Husband Feels Scared to Start TTC, but I am 1000% Ready
My husband (32M) and I (29F) got married in February after 6 years together. We’re financially stable, both employed, and overall in a good place in life. I’ve always loved kids (I work in and studied early childhood education), and since we started wedding planning, I’ve been hit with MAD baby fever.
His family members are super religious Catholics (we’re both not really). But as a formality, we had to do the marriage prep course before our wedding in the church. And through this course, I learned all about natural family planning. I started tracking my cycles with LH strips and the Premom app. My cycles are long and inconsistent (they are anywhere between 34 and 60 days long), but I do get positive LH tests, have a regular luteal phase, and all my bloodwork/ultrasounds have come back normal.
We’ve technically been “not preventing” for about 6 cycles now, and I’ve been trying to time intercourse around ovulation, but nothing has happened for us yet.
The bigger issue is that my husband gets really anxious whenever TTC becomes a more serious convo. He keeps saying things like “we should own a house first” “we need to make more money” “we should pay off more debt first” or “we need to have more space”.
And while they’re all kinda true/valid, I also feel like nobody ever feels fully “ready” for kids. We live in Canada where home ownership is unrealistic for a lot of people anyways, renting is the norm here. We’ve both paid off so much debt in the past 6 years. I just don’t want to put my life on hold forever waiting for some perfect milestone. We can continue to grow and upgrade our lives but with our kids by our sides.
Some of our closest friends waited until they were 38/39 to even start considering TTC. I know that times are different now, couples are trying later, we have lots of modern medicine and all of these things. They’re influencing him too. But I’m not the same! I don’t want to wait another decade to consider even trying, and I’m worried we’ll have issues due to my irregular cycles or the plethora of other reasons couples can struggle. I want to deal with any issues sooner than later.
After a lot of hesitation and convincing, he’s doing a semen analysis on Friday and I’m praying everything goes well.
I genuinely think if we got pregnant, after the initial shock he’d ultimately be happy and super excited. But right now he seems stuck in fear and “what ifs.”
Has anyone dealt with a partner who was hesitant/scared to start TTC even though you felt ready? What helped?