Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
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Notes -
Question for mainly parents of motte but anyone can answer.
Would you have more or less children if you knew for sure that:
I am wondering what motivates people when choosing how many children to have. If neither of these would affect your decision but you have another important factor in mind, please share as well
I hate to do this, but I have to half-hijack the thread:
When is it actually "too late", for a male, to have children? Please don't give me the sunshine and rainbows "it's never too late!" nonsense. I'd like the informed and unvarnished truth that the Motte is (in)famous for.
I ask this as a mid 30s male in great shape with FAANGy levels of income in a non-FAANG job who's just a little too surly about marriage, but has accepted the moral imperative for reproducing and being a good parent.
Do it ASAP. Your kids deserve a dad who's young and energetic, not a tired old man. Give them best years, don't fritter them all away on yourself.
I realize this and agree. My main concern is marriage.
Convincing a woman to give you her hand (as it were) or selling yourself on a lifetime commitment to one female? Or something else?
Zero problem with commitment, not worried about actually meeting and dating a girl (have done this many times, a few that looked like they could go all the way).
My opinion, unfortunately, is that marriage is fundamentally broken in the west. I see this in my own laptop class PMC constantly where the pair got married on nothing more than the basis of "it seemed like the time!" Even if they don't end in divorce - which is common - the day to day subtle resentment between the partners is really astonishing. The hyper fixation on individual achievement or "actualization" paired with the toxic comparative nature of social media means that couples are living not for each other but for their imagined perception of themselves in the minds of other people outside the marraige. That's an insane way to be.
So, just find a down to earth girl who doesn't care about any of that. Maybe go a little more trad-ish, too, right? I (kind of) tried that. Started going to the Young Catholic events at a parish known for being very pro-coupling. The first girl I met was already engaged but we hit it off nonetheless and she became a good friend. A couple months into me going to these kind of events, having a few coffee dates etc. she pulls me aside and drops the truth bomb on me - a lot of the women in these groups are LARPing for a provider husband who they feel is utterly domesticated and low risk of ever straying away .... the men in these groups are pretty much doing the exact same thing but with a weird eye towards "sex on demand" and "thy wife shall submit!" This latter group are pretty much incels who went RadTradCath online, the former group are often party girls who wish to exit the hook-up culture and want to find a guy who is low risk, low dynamism. Both groups are entering relationships with a fundamental lack of respect for the other party. It's self-referential all the way down.
I want to commit to building a life with a partner, that is in no way the problem. I don't care about the leveling off of the passionate attachment phase of the relationship. But I do have sincere concern about the ability of most any firmly "in the matrix" person to really commit to the idea of marriage at the level of depth that I think is necessary for the marriage to last. Simple screening based on religious or political affiliation doesn't guarantee much (see above) and, what's more, I feel that social pressures and relative comparisons to other couples or imagined states of marriage are so omnipresent that they're a constant source of erosion of the commitment to the marriage itself.
I can recognize my own neuroticism here and I am aware that the only solution is to just do it and continue to work at it with a wife who also wants to work at it, but these thoughts persist.
Whether that was a truth bomb or just her cynical opinion is probably something to consider. Cynicism (in the couples you mention, in the viewpoint stated about the group) is never, in my experience, attractive long-term. People who complain--about whatever is around them--generally become intolerable, but it's a slow poison.
Apart from that, it's possible to overthink this stuff. I'm a small-picture guy. I never really think about the scheme of things, the larger frame, etc.
Have you met any southern girls? Sorry, women.
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