"One Of The Only Times My Husband Shows Me Respect."

The sad state of affairs around modern masculinity's intersection with pregnancy (and, well, then the rest of life).

Lemme give you the old trigger warning up front that all couples, women, and men are different in how they approach life, and this is not about any one specific couple or person. Some husbands are great; some are shitty. This is life. (Same goes for women.)

I’ve had five women in the past 30 days tell me a variation of the quote in the headline of this article. Small sample size, yes, but means something. Three of the five were responding to this article about whether women have a “pregnancy kink.”

I think I actually mentioned the idea that “husband treats you better” as a reason why “being pregnant” seems very cool, even if you’re nauseous a lot and feel like you’ve lost control of your body in some ways.

I started reading (read: skimming) a book by Elise L., who I believe is the Chief Content Officer of Goop. The book is about how women operate around the “seven deadly sins,” and it’s kinda proto-feminist, but you also need to remember that Elise has a full-time nanny and her + her husband actually bought a health care plan for their nanny, and she calls her nanny “the third-most important person in my life,” which is a hysterical slip-up because she has a husband and two kids, so that's three people, so who is the nanny ranking ahead of? I would guess the husband. I laughed.

In this book, there’s a lot about “the depressing normalization of the Useless husband,” which has been covered off on a few times in the wider world, including by me.

That’s part of the pregnancy equation. A lot of men are useless domestically, and would rather scream at you about how much money they make or how they “provide” for you when you do most of the day-in, day-out work and those same husbands often have no friends of their own short of what you organize socially.

But most men are not sociopaths, so when you’re “with child,” they’re usually going to be more caring and empathetic and there for you. The grand irony is that once that child can vomit on you, the guy is usually a little bit less involved, and I’d say that comes from a variety of socially-ingrained factors about how women need to be and must be primary caregivers. We basically let men off the hook, which actually begins with the semantics of pregnancy, I.e. most women say “Tom gave me these two kids,” which in Tom’s mind means he wrapped a present with a bow, and he can go play golf or grab some beers for Michigan vs. Texas as much as he wants.

Your husband is obviously your primary relationship when pregnant, assuming we’re discussing a married hetero-normative couple. But I also think this extends to the friends, too. A lot of women have been bridesmaids 8–12 times, and had to fly to Nashville or Mexico and buy a bunch of shots and a dress that they will wear twice and they’ve had to endure all the slings and arrows and comparisons and back-stabbing of female friendships, so when they get theirs in terms of a baby, they want to be celebrated. One of my neighbors told me her friend had a 27-slide PowerPoint about her baby shower, including the exact heights of the tables that people would make small talk around. That’s partially “Type-A personality,” of course, but also partially, “I got mine and I want it acknowledged because of all the shit I’ve put up with from you ladies over time.”

That’s actually part of the reason infertility can be depressing on the guy side — you want to get your lady that experience, that “fete,” and you can’t. You can do it for her in other ways, but it’s different. Meanwhile, some girl over here is now having a “sprinkle” for her third kid, even though they’re all the same gender. What the fuck?

But back to the bigger point: do women go through the pros and cons of childbirth in part because it’s the main time their husband is a nice, respectable citizen to them? I am sure some women do. There are probably as many reasons to get pregnant (including “accident”) as there are women, in reality. But I don’t think we can ignore this part of the equation, either.

Society — or at least American society — claims to “value” mothers, but it’s usually in the abstract. Once you have the kids, it’s kinda like everything else in America: “Figure it out. Bootstraps it.” But we do actually value pregnancy (well, somewhat — we still don’t have a great maternal mortality rate relative to how rich we are as a nation). Remember what the instant criticism of George Floyd was in 2020? He once hit a pregnant woman. That’s the ultimate sin. That’s why, 20 years after some douchebag in Modesto, CA had an affair and probably killed his pregnant wife, we’re still discussing it. It’s a sin to violate a pregnant woman. But to tell the mom of a five-year-old that she better figure her shit out and you can’t really help? That’s pretty much a common occurrence.

In a society that claims to value women and their ultimate “purpose” of conceiving, but one that doesn’t really do it that well, are we surprised that some would have more kids than their means just to feel good 1–2 times more for 36–40 weeks? We shouldn’t be.

Now, none of this explains why the fertility rate seems to be declining.

But that's a complicated equation involving mostly economics, even though we try to make it an ideological or cultural issue. And what we should fear, if that's the right word, about less people having kids is the “network effect." People do what their friends do. That’s called “Joneses.” If your friends don’t have kids, and their lives seem cool and they just did a tour of Croatia, there’s a chance you won’t have kids. Extrapolate that out to thousands of different social groups around the country and we can continue to see that fertility number drop. Add in cost of childcare. Add in cost of groceries. Add in “the phones.” Add it all in, and people will have less kids.

But they still might try to get 1–2, in part because it’s the time their husband will be nicest.

Yer take?