I have some sense of where you are coming from. I remember having mixed feelings when a friend of mine said they were trying to conceive with their partner: happy for them, but also sad knowing the friendship would probably change, and bad for feeling sad.
I also have to commend you for understanding that you need friends beyond your boyfriend/girlfriend. Not everyone understands this!
Loving children is a good reason not to have them. I think it’s cruel to bring a child into a world of declining resources, opportunities, and environmental health, and constantly increasing costs, risks, and insecurity.
I’ve known for as long as I’ve known that people have children. I’ve been open to the idea and possible discussion and doing my best if it ever happened to me. But there was no decision to be made in my mind.
Luckily I’m now pretty much past the danger for any foreseeable future.
Hobbies mainly, we joined a running club (in our 50s). We go running with other couples, some are child free. The child free tend to gravitate towards each other. Perhaps because we have more free time, and tend to accept invitations, and are able to host, as a result.
This makes sense. If you want kids and have the means to support them, then it’s fairly easy to just have kids. While it’s a ton of work, the entire process is very rewarding if that’s your thing.
If you want kids but can’t afford them, that’s a drop in life satisfaction.
If you don’t want kids and have aspirations outside of raising a family, you’re fighting an uphill battle since so much of our society is designed around men. It’ll be much harder for you to attain something satisfactory.
kids only benefit corps: they want human labor, they can create gmo kids and raise them on their expense, else a baby trashes his mother’s body, and a financial burden for the dad only to benefit corps. also noisy and uncontrollable, and personally i hate when things are out of my control.
Do you post about other stuff you don’t have or is it just children? Like do you post in different gaming consoles communities to say you don’t have that console.
I’m not arguing with the fact you don’t have children, I’m all for it, in fact. You should live life the way you want as long as it doesn’t harm others mentally or physically.
But an entire community dedicated to not having something screams that you’re not ok with this that it needs to be spoken about to be reassured, that it takes up more of your brain than not having other things would take up.
I guess what I’m trying to say is I don’t understand the reason this community exists?
Why do you go into other communities to complain about someone’s posts? An entire condescending post dedicated to complaining about something that has zero effect on your life - why bother? You could just ignore it, or even downvote it, and then just move on.
Having or not having children is a significant life decision. Maybe people want to talk about it? That’s why this community exists.
It exists because people are constantly flooded by a torrent of pressure to have children by society, and this is a place for a little catharsis and relief. Relief that there are a small number of people that won’t pressure you into doing something you don’t want to do. It’s a place for like-minded people to blow off steam.
I don’t personally come to this or similar communities, even though I don’t plan on having kids. I understand why it exists though.
For one, there’s a “community” that goes nuts over you not having something and will interject every time they get a chance even when unprompted and continuously question your decision and try to sway you another way.
Having a place to go to vent or talk is pretty nice when you have to deal with those individuals especially when many are surrounded by them and are made to feel “not normal” for it.
There’s a community for everything, it’s kind of the point of the internet, to be able to connect with like minded individuals.
Why do communities exist for - to pick an example - atheists? In lots of parts of the world, there is huge social pressure to conform to a specific religion. If you decide not to, or leave the religion, or have questions, it can be a terrifying and lonely experience.
It’s the same here. Lots of us feel huge pressure from family, friends, co-workers, and society to do something that we don’t want to do. So it is nice to have a community where we can discuss that and reassure each other. Because it is difficult to do what is right when everyone is telling you you’re wrong.
Must admit, I didn’t see it from this angle. Perhaps because of my personal experience in life and the few people in my social circle have never been pressured into having kids, it’s just not really been a thing in my 40 odd years on the planet. Perhaps cultural differences etc, either way adjusting my view point to be that of people constantly being pressured to have kids when they don’t want kids/can’t have kids allows me to understand the community’s existence.
Glad you are getting to be yourself around your new partner and it sucks that you had to go through the mess with your ex. Even amicable divorces suck.
Thanks! Yeah it was heartbreaking and the time between when I had accepted it and we actually agreed to it sent my mental health down the drain (and it was already going downhill before then). Luckily I’m in a much better place now!
As someone who has kids, it’s a fucking Act of Congress to get child care. I wouldn’t trust my parents to watch a potted plant, and her parents really aren’t interested in the whole grandparent thing. Hiring a babysitter is both sketchy and expensive, and asking a friend is awkward since
most of our friends are nokids and/or not super comfortable around kids and our kids were deeply blessed by the ADHD fairy and have never met a stranger in their whole lives. And
We don’t see our friends often, so “hey, wanna come over and watch our crazy heathens try to beat the shit out of each other every 3.5 seconds?” Is kind of a hard sell.
So, it’s just easier to take them everywhere, and if we can’t take them, we don’t go.
Ah, so just to recap, you chose to have kids, they made socializing difficult, and now everyone else has to deal with your “crazy heathens”.
These are reasons why people choose not to have kids, not reasons to justify ruining other people’s times because you decided to have kids and it had predictable outcomes.
The question asked, I answered. To be clear, we didn’t specifically sit down and plot to make you and other people miserable when we decided to have kids. Also, we don’t let them run wild, which usually results in us just leaving because they’re going to start melting down over not being able to go harass strangers who just want to be left alone. Besides that, we try to avoid adultier venues, but sometimes shit happens. When I say we normally don’t go unless we can take them, the emphasis is on the ‘we normally don’t go’. We kinda figured that the grandparents would at least be able to help, as has been the case for millennia, but it turned out that my mom has all the parenting skills of a pair of scissors and her parents want almost nothing to do with it. I’ll save you the sob story and just say that it’s been fucking difficult, and sometimes it feels like my brain is going to melt out of my ears; we’re not fucking sitting around laughing about ruining your night out, and that’s even if we do go out, which we usually don’t.
We try to avoid adultier places if we can help it, but sometimes there’s no helping taking your kid to the DMV and just having to get your shit chewed out by the security guard. In general, though, we just avoid unnecessary trips out.
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