[borski]

It is obviously extremely important who you choose to have children with. I completely agree. If I’d had kids in my 20s with my ex, I would have ended up with regrets for the rest of my life (not the kids, but my choice of with whom to have them).

If I have kids now, there’s no chance I’d have regrets. It’s a very different timeline in my life, being in a non-abusive relationship after 8 years of being in one and lots of therapy.

And yes, men can be in abusive relationships with women too.

[jajko]

I've been in such relationship once, albeit only few months. Took me few years to recover fully but it was a lifelong wakeup lesson and I started properly looking into psychology. Afterwards, no mysteries in the opposite camp anymore and straight to my wife now.

How to handle various relationships and personalities should be mandatory psychology 101 somewhere around beginning of high school. It would make whole mankind behave a bit better overall, no doubt there.

The problem with your comment is, kids are by far the biggest stressor in marriages. Wonderfully working, fully matching couples are pushed sometimes to their limits and beautiful relationships become just surviving hardships next to each other. You can't fully know how the opposite will handle this, even under good circumstances, god forbid something ain't right (like post natal health issues in kid or mother), even when trying to use psychology a bit. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails in myriad ways. You could have felt your ex was the one for life while pro creating, thats happening during (brutally) easy times.

[borski]

You’re right; I can’t predict the future.

But I have experience having gone through extremely difficult things with my wife; both of our dads were diagnosed with cancer this year, months apart. Our relationship started only a year before a pandemic. I went through a serious depressive phase. She was diagnosed with and has been (successfully) working through dealing with her C(omplex)-PTSD. I discovered I had ADHD, and have had it since I was a kid, and have gone through that self-discovery process.

Basically, you’re completely correct, but we’ve also discussed the fact that most partners do forget about one another when kids enter the picture, and we have promised not to; and to check in with each other constantly, as the risk of postpartum runs in her family (if that’s even a thing, and it isn’t just people in general).

It may help that she has been through many, many years of therapy on her own, and is also studying to get her masters in psychology to become an LPCC/LMFT.

She’s the strongest and most impressive person I’ve ever met. And I’ve met a lot of strong and impressive people.

So while the chance we end up hating each other isn’t zero, I’m pretty sure it’s as damn low as it can be, and I’m pretty fine with that as life decisions go. :)

[zomglings]

Do you have kids?