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Notes -
Last Friday, I got married. It was fun.
For opsec reasons, I won't go into too much detail about the ceremony. We had a hard deadline on when the certificates of freedom to marry from our respective countries would expire, so we elected to get married abroad. My wife told me that, in her home country, it's not at all uncommon for couples (or their parents) to go into debt paying for their weddings, which was the last thing either of us wanted. We instead opted for a very small civil ceremony, a few photos during and afterwards, and going out for dinner in the evening.
Less than a week later, it hasn't really hit me that I'm a married man, and I still have to remind myself to refer to her as "my wife" rather than "my fiancée" (and I only started referring to her as "my fiancée" less than six months ago). We crack little jokes with each other: "oh, my husband looks after the finances". I'm still not used to my wedding band: as someone who doesn't wear much jewelry, it feels like I'm wearing a plaster on my ring finger.
The other day I stumbled across this thread about things that people have changed their minds about, and it's still surprising to me to be reminded that, as little as thirteen years ago, I was painfully woke; so much so that even some of our resident progressives might have been like "dude, chill out". Pronouns in bio, gender is a social construct, women in STEM, "from the river to the sea", Nice Guys™: the whole shebang. If it was woke, I was here for it. During this period, I often said I didn't want to get married, as marriage was just an oppressive patriarchical construct invented to control women, and that I wanted no part of it. Needless to say, I no longer believe this (horror stories about women getting trapped in abusive marriages aside, I don't think it would be too controversial to argue that women as a group have been net beneficiaries of marriage), and in retrospect this proclamation of mine carried a pungent odour of sour grapes. I'm not sure when I first began saying "marriage is a patriarchical construct used to oppress women", but it wouldn't surprise me if it was a period in my life in which I sincerely believed that I was – no, scratch that, a period in my life in which I was an unfuckable unloveable loser whom no one would want to marry. Under those circumstances, it was far less embarrassing to pretend that my decision not to get married was the product of a principled moral stance – indeed, to pretend that it was a decision at all, rather than a decision by default: it's not as if prospective brides were forming an orderly queue outside my front door.* (I recall @FiveHourMarathon describing a similar dynamic when he was pretending to be straight edge, which really resonated with me.)
During this period, I also said that I didn't want children, motivated by similar sour-grapes coping and also the fact that I was struggling with (what had been diagnosed as) depression – a condition I sincerely wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, and which I feared might be hereditary. I'm obviously not the first person to arrive at this conclusion: as I noted a few months ago, it's surely not an accident that people who subscribe to /r/antinatalism are disproportionately likely to subscribe to subreddits like /r/suicidewatch, /r/depression, /r/lonely, /r/bpd, /r/cptsd, /r/latestagecapitalism and /r/antiwork (the latter two of which can be summarised as "I'm an unemployable loser who can't hold down a steady job – but this is a problem with society, not with me").
But a few years ago, I was visiting my friend Alice** who'd just had her first child, a girl. As I was holding her daughter, Alice said to me "you want to have children. I don't even need to ask – I can tell just by looking at you". And she was right: however much I might try to intellectualise and deflect, there was no point in trying to disguise the primitive joy and elation I felt holding a baby. I adore children. Even thinking about children while writing this – not even a specific child, just the idea of children in general – is making me feel a little teary-eyed. Not only am I not an anti-natalist, I'm about as far from an anti-natalist as it's possible to be: I want everyone I know to have children, and soon, and lots of them. It actually aggravates me the way progressives derisively refer to people like Victor Orbán and the policies he promotes as "pronatalist", like it's a dirty word. "Ugh – don't tell me you're one of those people who want to fill the world with beautiful children who make everyone around them happy by their mere presence." Well, guilty as charged!***
A few months after visiting Alice and her daughter, I decided I'd wasted enough time fucking around, waiting for good things to happen to me, and that it was my time to get serious about what I wanted from life and actively pursue it. It was true: I did want children (plural), and I wanted those children to have the best upbringings I could possibly provide for them. A wealth of data from the social sciences indicates that children tend to have the best outcomes when raised by loving married parents. No doubt there's a heavy selection effect (people who get married are heavily selected for being intelligent, responsible, conscientious and so on; conversely, a child borne to a pair of junkies isn't magically going to have better outcomes just because said junkies are married), but the general point still stands. Ergo, if I wanted to have children and wanted those children to have good upbringings, I would need to find a wife. And while I consider a serious romantic partner a terminal goal, marrying that person was really just a box-ticking exercise, an instrumental goal in service of the other terminal goal of starting a family.
And while taking stock of my life, I realised that, as much as I might want children, I couldn't see myself having them with Barbara, the woman I was in a relationship with at the time. Don't get me wrong: Barbara would likely have been a good mother (for all I know, she already is, we're no longer in touch): but I didn't want children with her, and there was no point in wasting any more of either of our time.
So I broke up with her, and set about playing catch-up with the assorted milestones of adulthood I'd put off meeting for years. The next three-and-a-half years were devoted, in large part, to seeking out a wife and mother for my hypothetical children. Not quite as diligently and single-mindedly as I perhaps could have: at times it felt like a case of one step forward, two steps back, and I seized plenty of opportunities to sow my wild oats. Indeed, if you'd been an angel sitting on my shoulder during this period, you probably would have frequently found my behaviour indistinguishable from that of a common-or-garden fuckboy. (Early on in this period, I even went back to Barbara for a bit of sex with the ex, a massive unforced error.) Nonetheless, I met a few women who would surely have eventually agreed to have a baby by me, and women who I wanted to have a baby with – alas, they generally weren't the same women; or they initially were, only for one of us to lose interest, or for me to experience an attack of emotional avoidance.
But after years of rejections, false starts and disappointments (not to mention slow, gradual self-improvement), I finally met my wife. In a period in which I was seriously concerned that I might be suffering from an undiagnosed anxiety disorder, I noticed that I felt completely at ease in her presence. She makes me laugh without even trying to. She isn't afraid to disagree with me or contradict me, something Barbara hardly ever dared do (which, believe me, isn't nearly as desirable a trait as it sounds). After years in which a woman telling me she didn't want to see me anymore would fill me with abject relief nine times out of ten (because it saved me the trouble of breaking up with her myself), my wife was one I felt very deeply I had to hang on to. And so I hung onto her, through thick and thin, and I dare say we've had more than our fair share of thick: there have been disagreements, rows, tantrums, screaming matches, ultimata. But I still hung onto her. Of the three actual relationships I've had, this was the most serious by far, the first woman I've cohabited with. Pretty funny, considering we matched on a dating app and, as she put it, I only went on our first date looking to get laid. ("Yeah, well so did you," I retorted; she didn't even deny it.)
Some months ago we began toying with the idea of wedding. As much as I wanted children with her, I still felt some residual discomfort with the idea of getting married – why couldn't we just have a baby and worry about the marriage part later? But then I remembered: how many times have I criticised couples who've done just that, hitting all the milestones in the success sequence (marriage, children, buying a house), but doing them out of order, purely for the sake of being contrarian? Didn't I specifically criticise my friend Carol's mother, who has been in a relationship with Carol's father for decades and owns a house with him, but refused to marry him (despite his multiple proposals) out of sheer stubbornness? Maybe getting married in its own right wasn't that important (wasn't a terminal goal) for me – but it was for my wife, and it's objectively a sensible thing to do before having children. I just had to remind myself of the decision I'd made years before: marriage is not a terminal goal, but an instrumental goal in pursuit of the terminal goal of starting a family.
And now that we've tied the knot, we can begin trying for a child. (I mean, we started trying a few months ago, but haven't had any luck so far.) I want lots of children: she tells me she wants two, and if I want more than that, I'm going to have to pay for it, which is fair enough. Indeed, the fact that I want lots of children is one reason we're not waiting to buy a house before we start trying – why waste a year (or more) of fertility? It appals me how few Western women are familiar with the term "geriatric pregnancy". It's true that you save money buying a house as early as you can, but it's equally true that you save money getting pregnant before you need to pay for expensive fertility treatments, to the point that it wouldn't surprise me if it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.
My brother has several friends from secondary school who might charitably be described as "failures to launch" (not meaning to point fingers: around the time I met Alice's daughter, it would be entirely fair to describe me as such), all of whom were still living with their parents and all of whom claimed, with varying degrees of credibility, to be saving up for mortgages. My brother didn't believe them: he thought their purported fiscal responsibility was a fig leaf for Peter Pan syndrome, and couldn't stand the thought of all the positive life experiences and maturation they were missing out on by continuing to live under their parents' rooves into their mid-twenties and beyond. Two years ago, he hatched a plot: he invited these friends over for a party in his flat, with the goal of making them feel envious of his comparative independence, in turn motivating them to tear the plaster off, move out, and grow up. The plan worked: since said party, at least two of the friends he targeted have moved out.
I now want to take a leaf out of my brother's book. In our circle of close friends, there are plenty of people in stable romantic relationships, but very few of them have children. They generally claim either to be prioritising buying houses over starting families (a dumb idea in my opinion, especially for the considerable number of women whose biological clocks are on the verge of expiring), or offering bullshit excuses such as children being "too expensive". What I want to do is have a baby with my wife, and then take every opportunity to shove that baby in my friends' faces, confronting them with what they're missing out on. I want every woman in my social circle (and the men, too, if possible) to feel unbearably, intolerably clucky and broody. And I want our child (our children) to go on playdates with our friends' children.****
But that's a secondary goal, a nice-to-have: the primary goal is to start our own family and be on some fuck everyone else type shit. (And my wife likely is my biggest flex.) So: marriage first, pregnancy second, house next year.
Wish me luck, boys (and girls).
*While writing, it occurs to me that if a man declares that marriage is an oppressive patriarchical construct, it's even odds whether he's an unfuckable incel or a fuckboy who wants to put a feminist spin on his promiscuity and caddishness, leading to a rather peculiar bell curve meme. Lindy West should have been paying attention during a shoddy latter-day episode of The Simpsons.
**All names are pseudonyms, obviously.
***People in favour of abortion euphemistically describe themselves as "pro-choice", while people who are opposed call themselves "pro-life". (As someone who abhors euphemisms, I call myself "pro-abortion".) No one would ever dream of describing themselves as "anti-life", and I vaguely recall an old post of Scott's (which I'm unable to find) in which he criticised how certain Republicans characterise Democrats that way, as if they literally pursue death as a terminal goal for its own sake. I found Scott's argument persuasive – and yet there are times when I can't help but think that the progressive coalition contains a sizeable misanthropic faction with no equivalent across the aisle. I mean, when they literally think that wanting more people to be born is a bad thing, they're not exactly helping their case, are they?
****A few months ago I joked that I wanted to buy up cheap property in the countryside and found a compound in which me and all my friends could live, grow our own crops, have lots of babies and raise all of them in keeping with the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. I was joking – and yet, doesn't the idea of a self-sufficient pronatalist homeschooled compound tickle your fancy just a little bit?
Congrats!
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