I [33F] now want kids, but my wife [33F] of 5 years will never want them and I am having a big, lonely crisis about it.

Before I met my wife, my stance on kids was always "I don't need kids to complete me, but if I met someone who I could see myself having and raising children with, I would! If my partner doesn't want kids, I'd be ok with it!" Spoiler alert: that was the biggest lie I ever told myself and now it's coming back to haunt me.

My wife knew my feelings about kids before we got married and because her stance was always a very confident "hard pass," and mine was more "meh," it was really easy for me to just call it a day at "ok, we're not having kids."

My wife's reasons for not wanting them are totally irrelevant to this. It's ok to not want kids and I respect her feelings about it. My panic is that for the last couple years, I've had these growing internal feelings of now wanting a child and regret for not knowing sooner or at least regret for not fully evaluating the gravity of our incompatibility on this topic.

I've always loved kids! I think I'm good with them, I love talking with them, teaching them things, etc. I just never had a desire to have one of my own until these last couple years.

I'm now starting to feel empty. I get these maternal pangs when I'm around all the kids in my family. They bring me so much joy and I feel like being a mom to one of my own is the next chapter for me. I am gay, so when I say "having one of my own," I am including all options I have as a gay person: carrying myself via donor, supporting a partner who is carrying via donor, using a surrogate, and adoption.

And to be clear, I understand that simply being around a child and raising one (or multiple) are worlds apart -- yes, I know. I'm here for it and I'm in a very good position in my life to commit myself to another life. I have a very stable job, financially prepared, a ton of family support, I'm mentally and physically healthy... I'm a happy person outside of this one area that I think in a couple more years is really going to bring me down hard.

The big catch in all this is my wife, and I hate it because there is no winning scenario for her and it's not her fault. First of all, I'm starting to resent her for not wanting kids which is just stupid on my part and totally unfair to her. Secondly, even if I told her all of this (that's right, she has no idea I'm feeling this way...more on that in a sec), I don't want to have kids with her. She's great with our family's kids and everything but I know with high certainty that we'd have polar opposite parenting styles and it would not go well. It's a moot point.

So, I can hear everyone yelling at me already to go talk to my wife. Yes, I know. Obviously. I'm 100% scared of the consequences. I'm scared of facing a very real and likely possibility that it ends our marriage on the spot. I'm scared it'll send my wife into a terrible emotional tailspin since it WILL be unexpected. I'm scared of divorce. I'm scared of her surprising ME and saying "ok let's have kids" simply not to lose me (which I wouldn't allow anyway) but then me having to punch her in the soul again with "oh, well, I don't want to have kids with YOU". I mean, yikes!

We've been married for 5 years. Our relationship isn't perfect, but we are solid. This has been eating at me for 2 years and it's going to crumble that solid foundation at some point. If I were single, there would be no anxiety around this for me. I'd simply take the next steps towards having a child. I have even thought through being a single parent by choice. Of course, I'd love to have a partner in raising a child, but I'm not going to hunt for a new partner specifically for this. I want a child regardless of my relationship status. The trouble is that the marriage I am in is a conflict, and just writing that makes me feel like an awful and offensive person towards my wife.

Do I give it some more time and see if these feelings pass? Maybe it was 2 years of pandemic-related changes that contributed to this... being locked up, having nothing to do but eat, work, sleep and repeat? In my heart, I know it's not. That would be an excuse.

Do I tell my wife immediately and legitimately risk my marriage, upending both our lives completely?

Do I speak with a therapist first? I don't know what kind of better action that will help me with other than working on how to talk to my wife about it because oh man I do not even know how I'd bring this to her with the sensitivity it deserves.

I feel so lonely and afraid about this. I fear that it's just going to get worse and the longer I wait, the more resentful I become, literally the older I get (and I'd like to prioritize carrying a child myself), the bigger the blowup would be ... I hate that I'm in this situation because all roads lead to ruining my wife's life.

TL;DR My wife of 5 years and I decided we weren't going to have kids when we got married. 3 years into it, I have changed my mind and having a big internal panic about it because I feel like no matter what, the roads lead to me blowing up my wife's life through zero fault of her own.

Submitted November 28, 2021 at 01:04AM by unashamed_desire https://ift.tt/3CUI8wY