Divorce, I guess.

heartbreak_star

I split with my ex of 11 years partially because he suddenly decided he wanted a child.

It can be a massive dealbreaker, and one that doesn't always show immediately

HBS x

whitewing

How sad for you.

I personally would go for a quick, clean break ie no holidays etc. (I have done long drawn out, hope we can make a second go of things, even sex again, and it just delays the inevitable).

snowleopard61

hazyjo wrote: »

What if he finds some other woman who would love kids with him only to find she's infertile? Would he just dump her and find another? Doesn't love come into it?

What if you agreed only to find you couldn't have any more? Would he dump you then?

Hmm.

Jx

Hazyjo, I can’t answer for the OP’s partner, but I have been in the situation where one (me) wanted children and the other didn’t – it didn’t split us up at the time but arguably contributed to our eventual split after 16 years of marriage – and what I would say to this is that I would have felt completely differently if my husband had been physically incapable of having children; this seemed to me completely different from choosing not to have them. (Had it been impossible to have children by the traditional method(!), I wouldn’t even have wanted to adopt or have IVF: the first because someone else’s child would never have felt like mine; the second because of the extreme uncertainty). It’s just different – hard to say why. (In case anyone’s wondering why we didn’t sort it out before marriage – we married young but were quite mature and of the same mind in most other things, but being in a position to offer children a stable home was years away and was something we mentioned only in passing; therefore by the time it became possible it was clear that in the interim we had developed very different feelings on the subject.)

But I really do feel for the OP; the horrible thing about it is that you can be the sort of people who come to agreeable compromises over everything else, yet over this there is no possible way to compromise; either one of you gives in, or you split, and that’s desperately hard.

victory

snowleopard61 wrote: »

Hazyjo, I can’t answer for the OP’s partner, but I have been in the situation where one (me) wanted children and the other didn’t – it didn’t split us up at the time but arguably contributed to our eventual split after 16 years of marriage – .

Did you have children with someone else?

snowleopard61

victory wrote: »

Did you have children with someone else?

No, nothing so dramatic - don't want to derail the OP's very personal thread with too much of my own history, but briefly I persuaded him and we did have two children together; however, feeling like a lone parent within a marriage took its toll on me - in fact when I actually was a lone parent later, daily life was much less stressful - and we were driven apart by our differing priorities, work in his case and family in mine, which is what I meant in my post above. (There's a lot more to it than that but not for here and now.)

ETA: Just for the avoidance of doubt, I don't mean he was working all hours to support his family; it wasn't like that.