Not every woman wants to have children and some believe that the maternal instinct is completely absent. But is it? Why doesn't the wife want to have a child? You will learn about this in our article.
It often happens that men do not want to have children, but women are like that too. While the former are easy to understand, the situation with the latter is somewhat more complicated. After all, it is women who give birth to children, not men. But the task of the male sex is different. And there is no way to dispute this.
And it just so happened that since nature has endowed women with the function of giving birth to children, they should want it. After all, why does a person need such a function at all if he doesn’t need it? Of course, there's no need. Accordingly, it is no coincidence that nature has endowed women with the opportunity to give birth to children.
Accordingly, it is inherent in every woman, but for some reason sometimes it falls asleep. It is believed that about 6% of women do not have maternal instinct. Some will say that this is quite a bit, but it is not so. But still, why can a woman refuse to have a child and what to do about it? Let's find out.
Pressure from outside
Many social factors put pressure on a woman. From childhood, girls are instilled with the idea that happiness lies in a large family. To some extent, yes, for many this is one of the elements of happiness.
And the fairy tales end with the princess marrying the prince, they had many children, and everyone was happy. Only in reality the picture is a little different (read above).
When a girl grows up, everyone around her suddenly becomes “concerned” with only one question: “When will you get married?”, “The clock is ticking,” and so on.
Rarely does anyone ask a woman what she wants until she announces it to annoying well-wishers.
Yes, we don’t live in the Middle Ages and girls have millions of opportunities and choices. Including: the ability to decide whether she wants to have children or not.
The childfree movement, by the way, is very actively gaining momentum also due to the fact that marriage and motherhood become the result not of harmonious relationships and love, but of pressure:
“When will you give me grandchildren,”
my mother cries.
“I need an heir,”
insists the husband.
“It’s very difficult to give birth after 30,”
my friends insist.
“Children
are the flowers of life,” from every “iron.”
The desire to have a child can often be dictated from outside. And from the inside, a woman is simply consumed by panic fear: from banal everyday problems to the uncertainty that she will be able to raise and educate a new person.
What if she simply has no desire to change anything. Selfishness has not been canceled either.
Why doesn't he want to get married and have children?
Thousands of girls and women are racking their brains over this issue, reading articles, books, pumping up femininity and women power, following the recommended points in relationships, trying in every way: pressing/not pressing on this issue, manipulating sex/not manipulating sex, but the question remains. without an answer, hangs in an existential vacuum and unanswered causes anger, disappointment, a feeling of humiliation and rejection.
Let's try to figure it out.
Firstly, many men want both a family and children . There are a lot of crazy dads around who understand diapers as well as women. And in my childhood there were no men with strollers in the parks, but now it’s a familiar picture.
Secondly, the age of marriage for both men and women has shifted significantly over the past forty years by 5–7 years. If earlier marriages took place on average in the 4th–5th year of college, with marriage partners also located there, now this very rarely happens in big cities. It is now important for a modern girl to get married before 30, for a man before 33–35.
The time shift has its consequences.
On the one hand, people manage to graduate from college and begin to provide for themselves, and this seems to be good; by the time they start a family, they are already firmly on their feet. On the other hand, the natural biological age is missed, when the creation of a couple and the birth of children occurs more spontaneously, under the influence of sexual desire. The natural time for establishing marriage relationships is missed The older the human body, the more difficult it is for it to live with someone. A person simply gets used to living either with his parents or alone. A person painstakingly creates his own personal comfort, which is difficult to share with someone. Various comforts. In addition, as a rule, by this age, both men and women have experience of relationships and more than one, often it is disappointing, painful, leading to the hypothesis or conclusion that all relationships end sooner or later, and stability and fidelity are an illusion.
The main consequence of the temporary shift in marriageable age is the loss of spontaneous reproduction , increased awareness, individual life practices, accumulation of disappointments and fatigue from relationships .
Men and women under 30 are no longer so much influenced by instincts, they make responsible decisions, and this is where personal hell begins. A powerful psychological virus - the fear of responsibility and decision-making - cruelly torments our contemporary. Never before have people had to make so many decisions! Women and men who are forced to make their own decisions about reproduction and are not used to it tend to take years to decide.
Women have the feeling that men don’t want children at all. It turns out a strange confrontation when women need it, but men don’t, and the woman feels alone. And in this loneliness he begins to courageously decide everything . Such a split between the sexes is observed in this place.
It’s still a little easier for women - the fear of being left without children at all at some point begins to advance the process, and instinct kicks in, often accompanied by neurotic reactions (“I have to get married and give birth this year, I’ve decided so”). And this scares men, by the way, because there is no logic in it. Why this and not the next? Why can't you just wait until everything works out on its own, rather than having sex according to your ovulation schedule? Control introduces many additional difficulties in relationships, tearing off the romantic veil, which men actually need more than women.
Men, theoretically, up to the age of 50 may not reproduce at all, so their time is not so scary, and at the weddings of friends their feelings of envy are weaker. As a rule, men do not realize that having children after 35 will force them to stay in work shape for ten years longer. Maybe unconsciously this is what they want? Just live longer. In our country, men die terribly early, and no one understands why. It’s not just alcoholics who die, not at all.
a big contribution to men's fear of marriage and children . By the time a woman has “matured”, she has usually already built a clear picture of how everything should look (a magnificent wedding - so that her girlfriends will envy, an expensive stroller - the child should not ride in a cheap wreck, etc.). The woman begins to realize her neurosis, because she is also scared - she lived for pleasure without children for thirty years. And the woman hopes/demands that the man will save her from this fear while she makes her sacrifices (she will become financially dependent on him, risk her career or lose it, lose her sexual attractiveness and will not be able to enjoy herself as before). A woman offers a man a rather strict contract for children.
The habit of living, satisfying one's desires in pursuit of comfort, plays a cruel joke here. But men cannot and do not want to rid a woman of her fear. They are also very scared. Men are afraid of not being able to afford all these necessary things. They are simply terribly afraid of not coping financially and psychologically and are dragging their feet until the last minute. And female pressure and manipulation only worsens the situation. Because from the moment a woman “ripes and decides,” a man is offered the unenviable role of a family slave. The woman will fulfill a great mission (to become a mother), and the man will be offered the role of service personnel. But in fact, a man doesn’t really want to be a resource and property. Why?
More precisely, many want it, and for them this is the male role, but many do not. Those who do not want to and fight with women are those who, since childhood, have not seen their mother’s respect for their father. Respect in this case is transmitted through mom’s satisfaction with dad (satisfied woman). He didn't see a happy dad either. In client descriptions, such a dad often looks like a not-so-obligatory forgotten character, living some very uninteresting life, in a barn or garage, without dreams or aspirations. The depth of these descriptions reveals deep contempt.
At the same time, when you start to figure it out, it turns out that he was a fairly good father, who seemed to do everything for the family (went to work, did homework with the children, got an apartment, didn’t drink), but was henpecked, and no one really respected him , and exploits were not discussed. He had no exploits. A very popular scenario for the Russian family of the post-war generation is an active, determined woman and husband, a supporting actor who never made it to the main stage. The boy does not want to be like such a father, he grows up and begins to try to understand: what is he like, and what does he want? This is long, difficult and still incomprehensible, but in the meantime you need to fight for freedom so as not to become like your father and postpone the implementation of the family scenario. Or another option, where the father is completely bad (traitor/alcoholic/womanizer/nonentity). There is no chance of identifying with him at all.
And if young men, idealistic and wanting to prove that they are “real men,” are ready, under the influence of instinct, to take on this role, then older men already know that the risk that a woman will still not be satisfied with something is very high, and they will fail like their father. The family is consciously or unconsciously viewed as a deliberately failed project. Years go by, relationships change each other, disappointment and fear of failure accumulate. Why get involved in a known failure? And the more a woman puts pressure (you don’t love/an indecisive loser/not a man), the stronger the desire to escape from this situation or delay it indefinitely. Fear goes around in circles and brings a lot of tension and psychological defenses that destroy good relationships.
The stupidest thing you can do is ask a man if he wants children and get offended if he doesn't yell "Yes!" very convincing. If he doesn’t scream, a woman often decides that it means he doesn’t love me. But this is not at all true, you also did not immediately agree to accept his “blessed seed”, but at first you thought for a long time, and no one was offended by you.
A man doesn’t know and wants to theoretically, but here and now - not really. In practice, I have discovered that very rarely men know the answer to this question. Probably, they are still designed to respond to it directly in the process leading to reproduction. And my deep conviction is that it is in the process that this must be resolved, otherwise the neurosis of responsibility is a big hindrance. And awareness of this desire is often inaccessible. The awareness of not wanting to have children from a particular woman, which also often happens, is generally very painful.
Surely there is also the influence of more global, “field” processes that we are not yet aware of - the unimaginable increase in the human population cannot but influence the desire to reproduce. And it affects, complicating and slowing down this process.
Let me remind you that in fact only a couple of generations are forced to take responsibility for this issue. For millions of years things were different. Thus, only recognition of the natural right of men to desire and not want to have children and a family, just as this work is done for women, can expand the situation and take away its pain, opening up prospects for a modern couple to more detailed agreements and open dialogue.
Escape routes?
If we consider the possibilities, a man has a greater chance of moving away from his child: career, work, affairs, meetings. The final solution is betrayal, divorce or leaving the family for various reasons, objective and not so objective.
There are many examples of a man leaving a woman in the first year of a child’s life. In most cases, a woman is much more attached to her child from the moment of birth.
The heroine of the novel, Elizabeth Gilbert, was right in many ways: “Having a child is like getting a tattoo on your forehead: in order to decide on it, you need to know for sure that you want it.”
If a man's desire to have children is unshakable, he loves his wife and is sure that. roughly speaking, I’m ready to live with her all my life - that means it’s worth working on the relationship.
There is no need to convince and persuade a woman, she needs to literally show that she is safe, loved, cared for and has nothing to fear. This requires quite a bit of work.
Invest in relationships
First you need to learn to talk to each other, listen and hear your partner. We need to find out the real reason why a woman does not want to have children.
These may be completely groundless fears. But what if a woman does not want to sacrifice: her comfort, body, time?
Here it is already more difficult, because in a harmonious and mature relationship, partners literally negotiate with their irrepressible ego in favor of each other.
This is the moment in which they first think about the other, and then about themselves. And without sacrificing oneself, but simply because one never forgets about the partner, his desires, and opinions, especially if the latter coincide.
You need to invest equally in the relationship. If the balance is disturbed, the family gradually falls apart. Another big question is that the desire to have a child arises naturally in a harmonious couple.
Children are not just a bunch of cuteness.
Talk about what each of you will conditionally “sacrifice” if a child appears or does not appear in the family, how your life will change after this, discuss with your wife your views on raising a child.
With all this information, it will be easier for a woman to trust and decide to take a responsible step.
Is it worth getting a divorce if the wife doesn’t want a child?
Should you get a divorce if your wife doesn't want children?
In this case, divorce is not the solution to the problem. A man in such a situation does not just want a child. It must be from the woman he loves. They just want children in rare cases. Undoubtedly, you can always get a divorce and find a woman who will love children. But that would be a selfish act.
You must understand that children are always happy when their mom and dad love each other. And when parents simply love their children, but not each other, then such a relationship will definitely not be an example to follow. So you should only get a divorce as a last resort. It is better to try to persuade your spouse, solve problems together with her, and awaken her maternal instinct.
And let's be honest...
Men don't give birth. Pregnancy is not only a joyful state, but also a frequent urge to go to the toilet at the most inopportune moments, toxicosis, compulsive overeating or a complete lack of appetite. And many, many things.
The male body does not experience hormonal storms and changes; it does not need to pick itself up piece by piece after childbirth.
But at the same time, the birth of a new life is a real miracle. And the best way to convince your wife to give birth is to overcome the fear of the unknown and a new stage in your life together.
Ksenia Litvin,
psychologist Growth Phase
