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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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You're kind of proving my point lol. It's very important to me that I stick with 1 wife. You can definitely have kids in any financial situation but I think that doing so if you're not stable is a good recipe for divorce. Not to imply that's what happened to you, but this is the sort of thing I want to be extremely careful about.

Well my first wife passed from cancer after 20 years of marriage and three kids. Which is not to make you feel bad, but just to illustrate, you cannot control the future. If you both prize kids above financial success thats unlikely to lead to a divorce. If you're on different pages, then thats the real problem.

Maybe it will add 1% to your divorce chance, but you have to trade that against the chance, the timing is never right,or something happens to one of you in the meantime.

Sorry about your wife. I agree that the timing is never perfect but there are certainly tradeoffs to starting earlier vs later, even if you disagree on where exactly that tradeoff lands.

For me the priorities are:

  1. Have enough kids (3-6)

  2. Don't have kids after my wife hits advanced maternal age

  3. Don't have kids until completely financially stable

In that order. Since we're still pretty young, we're not yet constrained by 1-2, so may as well work on fulfilling 3. In a few years 1 and 2 will start to be actual constraints, so by then we'll be having kids whether or not 3 is met.

I think this is generally how people should be making these decisions--get your priorities straight and then act accordingly, rather than waiting for ill-defined life circumstances to line up correctly.

That doesn't sound unreasonable to me, especially at your age. The thing to look out for is if you start pushing that start time back. That can go more quickly than you think.

In any case i hope everything works out for you!

Thanks!