‘He Changed His Mind’

Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos Getty Images

On Nicole’s very first date with Mark, she told him she doesn’t want kids. The then-29-year-old had no interest in wasting her time on a relationship with someone who wasn’t on the same page. To her relief, Mark said that was fine, and they quickly became serious. Three years later, he was in the process of moving into her house, and they were even talking about marriage — that is, until one night while they were coming home from a wine bar and he said, “I think we’re done.” At first, Nicole thought he was talking about booze. “Yeah, I’ve drank enough for today,” she said. But he meant the relationship. “I want kids,” he told her. Nicole was speechless. She thought they shared a vision of the same future, full of game nights and afternoons at breweries. When did that start to change? Or was he lying the whole time? Nicole yelled at Mark, stormed out of his apartment, and sobbed on the drive home, thinking about how just a few words had upended her life. “Everyone has the right to change their mind,” she said. But this felt like a betrayal, as if he had been pretending to share her values while secretly harboring a different set of desires.

It’s finally becoming more common, and more socially acceptable, for women not to have children. By now, everyone’s familiar with the discourse about how hard and costly it is to be a mother, and opting out of spending thousands of dollars a year on day care is increasingly seen as a logical choice — even if it’s not an easy one. But after years of soul-searching and figuring out how to push back against the pressure to procreate, some women are learning that it’s hard to find men who also know what they want. Even when men claim they don’t want children, these women find, they end up changing their mind or trying to change their partner’s. A recent Pew study found that, of young people without children, women are 40 percent more likely than men to say they never want them, and the sub-Reddit r/childfree is full of women with stories about the ones who pulled a switcheroo deep into relationships. These confessions led to breakups, divorces, and watching their exes go on to start a family with someone new. The consensus among these women is that while they had made a well-thought-out permanent decision about their future — one they couldn’t easily second-guess past a certain age — men didn’t take the question as seriously. “Men want children like children want puppies,” said one redditor. “Zero forethought about all the responsibility and dramatic life changes they come with.” It’s hard to trust a man’s child-free choice knowing it carries much lower stakes.

Even finding someone who already has a grown child isn’t a guarantee that he won’t want more. When Candace, who is 44 (and, along with others in this story, using a pseudonym), started dating Sam, a man in his early 40s who had just gone through a divorce and already had a daughter, she thought they would be aligned. “It was actually refreshing,” she said. “I thought, He’s probably not going to be knocking on my door about having a kid because he’s got a 14-year-old. That was my mind-set.” The two planned to spend money on other things, like buying second homes in Nairobi, where he’s from, and Barbados, a place she visits every year. But nine months in, Sam told Candace that he did want another child, ideally a son, to carry on the family name. When she told him that was a problem, Sam started to backpedal and said he wasn’t actually sure about what he wanted. For the next two months, she lived in a torturous limbo, wondering if in a few years, once their lives were even more intertwined, he’d leave her for someone he could have a kid with. At that point, how could Candace trust him not to? “If he were to say, ‘I changed my mind — I’m good without having kids,’” she says, “I don’t know that I’d believe him.”

And getting your tubes tied doesn’t always give you peace of mind. Nina, a 27-year-old who works in media, was taken aback when her boyfriend of six months casually mentioned that he might want kids. They had met on Tinder, where Nina had made it clear in her bio that she doesn’t want children. When she pressed him, he admitted that he’d never really taken the time to think about fatherhood, which was “actually quite baffling,” she says. “I feel like a lot of women tend to form a strong opinion about kids one way or another. Everyone asks you about it, and if you do want children, there’s a ticking clock to lock in your partner.” They broke up a few months later, and after Donald Trump’s win in 2024, she got sterilized. Even after the surgery, she’s still paranoid that she can’t take men at their word. “Unless someone has a vasectomy, how do I know they aren’t going to change their mind?” she says. “What level of trust would I need?” Alice, 31, struggles with the same question in her relationship. She’s had her tubes tied, and her boyfriend of three years says he doesn’t want kids. But not long ago, he mentioned that if he were with someone who did want them, he’d be open to fatherhood. “That became a red flag that he wasn’t as dedicated as I am,” she says. Though he calmly reassures her, Alice still sometimes panic-calls him out of the blue to ask, “Are you still sure you don’t want kids?”

It took Nicole a few years to bounce back from her last relationship and start dating again. She continued to be up front with men about the fact that she doesn’t want kids; sometimes she’d throw in that her severe endometriosis would make it physically difficult to get pregnant, just so they knew she was serious. She’s 46, which you’d think would stave off prospective fathers. But even men in their 50s have told Nicole they still want children. Some tell her she could still adopt. “I have trepidation entering any new relationship,” she says. “I still have a fear deep down inside that they, too, might change their mind or hope I change mine.”