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When, at 46, Trudi Galbraith’s doctor told her she was entering perimenopause, she was devastated. “I just remember saying, ‘no, no, no, no, no’. I didn’t want to hear it.”
The 52-year-old from Melbourne always thought she would have children. After travelling and climbing the career ladder in her 20s, she started dating in her 30s in the hope of finding someone to settle down and have children with, but never met the right person. She never wanted to be a single mother, desiring the support and stability of a family unit.
Trudi Galbraith pictured with Ariya. She is still coming to terms with being childless. “This isn’t at all the life I wanted. I’m just trying to make sense of it now.” Credit: Simon Schluter
When dating in her 30s, Galbraith says her declining fertility was a source of anxiety. “I was absolutely panicking.”
“I felt like I was walking around with a neon sign on my head that said ‘my biological clock is ticking.’”
Galbraith now regrets not settling down earlier. “Life is really hard on your own. I should have put more time and effort in my twenties into finding the right person because finding a life partner is one of the most important decisions you’ll make in your whole life.”
She did fall pregnant at one stage, but with someone who wasn’t right for her, but miscarried not long afterwards. “It was very traumatic, but at the same time, it was also not how I wanted it [pregnancy] to happen.”
The people and culture manager has taken a break from dating for the past few years to work through the grief of being unable to have children. She still finds it difficult to look at pregnant women or watch movies about parenthood. “This isn’t at all the life I wanted. I’m just trying to make sense of it now,” she says.
Working with a personal coach, Galbraith hopes she can feel like a “whole” person when she returns to dating, after going through counselling and joining a support group for women without children.
Breaking the stigma of not having children
While fewer Australians are having children today, experts say we still live in a pronatalist society. “The ideology is that women are valued and prioritised for being mothers,” says Judy Graham, a lived experience therapist who works with child-free women, including Galbraith.
“Both women and men can have really meaningful and productive lives whether they have children or not.”
“So much of the stigma around not having children is often internalised as a sense of failure or not being worthy, and we’re not failures, we all deserve love and understanding” she says.
“In the context of dating, it can be very complex.”
Research conducted by the Australian Institute of Family Studies in 2020 found that fertility rates have been trending downwards since the 1980s. But the desire to have children among young people is still strong – only 5 per cent of women and 6 per cent of men surveyed said they definitely did not want to become parents.
On dating apps, few single people explicitly state a desire not to have children. According to data from Tinder, only 11 per cent of users use the “I don’t want children” badge on their profiles.
Despite this, there is a growing number of people, in Australia and abroad, pushing for greater acceptance and understanding of their child-free and childless lifestyles. “Both women and men can have really meaningful and productive lives whether they have children or not,” says Graham.
Within the community of people without children, there are two distinct groups. There are those who are “child-free by choice”, and don’t want to have children, and people who are “childless, not by choice” and can’t have children, due to their life circumstance or for biological reasons.
Dating when you don’t want children
Danica Partosa, 32, grew up in the Philippines and moved to Sydney to pursue a master’s degree in business. She decided she did not want children when she was in her mid-20s.
“I grew up in a country and religion where you get married and have children and that’s just the way of life. But when I looked around me, at my friends and co-workers, their lives were being taken over by their children. I didn’t want to have that kind of life.”
Having dated both in her home country and in Australia, she says there’s definitely a stronger emphasis on parenthood in the Philippines. “The first response I’d get is, ‘Who’s going to take care of you when you’re old?’,” she says.
Danica Partosa, a Filipino student living in Sydney, decided she didn’t want children in her 20s.Credit: Steven Siewert
Still, she says most men in Australia don’t take her seriously when the topic comes up and think she’ll eventually change her mind.
For now, Partosa is happy focusing on her studies. “I think that’s the beauty of it [not wanting kids]. I don’t have a biological clock I have to worry about.”
Tay, who is not using his last name for privacy reasons, realised he didn’t want kids last year, ending a long-term relationship. After buying a house together, his then-partner started to talk about having children. “It was like ticking one thing off and this was the next step for her. And I was like, ‘Wait, hold on’.”
Growing up in a Korean household, he says getting married and having children was a given.
Tay, who works for the defence force and is in his late 20s, is very career-focused and would not want to be put in a position where he’d be forced to prioritise work over his child. Growing up, he says his dad was largely absent from his life, an experience he would not want to a child of his own to go through.
“When I looked around me, at my friends and co-workers, their lives were being taken over by their children. I didn’t want to have that kind of life.”
After his break-up, he has been upfront about not wanting children with prospective partners. He and his new partner are on the same page about this.
While women’s identities are, often unfairly, more closely tied to motherhood, many men also feel pressure to pursue fatherhood. Imogene Smith, a psychologist and lecturer at Deakin University, has studied why men choose to remain child-free. She says the men she interviewed for a study in 2019 “all saw themselves as different, outside the norm and operating within a different kind of masculinity”.
Smith also found that the majority of men in long-term relationships had never had a serious conversation about having children with their partner.
This could be because men don’t need to think about their biological clock as much as women. Or, as Smith suggests, it could also be that “men shy away from conversations that involve heavy emotional content”.
Graham says it is common for women she works with to find themselves at a crossroads if their partner decides they don’t want, or no longer want, children.
“It can really feel like, ‘oh, gosh, I’ve spent all this time in this relationship and all of a sudden I’ve lost my best reproductive years’.” says Graham. “That can bring up a lot of resentment and blame. And it may be a real challenge to stay in the relationship or not.”
Dating when you can’t have children
Like Galbraith, Leigh Abernethy, 52, always wanted children, but never met the right person. She didn’t want to have children in her 40s or do it alone.
“For me, it was very much about having a family and not just having a child. It’s about that love and support.”
The Melburnian estimates that 90 per cent of the men she meets today – who are in their 40s or 50s – have children. And because so many potential partners are parents, she says it’s difficult to meet people in the first place.
“People with kids meet each other through their kids’ activities,” she says, adding that single parents often want to date other parents.
“The last time I went out with someone, they ultimately wanted to go out with someone else who had kids because they could share the experiences they’re having.”
Given the majority of men she’s dated are fathers, integrating with an existing family is sometimes difficult.
“That often became a bigger part of the relationship than the relationship itself,” she says. She now has a rule to only date people who have been separated for two years or more, and won’t meet the children before six months of dating.
“There’s a deep loneliness you have to manage, as it can make you both vulnerable and closed off as you are trying to protect yourself from forming too deep a bond with other people’s children.”
And while she has come to terms with being childless, she says there’s a certain sadness that comes with ageing and dating. “It’s just disappointed me that the people I might meet now, they get the older version of me, not the young sparky version of me.”
“I feel kind of sad that I haven’t been able to have that shared experience of growing older with someone.”
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