@Simone_De_Beauvoir – sorry, but I AM listening and that is what is inciting my ire. Your first shot across the bow came via this quip, “well that’s not a very supportive thing to say, is it? people who make the decision to not have children will face the consequences, if need be, later on in life..but they don’t need to hear that they’re just young and don’t know life and will totally really truly change their mind around 30 when that magical biological clock will spring to life.”
First of all, you mistake my intentions as someone who is here to validate the feelings of others, I am not here for that purpose, I am here to point out the logic or illogic in certain statements. Secondly, this accuses me of being dismissive of one’s decision as simply a folly of youth, which is not what I was saying, again what I was saying is, we don’t always know what we don’t know. Nor was I referring to anything magical or even biological, nor was my quip in my opinion soley “anecdotal and irrelevant in terms of a pattern” as you retorted later. It is none of my concern if a person hears 100 times a day ‘when you gonna have kids?’ I got that all the time, I dealt with it, that’s not was I was saying. My point was that what I’ve observed in our modern culture well beyond the reach of my personal experience is that people in their 20s OFTEN feel absolutely certain that they’ll never want kids, but far more often than NOT, they ultimately change their minds…it does not mean that they’re stupid or too young or full of folly to recognize it, it’s just that life priorities are dictated by current circumstance and past experience, and what we will feel in the future will be dictated by future circumstance and future past experiences which could be current past, current or future experiences from today’s perspective. Saying to a person that time will tell if you end up like the vast majority of people who in my experience, including myself, said what you say now when they (I) were your age is not being unsupportive, nor is it being judgemental, it is stating a fact.
And yes, we are way off topic, I do apologize.