#230: A pregnancy scare-turned-existential crisis
Hey and welcome back to Dear Baby!
Today I’ll be answering three questions that touch on three different phases of romantic love. First we have a 32-year-old woman whose last failed relationship has her feeling discouraged and harboring general malaise about the burden of “future family planning.” Second, we have a happily married woman who may or may not be pregnant and is freaking out about whether she’s ready. I was excited to share my theory of parental readiness for this one. Finally, we have a woman who’s drowning in work stress and can’t seem to get the kind of support from her partner that she desperately wants, despite directly asking for it (loved the details of this one).
In case you missed it, Danny and I also answered six questions for Dear Danny last week: on a meet-cute-gone-wrong (when she finds his Instagram), how much a woman can expect her husband to change his lifestyle when they’re trying to get pregnant (and his semen analysis was so-so), whether it’s gauche to invite yourself to social events, what to do when you’re several years into a relationship and trying to make peace with your doubts (rather than leave), what to do when a friend gives you a bad poem to hang on your wall, and how to manage vastly different sex drives in a relationship. Listen here!!!
On being a caretaker
“Hi Haley! I’m a 32-year-old woman living in Brooklyn. About a month ago I broke up with my boyfriend of 1.5ish years, which isn’t that long, but it was quite serious and the TL;DR is it ended because I felt I couldn’t depend on him after the same fights happened over and over again. Since the breakup, I’ve realized that I harbor a LOT of stress around relationships and dating—to the point that I feel paralyzed and so discouraged in trying to ‘get back out there.’
I think my fear is that, as ‘the woman,’ I will have the weight of my future family‘s life on my shoulders. I know I want to be a mom, but I’m really scared about the idea of being the main provider and caretaker (getting pregnant with likely limited maternity leave, having a kid, being the main caretaker, coordinator, planner and, based on my current career trajectory, also being the ‘breadwinner’).
All of this being said, I am a natural caretaker (I’m an older sister and my job is basically project management) and I get so much joy from doing it! I love doing nice things for my friends and partners. But I’ve assumed that role in so many of my relationships—I think it’s starting to freak me out that I won’t have anyone there to take care of me. To be honest, I might be thinking about this all too transactionally or traditionally, but I’ve talked with friends and so many of us have the same fears.
I guess I’m curious if this tension has come up in your relationship or if you have any thoughts or advice for new singles in New York because I’ve heard it’s rough out there.”
I think these are totally valid concerns, from the challenges of being newly single to feeling a bit burdened with family planning and caregiving. I also think there’s a way to reframe them in order to give yourself a little more agency—in the failures (and successes) of your last relationship and also in future ones. You mentioned feeling anxious and paralyzed about dating. Coupled with the other details you gave, this dragging of your feet sounds (to me) less like a general pessimism about love and more like a lack of confidence in your ability to navigate this world and its potential disappointments. Also, this breakup is fresh! In a few months, you may feel differently. Either way, regaining your confidence may require some looking inward.
When you said that you and your ex-boyfriend kept getting in the same fight, I wanted to pause and ask you to describe the fight. When a relationship dynamic isn’t working, even if one person is the more obvious “disappointer,” both parties contribute to its repetition. This is a slightly different point than me saying, “It’s your fault, too!” It’s more that it can be really useful to recognize the role we play in the way others disappoint us, and use that to better understand and maneuver through future disappointments.
This idea is fresh in my mind because I’ve been focusing on it in my own relationship. Avi is the outwardly “moodier” of us two. On the positive side, his good moods can be infectious. On the negative, his bad moods can make for a tense environment. For years we’ve seen this as his problem to work on—more awareness, better regulation, etc., and he’s made tons of progress. But in time, I realized the “tense environment” is actually co-created, both by Avi’s emotionality and my hyper-sensitivity. When I view his moods through the lens of my own anxieties, they can warp reality, causing me to perceive antagonism where there is simply neutrality or low energy. I’ve come to realize that sometimes my expectations for him to tweak his tone for the sake of those around him—as willing as he may be to try—are genuinely unrealistic, even unfair. This shift in my understanding of what’s happening has been really empowering. It’s made me feel like I can participate more, versus feeling like a passive observer who’s waiting to be either vindicated or surprised.
I’ve never been in couples therapy, but I have watched the show Couples Therapy (hope that counts), and I’ve seen many couples come to similar realizations: that although one party may be the more obvious scapegoat, relationship dramas between two generally well-meaning people require multiple actors. When you reflect on your last relationship, are you able to see the role you played in your fights? Again, I’m not meaning to victim-blame, especially if he was cruel in any way, only trying to shine a light on the ways in which your dynamic may have been feeding or playing off your own pathologies too, and how you might use that information going forward. Perhaps the unknown doesn’t have to feel so paralyzingly out of your hands.
This brings me to your professed concerns around your role as a caretaker. I relate to them as someone who tends to jump quickly on managerial tasks for my family and also as the partner of Avi, who chronically takes care of others. This quality we share, lovely as it is, can be burdensome. For my part, I often don’t trust other people to manage things and actually thrive off maintaining control of situations, even while part of me grows resentful. In Avi’s case, he can be so focused on taking care of others that he doesn’t take care of himself, and without realizing it, he grows resentful too. Appreciating the challenging aspects of these caretaking impulses—specifically the ways in which not wanting to be a burden can inadvertently make you one—is crucial to maintaining their upsides. Nobody wants to be (or be with) a martyr. Resisting that complex means being more honest and proactive about meeting your own needs.
Which brings me to your fear of a lopsided parenting dynamic. It’s easy to see the stereotypical failure of fathers to pull their weight as purely the fault of men. But the further I get into parenthood, the more I understand it as a co-created dynamic—by men, by women, and by society. Women may be suffering under the weight of extra domestic labor, but in my experience they’re also having a richer, more involved, more communal experience of parenthood as a direct result of that. I’m not suggesting that means it’s all even in the end, just trying to express that there may be certain draws to repeating the dynamic and resistance to changing it.
That doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t work to change it though. If you want an egalitarian partnership, that’s not only a value you should try to find in a potential partner—any wise man will see he stands to benefit from it—but also a dynamic you will have to be conscious of cultivating. It may be easier to see yourself as unimpeachable, waiting for someone decent enough to come along, but it’s far more liberating to locate your own agency in all of this, and learn to wield it.
On a pregnancy scare
“Hi Baby! I’m in my thirties & happily married for several years now. We know we want a kid, and we’ve been particularly obsessed with daydreaming about it lately, but we’ve both decided it’s probably not a great time right now, primarily due to career/financial stuff. We just want to feel readier on that front re: savings, healthcare, certain career-related goals, etc. But…the other night we got caught up in the moment and WHOOPS, if you catch my drift. As soon as it happened, I snapped out of my romantic fog and my stomach dropped: I’m nearly 100% sure I’m ovulating (I track using FAM method, it’s what we use for birth control), so we had fully just done the thing couples do when they are actively trying to conceive.
Completely on us, I know! And even as a fully grown adult who does eventually want this SOON, I have suddenly reverted back to having a pregnancy scare as my teenaged self and I feel crazy. But also curious and excited and giddy but also horrified? We’re in this odd place of knowing it’s a bad time but also knowing the idea of having an abortion would make us sad (pro-choice always though, don’t get it twisted). My partner and I have both admitted it’s fun to imagine that I am pregnant, but I am also fully aware of how much this would disrupt our lives in this very moment.
We could also very well not be pregnant and maybe I’m freaking out for no reason but I’m wondering, theoretically, if the test is positive in a couple weeks…how do we make ourselves ready to have a baby when we’re simply not feeling ready ‘on paper’? What does that even mean, especially to you in hindsight as someone who’s been doing this for a little while now? Basically, please just talk me through this pregnancy scare, lol. I need to be reminded that if it happens, we will somehow figure it all out beautifully!
Sincerely, an irresponsible but in love dumb bitch”