Family & Parenting
I want a child and my spouse does not. We keep circling this conversation and getting nowhere. What now?
“Can two walk together, except they be agreed?”
Amos was a farmer from Tekoa sent north to confront a prosperous kingdom, and he argued in short rhetorical questions that everyone in the crowd could answer for themselves. Two people do not end up walking the same road by accident; they walk it because they agreed to. The line is not a threat aimed at your marriage. It is a plain observation that agreement is arrived at together rather than won by one of you.
“Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.”
Paul wrote from prison to a church he loved that was fracturing over people digging in on their own positions. His instruction is not that you abandon what you want, but that you hold your own interests alongside the other person's rather than instead of them. In a disagreement this size, the real question shifts from who is right to whether each of you can state the other's fear as clearly as your own.
A path forward
Ask your spouse to describe what specifically frightens them, and listen all the way to the end without answering. Most positions of I do not want children turn out to be I am afraid of something particular: money, freedom, their own childhood, or what it would do to your marriage.
Agree a timeline for the conversation rather than demanding a verdict. Saying you will revisit it in six months and neither of you will apply pressure in between turns an ultimatum back into a marriage.
See a counselor or your pastor together, once, before this hardens. It is one of the few disagreements with no natural compromise position, and couples navigate it far better with a third person in the room.
Closing verse
“Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water; but a man of understanding will draw it out.”
- Proverbs 20:5
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