My now life-partner and I began dating a few years after my dramatic heartbreak – long enough to move on, not quite long enough to “get over it already”. My partner was my first date from an on-line dating website; he’d only moved to town two weeks earlier and I snatched him off the market immediately! We were two damaged souls that were both looking for a new adventure, growth, and healing; that’s far from ALL we were, but it was a point of essential connection in addition to the general necessities of shared interest and attraction. Plus, meeting on the internet is a great way to ensure that you do not spend years falling in love and building a life with someone with entirely incompatible long-term goals, like for example, one of you wants kids with the passion of a thousand suns and the other one is pretty “eh, whatever, but leaning no”. Whoops!
He wanted children by any means necessary. I think it’s easy for men to generally “want kids” because the majority of baby-work still falls to women, so I’m skeptical of men who “want kids”. In fact, he wanted both biological and adopted babies, and the whole family thing and he wasn’t kidding about it. I wanted a life of adventure and passion and growth and like…if a baby happened I would work with that and obviously get excited about it.
By the time we were married three years later, we had negotiated the contractual reproduction agreement – we would attempt to produce one child naturally. If that did not work out, due to age or otherwise, we would simply not have a child and would continue in our fulfilling lives without children. As an artist and a lawyer, we had plenty of professional and personal accomplishments and goals without children. We also have amazing nieces and nephews, and plenty of children of close friends to share in our lives. I love certainty and here we had it – a happy story for all involved, with a plan for every possible outcome! He could work sporadically and/or from home, and would be the “primary caregiver” (whatever that means) so that What could possibly go wrong?