The divisive dilemma: How the question of having children led to breakups for these Australian couples

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Alexandra Hobbins remembers the exact moment she realised she never wanted children.

She was 22, and a friend had just unexpectedly become pregnant.

“I remember just seeing my friend’s announcement on Facebook and thinking: ‘That’s amazing for her. I never want that’,” she told The Feed.

There wasn’t a specific reason why — for Alexandra, it almost felt innate. At the time, she was around six months into a relationship with her 24-year-old boyfriend.

“I saw that post and said: ‘Hey, just so you know, I never want to have children’. And his response was like: ‘Yeah, me either, that’s fine’,” she said.

Alexandra said every six months, whenever another friend became pregnant, she continued to mention her choice to never have children to her partner.

But as the years went by, Alexandra realised there was a disconnect.

She thinks when her partner agreed he didn’t want kids, he actually meant “I don’t want them yet“.

While she never felt pressured by her partner to have children, Alexandra said he assumed she could change her mind.

“Our relationship was really excellent. And outside of the issue of me not wanting children and him wanting children, it seemed pretty picture-perfect to me,” she said.

After her partner turned 30, Alexandra said the conversation around children turned serious.

She was firm in her decision to be childfree, and says suggested other ways her partner might find fulfilment without kids, including having young family members over for regular sleepovers and spending time with friends’ children. But she said her partner still longed for children of his own.

“It broke my heart that I was going to potentially pull him away from being an amazing father,” she said.

A woman in sunglasses and a beige coat sits in the driver's seat of a car with two muzzled dogs in the backseat behind her

Alexandra says she has an innate feeling of not wanting children and enjoys the freedom it gives her. Source: Supplied

“It was a conversation that ended up being almost, at one point, every single day — turning into tears every single day.”

The couple was at an impasse. So, after more than seven years together, she said they made the difficult mutual decision to break up.

“We were still madly in love, and I had to fall out of love with him very intentionally,” Alexandra said.

The rise of people without children

It will become more common for people to end relationships when they disagree over having children, expects Bronwyn Harman, a researcher at Edith Cowan University who has spent over a decade researching people without children.

“Women are becoming more able to stand their ground and say: ‘No, this is what I want’,” she said.

The proportion of couple families without children has risen over time in Australia.

It’s projected there will be nearly four million couple families without children in 2046, according to one model by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

A column graph comparing the proportions of different family types in 2001, 2021 and 2046

The proportion of Australian women who have never given birth has also increased, according to Census data.

In 1981, 8.5 per cent of women aged 45-49 had never had children. This almost doubled in 2021, with 16.5 per cent of women in that age group having never had children.

A line graph showing how many children women aged 45-49 have given birth to in their lifetime, from 1981 to 2021

Harman said attitudes towards people without children — particularly women — are still generally negative in Australia.

She said being childfree (not wanting children) is not a new phenomenon.

“I think that in the past there would be … more people who did not want to have children and had them anyway,” she said.

“There’s always been people in societies who don’t want to have children, but they’re able to talk about it more openly now.”

‘Socially childless’: The people choosing their partner over children

Gemma (not her real name) faced a different dilemma. At the age of 24, she broke up with her partner because she desperately wanted to have children — and he didn’t.

“It was one of the most difficult times of my life,” she said.

After leaving her partner, Gemma spent a long time questioning whether she’d made the right call.

“I came to the conclusion that I wanted to be with him more than have a hypothetical child, when we both have some health issues we don’t want to pass on. But it also took our friends having them to help realise we are happy as we are,” Gemma said.

“We ended up getting back together; bought a house, gotten married and I’ve come to be comfortable and happy with a childfree decision.”

Gemma said she came to terms with not having children after discussions with her therapist, realising she didn’t want to give up her hobbies and seeing how challenging life was for her friends who’d had children.

Harman terms people like Gemma, who want to have children but whose partners are unwilling, “socially childless”. They’re distinct from “medically childless” people (those who can’t have children for medical reasons, usually due to challenges with infertility).

“They need to either decide to stay with their partner and therefore not have children, which goes against what they wanted, or they make the break and hope that they find somebody in time to have children with,” she said.

“They run the risk of being in the end, not only childless, but also single.”

Of the people Harman has studied, she said around half chose to stay with their childfree partner.

“They were saying things like they didn’t want to run the risk of being single and they’d left their run too late. They were worried that not only would they not have children, they wouldn’t have a partner either,” she said.

Harman said these people seemed to accept the fact that they weren’t going to have children, but often felt an underlying resentment towards their partner.

She said the other people chose to leave their partner to find someone else who would be willing to be a parent.

“Most of them did manage to find somebody else and had children,” she said.

“They had learned their lessons from the first time, basically, and asked about the person’s attitude toward having children early on in the relationship, rather than leave it further down the line.”

Having the parenting conversation early

For Alexandra, a person’s stance on having children is now one of her top concerns when dating.

Now 31, Alexandra said she and her ex-partner didn’t take the kids conversation seriously when they started dating in their early 20s.

“I could say, in a way, that I unfortunately wasted seven years with him because from six months in, we both sort of knew that we were not compatible in the long term,” she said.

A woman in a tartan blazer and black dress with tattoos on her legs takes a mirror selfie on a bed

Alexandra is upfront about not wanting children when dating. Source: Supplied

Harman said for many childfree and socially childless people, the topic of children is often brought up on the first date or first few months of a relationship.

“They sort of suss out quite early on whether their prospective partner wants to have children or not,” she said.

When she’s actively dating, Alexandra said her dating profiles have her childfree status listed in two locations, and she won’t swipe right on anyone who says they want children or already have children.

“I make sure that it is known pretty well from the get-go, first conversation. Don’t even really care if I’ve met them yet.”