CHILDLESS blokes may have trouble expressing their unmet yearning for kids — but the pain is real. This is the conclusion British sociologist Dr Robin Hadley has come to after studying more than 100 involuntarily childless men, including himself, over nearly a decade.
“It’s an unexpressed grief, it’s a sadness in your pocket,” Dr Hadley says, and moments later adds: “It’s always with you.”
Speaking straight from the heart in his hefty Manchester accent, Dr Hadley, 56, repeatedly uses the word “black” to describe the turmoil of facing up to a childless life.
“I don’t see the future. And if there’s one thing that kids give you, it’s a sense of the future,” he says.
If you are a man who doesn’t have a child, Dr Hadley says a legacy dies with you. Family heirlooms, anecdotes and recipes or other precious items can’t be passed on to the next generation.
Dr Hadley’s voice cracks as he recalls the story of a childless man interviewed during his research, who told him: “My dad loved being a dad. He enjoyed being a dad. And I always thought I would enjoy that as well.”
For Dr Hadley, who got in touch after reading my previous article on women who were unsuccessful at IVF, his mission to shed light on the plight of involuntarily childless men is intensely personal.
He describes himself as a “working class lad” who comes from “a big family of eight children”.
“We were all just expecting to follow my parents, get a job, find a girl, get married, and have children,” he says.
Things didn’t quite work out that way. Dr Hadley’s first marriage split up. In his 30s he met another likely lass, and candidly says: “I really was broody then.”
That relationship also failed, leaving him yearning for children.
“One of my colleagues and somebody I had known from school, he became a father and I was just so jealous of him. I could hardly speak to him, I’d avoid him,” Dr Hadley confesses.
By the time he met his second wife, Maryan, in 1995 the pair were unable to have children due to their age.
Even so, Dr Hadley did not set out to become an expert in this area. He simply went looking for research to explain his own unfulfilled broodiness — and found none.
“There was very little about men’s experience and the desire for fatherhood but there’s an awful lot of research around women and motherhood, and it seemed incredible to me,” he says.
Since then, Dr Hadley’s own research has shown something which negates the timeworn narrative that the desire to procreate falls into the lap of women.
According to an online survey of 232 people conducted in 2009 by Dr Hadley at Manchester University, 59 per cent of men and 63 per cent of women desire to be parents. This means the sexes feel roughly the same yearning for children.
And perhaps unexpectedly, the emotional impact of not having those desired children seems to hit men harder than women.
Dr Hadley says involuntarily childless men, “seemed to be more depressed and more angry”.
“There was a much more emotional reaction than there was for similar women,” he says.
The same research also found childless men felt more isolated and sad than their female counterparts.
The older childless men Dr Hadley interviewed all expressed fears of “being viewed as a paedophile by others if they found themselves in social situations with children”.
This reflects both “society and the media’s coverage of men and ageing,” Dr Hadley says.
While Canberra man Nigel, 62, says he doesn’t grieve for a lack of children, he does sometimes have a “fear of loneliness”.
In his younger days Nigel, a former elite athlete, says he didn’t long for children. But as he got older things started to change.
At about the age of 45, Nigel says he noticed “biological thinking” kicking in. He started to feel that being childless meant “Yes, I was missing out on something” and also that, “I would regret this”.
“I had a relationship in [my] late 40s with a younger woman and I had my vasectomy reversed. I did want a child at that stage,” he explains, but unfortunately “the relationship fell through and so it was never on the cards”.
Nigel says these days he sponsors children from less fortunate circumstances than himself and suggests this might be in order to “compensate, I suppose, or to fill that [fathering] need”.
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That's so sad.
It's so hard for men to find a woman to settle down with and start a family. Most modern young women want to have a career, travel and/or party, Not necessarily in that order. Kids tend to get in the way of that.
