The Men Who Sabotage Women's Fertility

On "Forever Girlfriends" and "Sunk Cost Boyfriends"

One thing I always find funny when I hear discussions about the reasons for the falling birth rate is that while this topic serves as an ink blot test for folks to project their own personal pet issues (no wonder nobody wants to have kids anymore, it’s nearly impossible to find Taylor Swift tickets!!) the “keepers” of the birth rate, according to various thinkpieces, consistently seem to be women. Either women rightfully don’t want to have kids because they’re saddled with unhelpful partners and an impossible cost of living, or women don’t want to have kids because they’re too busy “girlbossing.” I wrote about why both of those theories are stupid here, but one thing glaringly missing from the equation is:

At twenty-two, I found myself in an incredibly tricky situation. I desperately wanted my twenty-four-year-old boyfriend, Nick, to propose. We had been together for three and a half years and lived together for one, which felt like enough time, but he wasn’t ready. He assured me he knew he would marry me someday. He even joked about names for our future children. But when we really got down to a timeline, he couldn’t give me an answer.

I was stuck between two fears: make it clear that I wanted to get married sooner rather than later and risk him leaving me because I was pushy, desperate, and bitchy…or continue this song and dance for eight more years until he left me, declaring me “just not the one,” only to imprint upon the next woman he saw like some kind of tadpole, marry her and have children with her immediately.

My “perfect plan” was to make him engagement chicken, using the famous 1982 recipe that would supposedly make him propose to me. When that still didn’t happen, I resorted to lots of sulking and claiming I was fine (he did like the chicken though.)

You might think that at twenty-two, marriage shouldn’t have been on my mind at all. If so, you’re a lot like all the people I talked to about my predicament. Family members and friends told me that I needed to “relax” and “enjoy being young.” They told me that Nick probably wanted to wait until we were “financially stable” before getting married—never mind that I didn’t expect an expensive ring and our parents had already assured us they’d help us pay for a wedding, which I also did not need to be expensive. Or the fact that we could continue to build up our finances after marriage, considering we didn’t want kids right away.

The comment that stuck with me the most was the one about our ages—never mind that we had already been dating far longer than is necessary to know if you want to marry someone, but if Nick was “too young” to propose, then that inherently meant he was too young to decide whether I should be his wife. Was the idea that I had to give him time to decide? Decide on what, me? I should tolerate that the man I 100% knew I wanted to marry wasn’t 100% sure he wanted to marry me? I knew we were young, but marriage wasn’t about needing a wedding, a ring, or “half his stuff.” It was about having some kind of definitive promise that he had chosen me. And if I was simply his live-in girlfriend indefinitely, I wasn’t being chosen. I was being tried out.

Just to be clear, Nick did eventually propose, a few months after I turned twenty-four, and we got married a year later. (I asked him why it took so long and he said “Because we were young. Then I got older and I did it. But I knew I was going to marry you for a while.” Okay, fine.) We went on to have two children. But I worried about falling into the “forever girlfriend or shrill demanding bitch” trap, because before he proposed, Nick didn’t seem to have a defined timeline for marriage, and I had seen countless older women in my extended social circle fall victim to dynamics in which their live-in boyfriend repeatedly promised marriage “someday” while also failing to ever make it happen.

What’s odd is that a lot of the purportedly “feminist” beliefs about marriage—that you’re too young to think about it until you’re thirty, that it’s “just a piece of paper,” that women don’t benefit from it, that you’re high maintenance and old-fashioned if you demand it after a certain amount of time—really don’t serve the interests of women at all (at least not women who want marriage and children.) They serve the interests of men. Specifically, men who are happy (or at least obliviously willing) to sabotage a woman’s fertility.