I will day that I'm struggling to align these survey questions with human nature as I understand it.
I have a friend who "wants kids" and two different women, when they reached a certain age in their 30s, signaled they wanted to marry him and have kids.
But they both exhibited red flags that caused him to decline. One woman didn't act like she liked him, even though she was also saying she wanted to settle down together.
The other woman was unwilling to discuss how they'd raise the children given the fact they were from different religious backgrounds.
Given he's now in his 40s he'll likely never have kids.
I suppose if he was super passionate about kids he'd enter an unhappy marriage and make sure he got some kids out of it, before possibly ending up divorced.
So wanting children was more a conditional thing than a binary thing, and I don't know if these surveys can capture that.
I can't say too much about that exact scenario, but I think a practical issue for people is waiting for the perfect conditions. And in general, those perfect conditions never come, yet the years fly by so incredibly fast.
And for women this is particularly true. Because in practical terms you're going to have at least a couple of years between kids. At the minimum this is because their cycle is suppressed while breast feeding, and then it generally takes a number of months to get pregnant, even moreso if somebody is in their 30s, let alone 40s. And so if you want to have 3 kids, it's a practical necessity to start very early - that's pushing towards a decade of time.
So modern society is really rather a lie in this regard, and I think that's been quite harmful. Because this lie is encouraging all of us (male and female alike), to push parenthood out later and later. And that dramatically increases the odds that 'later' eventually becomes never.
I will day that I'm struggling to align these survey questions with human nature as I understand it.
I have a friend who "wants kids" and two different women, when they reached a certain age in their 30s, signaled they wanted to marry him and have kids.
But they both exhibited red flags that caused him to decline. One woman didn't act like she liked him, even though she was also saying she wanted to settle down together.
The other woman was unwilling to discuss how they'd raise the children given the fact they were from different religious backgrounds.
Given he's now in his 40s he'll likely never have kids.
I suppose if he was super passionate about kids he'd enter an unhappy marriage and make sure he got some kids out of it, before possibly ending up divorced.
So wanting children was more a conditional thing than a binary thing, and I don't know if these surveys can capture that.