Unconventional Wisdom: A Promise of Babies

A Promise of Babies

My husband and I have been together for almost 10 years, married for three. I told him years ago that I wanted to have a baby when I was 25; he agreed. We have a house, plenty of "toys," and we make a decent living. I am now 25 and he wants to wait "another year or so." I feel betrayed and frustrated.

It's one thing to have long-range goals as a teenager. It's another to live life as an adult; generally goals need some adjustment as real life impinges. Most men wish to establish themselves professionally before having a child. They take seriously their role as provider, and they want to be in the best position to provide. When do they feel ready for this? Some of it has to do with income, some with psychological preparedness. The strange part is that you have no clue why he wants to wait a bit. What have you two been talking about for the past 10 years that his hesitation takes you by surprise? Put aside your own feelings of betrayal and frustration and take a moment to find out how he sees things and what's on his mind. Maybe his goals for himself have expanded. Maybe your husband has only your needs and a baby's needs in mind; after buying a house and toys, he may want some time to accumulate capital—financial and psychological. It's time to talk about hopes and dreams. That's how couples stay close and avoid the kinds of surprises that feel like betrayals. You and your husband are still young. Waiting a year or two will not jeopardize anyone's health. But your wishes count as much as his. Perhaps you can together agree to wait "a year" rather than "or so."

She's 16 Years Older; Can It Work?

I'm 23 and I took some time off from the dating scene after my last relationship disintegrated. Recently, my friendship with a coworker has turned into something more. We have mutual feelings, but she's 16 years older. Is it possible for a couple with such a wide age gap to have a healthy relationship? What kinds of explanations can we offer friends and family should we choose to try to make it work?

Of course it's possible to have a healthy relationship. It just comes with a special set of problems on top of the ordinary ones. As Cervantes said, forewarned is forearmed. Since your relationship runs counter to the cultural norm, it will definitely invite the stares, questions, and even the rudeness of curious or judgmental outsiders. On bad days, that could make you question yourself and your partner. Going slow now will help you know whether you are both up to the challenge. You can also insulate yourself to some degree by preparing a witty response to deploy in such situations; humor always disarms people. You might say, with a grand smile, "You may be wondering what my girlfriend sees in me. It's the usual: my yacht and my Porsche." Invent your own line.

Relationships work best when they are felt and seen as partnerships of equals. Hopefully, you both feel you bring roughly equal assets to the arrangement despite the age difference and you make roughly equal contributions. Right now, the difference in career and life trajectories is at its height, posing another hurdle. You also have different cultural reference points, creating different mindsets. These are not deal-breakers; they'll just make goal-setting and communication that much more difficult at times when you're already at your stress point.

Give the relationship time to see how it plays out on its own and how well you master the challenges with affection intact. The relationship may seem especially attractive now because it is readily available and provides needed reassurance that you are a desirable human being.

He Doesn't Want More Kids, I Do

My husband is 23 years older than I and we each have a child from previous marriages. Early on, I decided that to pursue this relationship I would have to resign myself to having no more children. I agreed when my (now) husband decided to have a vasectomy. Unfortunately I have changed my mind. For the last two and a half years I have been battling the maternal urge. My husband will be shocked when (and if) I tell him about my feelings. I long to pay tribute to our relationship and share a child together. I long to experience pregnancy, babyhood, and the raising of a child that is wholly ours, no extraneous factors. I don't know how to get over this longing or how I could ever talk to my husband about my feelings without ruining the grounds our relationship is built on.

You are discovering the difficulty of having created a relationship on one-sided terms that discounted your own needs before you even knew what they were. And now, understandably, you ache with regret. However, you have vastly over romanticized the role of a child in a relationship. You are expecting things from a child when it is the nature of healthy development for children to require things from their parents. Their task is to grow and make demands on their environment—some kids make more of them than others—and to test themselves and to mess up before they get things right and to need care and attention and support and usually a great deal of time and concern from you. The way life is structured today, children are far more likely to strain a relationship than genuflect before it. Your expectations are highly unrealistic and a likely recipe for disappointment.

Most alarming is the implication that a child who is "wholly ours, no extraneous factors," would be different from, possibly better than, other children in the household. For sure, raising stepchildren can be daunting because of all those "extraneous factors," not to mention all the intrinsic ones. They need all the love and discipline from their biological parent and the respect and care of a stepparent from whom love may, or may not, later flow. I hope you read up on the nature of stepfamilies and rise to the challenge by caring well for the children you have.

When you married, you knew that deep down you probably would want more children. You attempted to sacrifice your needs to land the guy. Put aside, for the moment, the double dishonesty, to yourself and to him. Complying with someone else's unilateral terms only breeds resentment, and in the long run, that corrodes a relationship from within.

How do you now deal with a relationship begun under false pretenses? A lot will depend on your husband, his nature, his views on loyalty, his need for control, and his capacity for empathy. Talk to him about the situation; open the conversation by telling him about the sadness of your dilemma. Having a partner means you ought to be able to share your innermost thoughts with each other, not that you demand he see things your way. Indeed, your husband may feel betrayed, but don't overreact to his initial response. Changing his mind would require a miracle, not to mention surgery. The best you can hope for is to use your husband as a cushion for your grief. We can't get everything we want in life. The real sadness is that you already have so much but find it insufficient. Give your love to the family you have.

Happily Never After

I am engaged, love my fiance deeply, and have no doubt that we will be very happily married. But I have developed an intense emotional connection with a man at work. He is married, and while nothing physical has happened between us, I fear that we are engaged in something worse: an emotional affair. We are spending more and more time together, often seeing clients and going for drinks afterward. Neither of us says anything negative about our partners, but we have acknowledged that if we were both single, things between us would be different. Should I feel guilty?

No. You should be feeling relieved that you have been presented with a test—and failed. At least you know where you stand. You are sure that you and your fiance "will be" very happy. That is a form of magical thinking, expecting that a wedding band will transform the relationship into something more rewarding than it is now and you will live happily ever after. Maybe you've read one too many fairy tales. In real life, you have to accomplish the work you have been unwilling to do: Emotionally invest in and commit to your fiance. Once couples marry, they generally feel free to turn their attention to other life goals, and so they begin paying a bit less attention to each other than during the courting period. Under the best of conditions, two people leading busy lives have to work very hard to maintain closeness. They have to share information constantly, and they have to talk about what's happening inside their heads. You're not even married and you're looking for closeness and excitement elsewhere. Save yourself later grief and put your engagement on hold. You need to figure out who you are and what you want.

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