If you decide to have kids, you will sacrifice everything for your spouse and children, and have very little left for yourself. It is totally worthwhile. You will chose yourself and solitude over scrambling for friendship.
If you decide not to have kids, you will still be incredibly busy, however you won't have access to your friends who do have children because of reasons outlined above.
I am in category A. My ideal vacation involves going to a country alone where I don't speak the language for two weeks. The best part is coming home to my wife and kids.
Friendship becomes more rare as you age because your friendships don't have the desperation of youth. It was always rare to find people you truly relate to. When you get older, you almost don't have the option of wasting your time with people you don't relate to. It's awesome.
I agree. Once you have kids, especially when they're young, you don't have the time to sit around on the couch with the boys. I came to terms with the fact that I don't actually want friends anymore. I want relationships based around common interest in tech, politics or a hobby. Other than that, I'd rather be alone.
But the people with whom I share a common interest are my friends!
And I think it's always been like that. I could never just hang out with people for no good reason. It's easier when we share a common interest. As a consequence, I also never know what to do on family days with the in-laws. (My family is easy; we're all nerds.)
"don't have the time to sit around on the couch with the boys"
There's a lot of binary thinking in this thread.
First of all the article is weirdly misleading where the cheezy intro picture (cheezy as in giant intro pix are so 2011 and its not 2011 anymore, although the stock photo itself is a bit cheezey) is mom with a "Waltons"-full or "Bradys"-full herd of her own small children, but the article clearly states she has no kids and is waiting for her biological clock to ring off the hook or something. Maybe this "I'm bored" is mother natures evolutionary way of subconsciously motivating women to start squirting out kids. One thing that is unarguable is the editor who picked out the intro pix didn't bother even skimming the article.
When my kids were infants and toddlers I had a pretty good excuse to burn a ridiculous amount of time on IRC and discussion groups and multiplayer games, which were kinda the social media of their day. But that only lasts a couple years and now I socialize more than when I was single!
Kids often participate in scouts, church, after school clubs (Vex Robotics, etc) and especially sports. Theoretically at least a small part of the rationalization for making (forcing?) kids to do that stuff is to teach kids how to make friends and socialize, but it hardly stops at 18... There's two couples specifically we hang out with constantly during soccer season because our kids play, and another couple hangs out with us at every basketball practice and everyone hangs out together and basically tailgates at baseball. My wife became friends with a mom at a "kids learn how to cook" class and they're always talking and my wife got her friend's daughter a job where she works etc etc etc. My daughter is on a bowling team and has made a friend on the team and no my wife hangs out with her mom quite a bit.
There's a lot of fake sounding rationalization about parents "forcing" their kids into activities and I think a much more practical realistic explanation is the parents don't really care if their kid is making lego robots or baking cookies or playing sportball, the parents just want a couple hours a week to gossip and eat junk food and maybe tailgate or maybe everyone goes to the restaurant afterwards, or just hang out and watch the game together or whatever.
And with respect to the increase in kids programmed activities and decrease in kids ages, no 2 year old ever asked their mom for ballet class or toddler yoga or WTF, but plenty of moms and dads of 2 years olds want to hang out with other parents. The purpose of ballet class and modern dance class is for the moms to hang out, and likewise cub scouts is basically the dads want to hang out together, oh and in both cases the kids do something to stay mostly safe and out of trouble as a secondary thing.
I'm happily married longer than I have kids so this doesn't directly matter to me, but I've observed that some of the local single moms think the sole purpose of scouting is to provide a meat market of single men for them, oh and the kids learn to tie knots or something to stay out of the way. If people have nothing else to gossip about, they'll start on that topic...
As someone a little bit older, let me suggest an addendum to this. Once you get into your later 40s and your kids are grown you will find that you do have more time for friends. This is especially true when (as more then half of all people eventually do) you get divorced. I speak from experience.
>The divorce rate peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s and has been declining for the three decades since.... If current trends continue, nearly two-thirds of marriages will never involve a divorce.
>Ultimately, a long view is likely to show that the rapid rise in divorce during the 1970s and early 1980s was an anomaly. It occurred at the same time as a new feminist movement, which caused social and economic upheaval. Today, society has adapted, and the divorce rate has declined again.
Ummmm... Yes, there's a huge difference between 50% and 33%.
That's just for the general population though, as the article said the drop is largely concentrated in certain groups of people. If you are the average hacker news reader (a high earning heterosexual man) and you marry a college educated woman whose when both of you are in your late 20/early 30s you are very unlikely to divorce.
The 50% figure is really flawed to start with through, it came from taking the annual marriage rate per 1,000 people and comparing it with the annual divorce rate. Understand in in a given year the people who are getting married are not the same people getting divorced.
Completely agree on the time wasting bit. With kids, your free time is precious, so your tolerance for bullshit (which comes with most friends) wanes. With the exception of those rare, close friends to which you relate so well, it's hard to justify the effort for ones to which you don't.
This. The first taste of cat B comes when your friends find their spouses, but that first blush lasts maybe little over a year. With kids it's a bit longer.
Also at least for me: when you have a kid the free time you have without any arrangements tends to be couple of hours here and there. It is just much easier to have solitary hobby than to hunt around for a friend whose schedule your free time slot fits in.
My wife and I are in the no kids camp. We've watched our friends disappear as they have had kids. Nothing we do is kid unfriendly, but I think misery loves company so parents hang out with other parents ;)
This flies in the face of pschology, that states relationships, family (not necessarily children) AND friends are all requirements for a fulfilled life.
If you decide to have kids, you will sacrifice everything for your spouse and children, and have very little left for yourself. It is totally worthwhile. You will chose yourself and solitude over scrambling for friendship.
If you decide not to have kids, you will still be incredibly busy, however you won't have access to your friends who do have children because of reasons outlined above.
I am in category A. My ideal vacation involves going to a country alone where I don't speak the language for two weeks. The best part is coming home to my wife and kids.
Friendship becomes more rare as you age because your friendships don't have the desperation of youth. It was always rare to find people you truly relate to. When you get older, you almost don't have the option of wasting your time with people you don't relate to. It's awesome.