My first instinct was to start this piece with a chivalrous tirade about how the burden of birth control is on women far too often, but I don’t actually have any concrete evidence to support that claim so I’m just going to come clean and admit that for the majority of my adult life, I myself put the burden of birth control on women. My sexual debut was with someone who had significantly more notches in her bedpost than I did, and I followed her lead. Fortunately, she was on the pill and we had known each other for a few months before we hooked up, but looking back, it’s absolutely bonkers that I didn’t use the word condom followed by a question mark once in the moments leading up to my thing entering her thing. 

My past self’s moronic laissez-faire attitude toward prophylactics persisted well into his mid-twenties. He never carried a condom in his wallet and he foolishly assumed that if the person with whom he was hooking up didn’t want to have sex with him unless he was wearing one, they wouldn’t! Whenever he did use a condom, it was always at the behest of the person on the other side of the bed/couch/tent. He never openly objected to wearing one, but he was always incredibly disappointed when asked to do so. 

My past self was never going to win the Shagger Of The Year award, but he did have quite a few one-night-stands and casual encounters that evolved into mutually gratifying relationships of convenience, although few of them lasted very long. He was sexually reckless and a bout of chlamydia in his early twenties failed to spark any kind of self-reflection. 

I’m switching back to first-person because I’m much less inclined to distance myself from my present self. 

I’m a very different person now. I went through some pretty wild shit in my late twenties I won’t disclose, but suffice to say my outlook on a myriad of issues and topics had evolved significantly by the time I met the woman who is now my wife, Kelly. Kelly and I met in March of 2015 and got married less than a year later because why the fuck not? We used condoms the first few times we hooked up because Kelly wasn’t on any kind of birth control, which was totally fine with me because as I said, I was no longer a trash person by that point. When we realized that we were getting serious, we had another conversation about how to proceed. 

We took what we assumed would be the easy route out of our predicament. I say we but I didn’t actually have to do anything as Kelly went on the pill. Unfortunately, Kelly and the pill were not a good match, and the negative side effects are overwhelming. She experienced regular mood swings, as well as sudden and severe nausea and headaches. Another thing about the pill is that you have to remember to take it every day, which is neither of our fortes. And it was expensive.

After some deliberation, Kelly decided to stop taking the pill and get an IUD. Again, I didn’t actually have to do anything, but this is when the prospect of me getting the snip was first broached. “If this IUD doesn’t work out, you’ll have to get a vasectomy,” Kelly said. The thought of having a vasectomy had never crossed my mind. I just assumed that the only people who get vasectomies are men who already have kids but who don’t want any more kids. But when Kelly mentioned it as a potential option, I didn’t hesitate to say, “That’s fine with me.” 

The IUD was an absolute nightmare on the way in and on the way out. For whatever reason, it took the doctor longer than usual to implant it, and the procedure was incredibly painful and uncomfortable for Kelly. A few months later at an OBGYN checkup, the doctor was unable to locate the “strings,” which had evidently moved out of place. A complicated search for the strings ensued, during which Kelly had to be dilated several times. The doctor eventually removed the IUD, and that was the end of that. 

I don’t want to be a dad and I have never wanted to be a dad. Not once, in my 34 years on this doomed planet have I experienced even a twinge of desire to procreate. Don’t get me wrong, I do not dislike children (well, not all of them). I simply dislike the idea of me having children. Raising kids is very expensive and I am very selfish. I find the thought of having to spend money on diapers and those things that sterilize bottles deeply upsetting, and that’s just the tip of the parenthood iceberg. And why should I have to buy crappy toys for a baby when I could buy cool toys for myself? Fortunately, my wife feels (mostly) the same way, which is why when the IUD didn’t work out, I took one for the team for the first time in my entire sexually active life.

You would think that I would have had to think long and hard about the decision to get a vasectomy in my twenties and with no children to my name, but I didn’t really. I mean, sure, I gave it some thought. But ultimately the decision was an easy one to make. I don’t want kids. My wife doesn’t want kids. My wife is ostensibly allergic to all accessible forms of birth control, and we were married by this point so there was no way we were going to go back to using condoms. I went to see my urologist, and a few weeks later I was on the operating table wide awake with a groin full of anesthesia as the very same urologist (shoutout to Dr. Kasey) hacked away at my nutsack. 

I had been led to believe by movies and TV that a vasectomy was a far more straightforward procedure than it actually was. It was a fairly harrowing experience. Despite being anesthetized down there, I could still kinda feel what was going on. The pain was minimal, but I swear I could actually feel him tying a knot down there like he was doing up a pair of laces. I was relieved when it was over, but then the healing began. No sex for a few days, ice on the balls, walking around bow-legged with stitches in my scrotum, and tighty whities filled with gauze. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to raw dog my own wife without visions of positive pregnancy tests dancing in my head.

I’d also been led to believe that vasectomies were easy to reverse, but my urologist stressed that although a reversal procedure is technically doable, there’s no guarantee that it will work. Some opt to freeze their sperm before going under the scalpel so they have the options in the future, but I’m not that attached to my own genetics. Basically, by getting a vasectomy, I had to assume I was permanently relinquishing the option to procreate. Fine by me. 

It’s been five years since I got the snip, and not once have I experienced the slightest tinge of regret. Occasionally someone who doesn’t know me that well will ask me if I have kids, or if I plan on having kids, and in those moments I briefly consider what it would be like to be a father — and I feel nothing. 

If you tell people you just don’t want or plan to have children, they often have a knee-jerk reaction and dismiss the idea saying, “you’ll change your mind,” as if the appeal of parenthood is a taste we all acquire as we get older. The conversation can bring up a lot of defensiveness, as though you’re calling their choices into question by not making the same ones. But the ubiquitous expectation seems rooted in existential anxiety–what will the meaning and legacy of my life be if I don’t recreate myself in some way? When in doubt, have a child to fulfill your untapped potential and be a vessel on which to project unachieved hopes and dreams. And then once the kid is here, they can be the reason to cite why those things never happened. 

Quite a few of our close friends either have kids or are having kids. We also have nieces and nephews. These are kids that we can borrow pretty much whenever we want, spoil, and return when the sugar crash hits. We seldom take advantage of that option, but we like that it’s there. Going to Disneyland rules, but going to Disneyland with a kid rules even harder. The eagerness with which our friends and relatives hand over their children to us further solidifies our lack of desire to multiply. And in the highly unlikely event that we do change our minds, there’s always adoption. 

There’s this one kid who lives in the same building as me. He’s probably somewhere between 8 and 10-years-old. He’s a polite, affable kid who’s always hanging around in the courtyard with a smile on his face. Whenever we cross paths, we chat about video games for a few minutes. A few days ago, I gave him my old Xbox One S which I was too lazy to sell on Facebook Marketplace or whatever. He was ecstatic, and honestly, so was I. I got a kick out of knowing that I had brought him some joy and the whole thing triggered a feeling that I hadn’t experienced before. An unfamiliar quasi-paternal satisfaction that sprung not just from the giving of a gift, but also from nurturing a shared passion.

Is this what it’s like to have kids? Luckily, I can always borrow someone else’s.

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