When I see married people who don't have kids, I wonder what's wrong. Really. Because something is. Of course it is. I mean, if you aren't going to have children, why bother with the rest? Why bother with the $30,000 bash and the white crinoline dress? And you can say that about everything. What do you think we are doing here, biding our time on this planet with our misspent years, justifying our days with our ridiculous schemes of leisure? Is anyone's life so meaningful? Really? Really, really, really? Is yours?—Elizabeth Wurtzel, agreeing with Pope Francis, in Time magazine.
The existential nightmare of the everyday is way more than even those of us with enormous egos who love what we do can possibly cope with. We are on this earth to keep on keeping on. We are here to reproduce. We are here to leave something behind that is more meaningful than a tech startup or a masterpiece of literature. Everybody knows this. The biggest idiot in the world who thinks he knows better—even he deep down knows this.
Everything about this is terrible. Everything.
Your life is worthless if you don't have children. There is only one reason to live at all. Everyone's work, no matter how important or valuable, is garbage compared to parenting. Marriage is pointless shit without children.
Et cetera.
Which is to say nothing of the fact that not everyone who gets married can procreate. Not everyone who gets married is allowed to parent, if parenting necessarily means adoption. Not every married couple can afford to parent. Not every married couple has a "$30,000 bash" with a "white crinoline dress."
Et cetera.
Wurtzel is, of course, talking about married straight cis people who are fertile and financially stable but choose not to procreate.
She's talking about someone like me. Or mostly like me—since I was required by my government to get married in order to live with the person I love, and I got hitched at a courthouse wearing some crap I very likely pulled off the floor of my closet. Where I keep all of my clothes like AN ADULT.
I could spend the next six years of my life writing about what I think I'm doing here on this planet, married and not having kids like I'm supposed to, why I "bother" to have a marriage that is not for the express purposes of childbearing, what the meaning of my life is to me, but I'm not going to, because I don't have to justify my choices to Elizabeth Wurtzel or Pope Francis or anyone else.
And even if I tried, they wouldn't be convinced. People who think they know my life better than I do never are.
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