Men Who Are Childfree by Choice Are Happy, Too
There's a great piece in Esquire about men who choose to remain childfree — and are enjoying their lives, contrary to popular notions that men without children will be unhappy, just like their counterparts the proverbial cat ladies.
The conservative philosopher Yoram Hazony said, “The only honorable thing is to get married and have children, lots of children, and raise them, and if you’re not doing that, then what you’re doing is dishonorable.” This is a harsh assessment, and I take comfort in the fact that the approval of a conservative philosopher is probably not on the menu for me. But this message gets across in subtler, more familiar ways. En route to visit one of my nieces and her newborn son with my mother—now a great-grandmother—she enthused, “Oh, isn’t this fun.” And then she continued, “Can you even imagine not having children?” It wasn’t a memory lapse, exactly. It was a statement of our shared humanity: We’re good people, and good people have kids. Right?
In America there has always been a low-key dismissal of people who choose not to be parents. You’re assumed to be feckless, or selfish, or sad. When America’s Sweetheart J. D. Vance griped to Tucker Carlson about the “childless cat ladies” who evidently run America, he then described the childless as “miserable in their own lives and the choices they’ve made, so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
I don’t want to be a father, and I know I don’t want America to be miserable about it. But there is enough of a cultural expectation for a man to be a dad that sometimes I have to stop and think: Wait, am I miserable about it? Am I having fun, or am I just telling myself I am?
[...] And then I’ll say, “Hey, Ben, let’s get on a plane and go somewhere this weekend,” and we do. If what you do on a Sunday is who you are, then I am what I always wanted to be, which is whatever I feel like. I hope that doesn’t make you miserable.
This essay gets at one of the sentiments underwriting a lot of the narratives about childfree misery — it's not that parents worry that we'll be miserable because we choose not to have children; it's that they're worried our choice will make them miserable about theirs.
There are, of course, loads of parents who are happy — ecstatic even! — about their decision to have children, and wouldn't change it for the world. But there are also lots of parents who aren't happy, who are regretful about their decision. Sometimes that regret turns into an acrid resentment of people who made a different choice.
The old turn of phrase "misery loves company" is never truer than about a parent who regrets becoming one.
Perhaps especially for people who became parents out of some sense of obligation to others, whether their families or their gods or their countries, it can feel like people who don't share that obligation are being selfish or irresponsible or "dishonorable." But having children out of some misplaced sense of duty isn't honorable. Just ask the child of someone who felt obliged to have them.
And it's one thing to look at someone else's different choice and think, "That choice would make me miserable." It's quite another thing, however, to tell someone else that their choice must be making them miserable, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Forgive us, J.D. Vance and friends, if we suspect that it's a bit of projection. We're happy. If that makes you miserable, you're not merely failing to acknowledge the authenticity of our feelings; you're revealing yours.
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