I’ve got a serious dilemma and need your help in a big way. My GF and I have been together for 7 years. She wants kids, and for a long time I was up in the air about it. She’s going on 30 so she’s put increasing pressure on me over the past few years to decide if having children was something that I could envision for my future. If not, she wanted to know so she could move on with her life and find someone who shares the same life goals.
This increasing pressure forced me to analyze the issue to death over many months. The pressure from her got worse and worse; she often broke down into tears because she didn’t feel like I was making a commitment to the relationship by not telling her that I “wanted a life with her.” To which I always replied, “I do want a life with you, I’m just not sure I want it to include kids. If we could spend the rest of our lives together, kid-free, that would be ideal.” Yet she could never see that me not wanting kids was not the same as me not wanting a life with her, but I digress.
Long story short, I felt backed up against a wall for a long time and felt forced to make a decision. So I came to the conclusion that I don’t want kids and now feel a strong conviction about that. I felt a wave of relief when I came to that conclusion. Meanwhile, our relationship has been getting worse and worse due to this uncertainty. So, recently I told her that I couldn’t take the pressure anymore and couldn’t stand to go on thinking that I was making her so unhappy and insecure from my lack of commitment, and I told her I didn’t want kids and I thought I’d move out (we live together) so she could get on with her life and find happiness and someone who can give her what she wants. Equally I want to move on with mine so I can find someone who doesn’t want kids either and we can start to build something together. But when I told her this, she kind of broke down and said, “I’ve been putting too much pressure on you and its my fault. I think you came to that conclusion because things were so bad between us. Let’s just play it one day at a time and work on our relationship, and see if we can revisit the issue later on when we’re on better terms.” This has really messed my mind up because she forced me to make a very serious decision, and then basically turned around and said, “well, now I don’t need you to make that decision, and we can just see how things go.” So now I have a ton of anxiety about this because I feel she thinks I’ll change my mind. But I am about 99% sure I won’t change my mind, and don’t want to give her false hope. I think that us moving on and finding other mates who share our goals for the future would be best, but I really love her and am having a hard time doing it since she’s backed off a bit on her baby pressure. But it was really hard for me to make the decision not to want kids, and now that I have, she’s told me that she thinks I’ll change my mind and wants to give things more time to see what happens. I’m very concerned about giving it more time because I’ve been very unhappy for a few years because of this issue and the thought of drawing it out for another year terrifies me—in one year, breaking up will be even harder! And I basically made my mind up that I don't want kids and don't want to revisit it--it was a very hard decision to make!
What would you do if you were in my shoes?