Couple
It's the disagreement nobody can compromise on and the deadline is getting closer and the conversation hasn't actually happened.
One of you wants kids. The other doesn’t. Or one of you wants more. Or one of you wants them now and the other wants them later, where later keeps moving. You’ve talked about it. The conversation always ends in tears or in deflection. Then a few months pass and you have it again. The deadline is biological for one or both of you. The deadline doesn’t move. The conversation does.
The disagreement isn’t compromisable. There is no half-having a kid. One of you will get what you want and the other won’t.
The deadline is closer than it was last year.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
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You very likely both came up in households where the decision to have kids was either presented as inevitable or framed as a referendum on the marriage. You may have grown up watching the adults around you have kids out of obligation rather than desire, and you swore you’d only do it if you really wanted it. The other may have grown up assuming they’d have a family without examining whether they actually wanted one. You arrived at this marriage with two unexamined defaults that don’t match, and the gap has gone unaddressed because addressing it means losing something either way.
The disagreement is binary. Most marital disagreements have a middle. This one doesn’t. Either there’s a child or there isn’t. The middle position you’ve been holding, the “let’s keep talking,” is functioning as a slow vote for the no-kids partner because time only flows in one direction.
The avoidance of the decision is also a decision. As long as it isn’t being made, it’s being made by the calendar.
For the broader marital pattern, see Our marriage is in trouble and I want a divorce but I’m scared .
The talking-about-it has been substituting for the deciding. The talking has run out of time.
Strategic therapy treats the talking-about-it as the thing that’s been substituting for deciding, and we change what each of you does both inside the conversation and in the months between rounds of it. The avoidance has been doing a job, and we replace that job with something that can actually produce an answer. The decision gets made by the two of you instead of by the calendar.
You’ll know whether you’re having kids together. What happens to the marriage will follow from the answer, not the other way around.
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