I don't want to have children with my partner

Thursday | July 31, 2025

Love Letters Breakups 🖤

I don’t want to have children with my partner

Have something on your mind about relationships? Send your own letter to [email protected] or, even easier, do it here. Yes, it’s anonymous.

I am 30 and been with my partner for five-plus years. We met just before COVID changed everyone’s lives forever. We made it through the pandemic and live together.

When we are on vacation, or with our friends and family, I love the life that we have together and the people that are in it. The problem is is that when it’s just us working and existing alone in a home, I find myself constantly questioning my happiness, feeling drained more than fulfilled, and wondering if I’m holding on out of comfort or fear of being alone.

There are moments of love, silliness, and the ability to be our true selves together, but I don’t feel that our partnership is equal. We both lack skills in different areas – him in doing home-sharing/adult duties like going grocery shopping and cleaning (my preferred love language), and me in the romantic and physical touch part of the relationship (his preferred love language). We’ve tried talking about our needs more times than I can count, but neither of us are able to be consistent for the other person despite it.

Adding to this is a new feeling: after about a decade of declaring that I do not want to have children, I actually would like to adopt children and be a mother (despite the dumpster fire of times we are living in right now).

That being said, I know for certain that I do not want to have children with my partner. This sounds so harsh. I believe he would be an absolutely wonderful dad, but I am also very confident that the labor of parenting would not be shared, and I would not be happy in the partnership. Many years after my own parents’ divorce, I have learned and recognized that this was the leading issue in their marriage, and I refuse to repeat that for myself, my partner, and my kids.

I’ve been struggling with the question of when it’s truly the right time to end my relationship. I don’t want to give up on something meaningful, but I also don’t want to lose myself trying to make it work and delay what I want my life to look like.

How do I know if it’s time to let go?

– Harsh

You want a child, but you don’t want to share the experience with your current partner.

That seems like the answer. Sounds like it’s time to move on.

You’re not up in the air about this. You use the phrase “for certain,” which suggests no wiggle room.

If you were more on the fence, I might suggest that the two of you seem to balance each other with your skills. I could also say that it’s important you love vacations together – because many couples have a flawless routine in their busy homes, but when they have five minutes to relax, they have nothing to say to each other.

I wish I could tell you that there’s hope and potential here, and I really could make that case if you wanted me to. But you seem to have made a decision, and I understand it. You want a partner who can be a grownup with you. Makes sense.

You’re 30, which is a great age to choose a new path.

I don’t know if this move is going to get any easier to make over time. Maybe if you bring all of this up, he’ll be sad, but agree.

It sounds like the conversations about next steps should start now.

– Meredith

Readers? Could a discussion about children lead to real change? Is it too late for that? Any ideas for the letter writer’s next moves? What might the pandemic have had to do with any of this?

Have something on your mind about relationships? Send your own letter to [email protected] or, even easier, do it here. Yes, it’s anonymous.

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Featured Comment

If you want kids in your future, but don’t see having kids with him, then you have no future with him. Find someone else that you deem more compatible to your love languages/parenting styles.

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