Is Family Life a Fun Suck?

I used to want kids but now looking hot and partying sound way better!

Dear Molly,

I feel like a female Benjamin Button and it’s giving me anxiety. If you asked me 2 years ago if I wanted a family and a house in the suburbs I’d have said “YES.” I was much more mature then. Fast forward two years I make a lot more money at my job which affords me to look better, live in a fun city, pursue all the hobbies I’ve always wanted, go out partying and date more men! I’m living the 20 something life I always wanted at 34! 

Now the thought of the family life seems like a fun suck! I’m ashamed to admit that all I can think about is looking good, partying and meeting men! This desire is making me lose A LOT of sleep because I know in my heart I’ll look back and regret not having a family. At 34 biologically this would be a great time to start. My friends are all married, leading me to have to hang out/date people who are younger than me or don’t want families.

How long can this last? 

Should I stop this lifestyle and just start a family now/ date men who have a real future with even though they aren’t that much fun? Do I still have time? 

Feel Bad For Having Fun 

Dear FBFHF,

Right now I’m on vacation, sitting by a pool in the desert, wondering when I should start making cocktails for my friends. The day before yesterday I got my hair bleached platinum blonde for pretty much no reason other than I was curious how it would look. It looks fucked up, which is how I wanted it to look. I’m ashamed to admit that lately all I can think about is looking fucked up, getting fucked up, and meeting fucked up people.

There are also kids here.

I don’t drink that much, honestly and I’m not trying to pretend that any of this is glamorous. Glamour is not the point for me, though there are people who hold onto glamour, cultivating and pursuing hotness and aesthetically pleasing settings and situations at all times. They have gorgeous houses and photogenic children and literal rock star husbands, and their Instagram feeds are like magazine spreads. I’m making them sound terrible but some of them are great.

Others pursue the edgier, scrappier side of existence. They move to desert cities and befriend desert rat types and hang out in old timey saloons and amp up their freak natures and write and talk and read and think about mysterious desert shit and aliens. This is just an ad for The Desert Oracle, a really excellent publication and podcast that exist because someone who saw family life as a fun suck followed his bliss and dragged his family along for the ride.

You can’t suppress who you are. If you like looking good and meeting new people, you’ll probably do that whether you have a family or not. If you want a family and crave security you’ll pursue that path whether or not you’re “partying” before, during, or after. Likewise, men who want families are sometimes very fun. Men who don’t want families are sometimes extremely boring. Just because our culture is hopelessly stupid and rigid about what it means to be a parent, so we all think it means endlessly looping between church, Target, and the Olive Garden, the rest of the world tends to disagree.

People with kids are exactly as tedious as they were before they had kids, or exactly as entertaining or exactly as unhinged. People don’t change that much. If they do change dramatically, sometimes that makes them miserable. The happy people I know do their best to be good parents while also pursuing their own weird desires. Despite our culture’s propensity to paint any single-minded pursuit or vision quest by a parent as selfish or evil, it’s not all that difficult to shield your children from harm while doing exactly what the fuck you want with your life.

Will your kids feel faintly neglected occasionally, compared to the kids whose parents take their emotional temperature constantly and run labs on their shit samples every few minutes to make sure they’re getting enough antioxidants? Probably. But I would argue that neglect is a crucial staple in any healthy child’s upbringing. My dipshit sister has a front row seat to the depressed, overthinking, paralyzed children of depressed, overthinking, paralyzed adults who gave up everything – INCLUDING FUN – to have children. And guess what? Ignoring your kids a lot and dragging them along on your weird adventures is much healthier.

Kids are adaptive. My school-age kid was just playing with leaves by the pool for a solid hour. She and two other kids were “making tacos,” describing how spicy each salsa was, passing leaves around and discussing them with great intensity. This happened because no one brought along any toys, we were all too focused on packing our big bottles of gin.

That doesn’t mean that we’re drunks or shitty parents. And it’s a lot easier not to be a drunk when you didn’t give up your interests and your career and your secret desires and your full fucking self just to have kids. When you give up everything, when you associate families with boredom, when you associate boring men with stability, when you allow all of the fun to get sucked out of your life, that’s when things get dark and sad and unnerving.

So do whatever you want, but keep your previous desires in mind. I’m sure you spent some years before this one caring about your looks and meeting guys and “partying.” Likewise, you’ll probably want a family again, just like you did before. Plan for all of the above. Don’t waste your time with guys who don’t have a similar mix of conflicting desires – not because they’re bad marriage material, but because they’re usually one-dimensional idiots.

Will you find family life empty? Will you find socializing empty? If you’re empty, you’ll find most things empty. But you’ll be projecting.

Molly

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