A lot of couples tend to opt for getting pregnant in order to fix a marriage, but one couple on Reddit is witnessing their relationship hangs on by a thread because of an unexpected pregnancy.
They’ve made it clear in the past that neither of them wished to have kids and never wanted to, but the mother is having second thoughts about it.
Their marriage is about to end because the wife is pregnant and might want to keep the child her husband rejects.
The 40-year-old woman went to Reddit in order to get the opinions of strangers on the internet, wondering if she was simply feeling the hormones of her pregnancy or if she might actually want a baby.
She has been married to her 49-year-old husband for 12 years, and they’ve made it clear during that time that they were totally satisfied with being child-free.
“We are both child-free and it’s one of the things we’ve bonded over,” she wrote in her post on the subredit “TrueOffMyChest,” where people go to tell stories about their lives.
“Now I’m pregnant. I’m not religious or anything but I’m 40, he’s had [a vasectomy] and here [I am like, ‘a miracle’],” she writes in her post. “I want to keep it but I’m so scared.”
She relays to the internet strangers that she feels different about this child for some reason, and lays out what her husband has said about this unexpected pregnancy.
“He made it clear we are too old to be parents and we hate children and that if I want to keep it then it’s divorce. I do hate children but not this child,” she explains.
It seems like she wants other single parents to dissuade her from keeping it by giving their “Brutal and honest opinion based on your experience.”
“Are these just my hormones being crazy [and] making me emotional or is this real love?” she ends the post. “I love my husband so so so so so so very much but it’s kinda faded away compared with the emotions I’m having with my belly. Please help.”
The top comment reads “I guess I’d think of it like this ‘what would you regret more?’”
Many people responded with their thoughts and experiences, and one of the main driving factors seems to be the financial burden that living in a single-income household with a child would bear.
“Being a single mom is tough, I was broke, and I bought everything second-hand. I was working to pay for daycare and food,” read the next comment, which also elaborated on the second-worst part.
“Aside from the money, you are on 100% of the time,” she writes. “If you have support (family or friends in the area) or enough money to pay for support this might help. But you are changing every diaper, preparing every bottle. Then later you are handling every fit, going to every sports game. There is no day off, there is no moment off.”
Being a single mother is no easy feat, and the woman who posted the original story recognizes it because she posted an update regarding what her final decision would be.
“Many of you said that my marriage is already doomed because if I terminate there’s a big chance that I will resent my husband for it,” she writes in the update. “I have been thinking about this a lot. I love my husband and even when we are separating I don’t want it to be because of resentment.”
She would resent the difficult choice that she would have been forced to make, and if they were going to separate either way, she would prefer it to be because she wanted to bring a new life into the world.
“I’m so sorry for everything that’s happened but I can’t control my feelings,” she finishes. “I hope he will forgive me and that my child will forgive me.”
At the end of the day, keeping the child was more important to her than keeping her marriage.