cute at the time, but also as something ‘still very far away’. Until I heard him say it again to a friend on the phone recently: ‘Yes, but when we have children…’ Suddenly they are everywhere: babies. One after another friend is pregnant, and with every pregnancy, I see him looking at me with a certain happy look. I can already see him in his mind starting a family with me.

And here comes the knot in my stomach. I just don't know if I want that. Or even more painfully: if I want that with him. Aside from the question of whether I am even fertile enough to have children. Do you slowly grow into the idea of wanting children? Is it normal to doubt whether your partner is ‘the right one’ to do all this with? I have no idea, but I feel incredibly guilty about it every time I look at him. I am very happy with how our relationship is now. We travel often and a lot, have nothing to complain about our double income, and have a good sex life. I don't need children at all to be happy or feel complete. But he clearly sees that differently.

These weeks we are together in social distance, and he keeps making jokes about the baby boom that is coming and the fact that we now have ‘all the time to talk’ about the future. And the more he brings it up, the more it suffocates me. The only thing I wonder now is: how further… There are all sorts of reasons not to want to start motherhood. Uncertain times, overpopulation, wanderlust, illness, a bad childhood, or just… simply ‘not wanting anything to do with children’. But not knowing if you are the one I want to procreate with is too painful to say. And even that I am not sure about, maybe I am just saying that now out of some kind of strange fear of commitment.

Anyway, I am afraid that the bomb is going to burst soon. Is this a postponement of execution, or can we still go on like this until it really becomes an urgent need and an ultimatum comes? Would my feelings change? I am sure he will leave me if I tell him that I am not sure if I want to become a mother. Rationally, I understand it, I wish him that too, emotionally it makes me very sad. Is it very selfish that I don't want to end our relationship because I still love him so much? My heart breaks at the thought…’

In this unusual time, we asked people to share their honest story. To avoid hurting others, the names of Yara and Alex have been changed.