During Chinese New Year, tradition has that the following conversation starters are normal and somewhat acceptable.
If you’re single, you get asked when you’re getting married.
If you’re married, you get asked when your first kid is coming.
If you’re married for long enough, you eventually asked why you don’t have kids yet.
Today I want to talk about why 2 and 3 are the most inappropriate questions you can ask a married couple.
Here’s why.
Do married couples want to start a family?
First let me answer the question bluntly. Do married couples want to have kids? Well this depends on preference but you can safely say that most (not all) married couples want to have kids. It’s just a matter of when and when. The first when is for when they’re ready to have kids. The second when is for when they are lucky enough to conceive.
It is harder to have a baby than you’d expect
Before we get married and try to have kids, we often are filled with paranoia that it’s really easy to get pregnant and accidentally have a child out of wedlock. We hear about other couples in college getting pregnant and then forced to quit their studies halfway. Or we hear about couples that got pregnant and were forced to marry quickly.
Over the years I learn that this paranoia is very much exaggerated. Yes some people are more fertile so for them it’s easier to conceive. For a lot of other people though, having to conceive a child is quite the opposite.
When you see a fertility doctor, you’re normally asked how long you’ve been trying to have a baby. You are only considered to have fertility issues only if you’ve been trying for at least a year and when I say infertility, I don’t mean just the female in the relationship. Often the problem stems from the male too.
So it takes at least a year of trying for the most average people to start a family. For the ones who have to fight harder, it takes longer.Or for some… it just doesn’t happen.
Peer pressure
For those who it doesn’t come easy for, it doesn’t help that it would appear to them that everyone around their age group is having babies without too much trouble. Each new photo of a newborn baby on a Facebook feed is met with happiness but also disappointment and wonder on when your turn would come.
Then there is the cost of these expectations.
The Cost of Expectations
Few things test the strength of a marriage more than the challenge of trying to have a baby. Everyone starts with expectations of being able to conceive and the longer and longer this drags out without success, the more stressful it becomes on the relationships. The constant cycle of hopes and disappointments lead to fights and sometimes those fights get enough to end a once happy marriage.
Now put yourself in the shoes of a newly married couple who has been trying really hare to have kids but have had little luck.
A friend comes up to you and asks you (sometimes in front of everyone) “When are you going to have kids?”
The real answer is complicated. Behind the scenes you fight this battle in secret. A battle of constantly seeing doctors after doctors. Taking hormones and all the needles you need and spending more money than you have ever spent on anything else. A battle where your hopes of victory lie in whether your period (or wife’s period) comes or not every month… and for all the many months before.. you have only met disappointment and defeat.
So when someone publicly asks you that, your real answer is “I am trying” but sometimes you lie and you say “We’re not ready yet” because you don’t want to talk about it more than you already have.
But nobody ever means any harm by asking that
That is true. “When are you going to have kids” is a question that is most often asked in the most innocent manner possible. It’s a conversation starter but the thing is that most people don’t understand the sensitivities that lie within. I was one such person that asked these questions because I was ignorant to the challenges that married couples faced behind the scenes. And now I know.
If you really really had to ask because you really really wanted to know?
Well.. maybe you could just ask “Are you planning to have kids?”.
My Personal Story
My inspiration to write this is from the stories of the many friends I have who have tried and are still trying to have kids. The feelings I describe here come from them.
Personally I have been lucky. Before my wife and I got married, my wife told me she suffered from PCOS which was the most common cause of infertility in women. As much as I wanted to start a family and have kids in my life, marrying my wife would mean I face the possibility of never having my own kids. We discussed various options from the different medical treatment to even adoption. In the end I decided to stand by my wife and get married to her regardless. I decided that it was a battle I wanted my wife to face with me by her side…. not with anyone else.
So you see, I began our marriage with very low expectations. I expected a long drawn battle for years before I even started trying. When people asked me when I was going to have kids, I told them outright that my wife had PCOS and so it would take us some time before we did.
I felt the peer pressure, but not having expectations made it a lot easier for us to cope. We got lucky too, because half a year or so after we got married, we had Fighter.
My hope of writing this is to shed some light of the sensitivities of this question. Something most people don’t realize when they ask it even with their best intentions. Heck I know because I’ve done it. So share this entry, tell a friend or whatever. I hope one day regardless of whatever phase in life we’re in, we would understand this.
Perhaps a simple “How are you?” would be a good enough conversation starter.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space