Happily Childless but Constantly Hassled

My partner and I have been together for 8 years. We’re very happy and we don’t plan on having children, ever. But we’re still regularly hassled by friends, family, work colleagues and even relative strangers about when we’re going to have kids or why we haven’t had any. Maybe I should be used to it by now but I still find it so rude and so fucking invasive.

Despite telling people we’ve actively chosen not to have kids, many just keep laying on the pressure regardless. I’ve had a boss repeatedly tell me that it’s not too late and that I may regret not having children once it is. And we’ve had friends tell us that having kids gives your life purpose and meaning. The inference being ours has neither! Having children or not having children is a choice and both should be respected. I mean, I don’t ask my friends or colleagues why they had children!

We’re genuinely so happy in our relationship and with our child-free life, why can’t people just accept that?! I’m so over being interrogated I almost don’t want to go to social events anymore so I can avoid the questions.

Help make it stop!

Hey Lady,

It would be so easy to just write these interrogators off as rude/ignorant/narrow-minded/basic. And they may well be one or all of those things. They may also be scared; fearful of those who have side-stepped the limited life options that many religions and inherited social conventions have laid down as The Way to Live*.

Yet you and your person have chosen something that they may not have considered to be an option: another road, relatively less trampled but infinitely more exotic. Does your choice make them question their own road perhaps? In witnessing your happily child-free union and all of its excellent freedoms, they could well be feeling the long-term limitations on theirs. So they respond by trying to drag you into their world of teething, tantrums, years of childcare hassles and family infighting. Because that’s their version of normal.

When it comes to nosy and unsolicited poking into a person’s private life, this is the couples version of being constantly asked why you're still single. It definitely sounds as intrusive, judgey and unwelcome. And let’s take a moment to consider how much worse this line of questioning would feel for those who’ve had that choice ripped away from them by infertility, miscarriage or stillbirth. [If that doesn’t inspire everyone to STFU on this topic, I don’t know what will.]

In witnessing your happily child-free union and all of its excellent freedoms, they could well be feeling the long-term limitations on theirs.

Now only those on the receiving end of these kinds of interrogations really-truly get it — which is why I’m phoning a friend to help me/us navigate these particular weeds. My friend, let’s call her Liberty, has been happily married and very purposefully childless for many years. Liberty and her husband met, fell in love, and established that neither wanted a life interrupted by children. Then they made a pact to check in a few years later to make sure they both still felt the same and were 100% regret-free. To my mind, they are the pin-up couple for The Other Way to Live.

Liberty’s family and her in-laws have respected their decision but as a couple, they’ve copped it from critics in the double digits who’ve felt free to burden them with their weighty judgements and unwanted opinions.

“I’ve heard it all,” she shares. “From friends who worry that we won’t have anyone to look after us in our old age to an acquaintance who actually thought it was selfish not to have kids. It still floors me that people think they have a right to weigh in on such a personal subject.”

So what to say the next time the state of your womb is brought up at a barbecue? Besides the default move of smile, nod, and change the subject, it’s over to Liberty:

Option #1: Lay out the incredible benefits of being childless & leave them hanging in the air

‘I smile through their insensitivity as I tell them that our life is undoubtedly fuller than they may realise and in ways that those burdened with demanding tweens, unsexy SUVs, and rising debt to pay the school fees would not be able to fathom. And that we can live and work anywhere, we’re as free as a couple with a double income and no kids can be and it’s fucking glorious.”

[Good one, I imagine that amount of smug would suffocate that conversation quick smart.]

Option #2: Assert yourselves as superior citizens

“Sure, we thought about having kids but given the planet clearly isn’t coping and we’re all suffocating in myriad ways thanks to overpopulation, we just don’t think it’s a responsible thing to do. Why would anyone in their right mind think it’s ok to just add to the problem — unless of course you’re a narcissist right?!”

Option #3: The ultimate silencer

‘I’m barren.’

Liberty has used this one a number of times and claims it’s incredibly effective for the simple reason that there is no conceivable comeback and the interrogator suddenly needs to hit the loo/bar/exit.

As for this Lady’s advice: leave the staying in to those bearing leg irons chained to children. Instead, remember that like attracts like; widen your social circle and ram it with childless couples and singles who not only see you as the two very complete, fascinating humans that you are but who have a deeper and broader conversational repertoire. The Australian Bureau of Statistics says that more of those types are sure to be coming your way; the birth rate hit an all-time low in 2020 and some sociologists predict that within a decade, there will be just as many childless couples as there are those with children.

And in the meantime, while we wait for this course correction to play out, I’ll send you Liberty’s email…

*Which generally goes a little something like this: settle down into monogamy with a member of the opposite sex. Get married and then procreate with that person as many times as you like to make a family — even if you can’t afford it. Raise all offspring to do the same.]

Image credit: © Tim Walker