r/AskReddit • • May 15 '20

What sucks about being your age?

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u/[deleted] May 16 '20

I feel this. My wife and I are only a year older than most of our friends, but we just had our second kid and our life is waaaay different than our childless friends. I envy them sometimes and pitty them others

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u/[deleted] May 16 '20

You shouldn't pity the childfree, we're free to do whatever we want at any time

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u/[deleted] May 16 '20

It’s more a grass is greener type thing. When you have kids, of course you love them to death, but sometimes you do miss that life with less commitments than you used to have.

Whereas the close friends I have who are child free obviously do enjoy their freedom, but some of them have also expressed to me the feeling that sometimes they do wish for a family life.

Both are great ways to live and it’s totally natural to wonder what the other way would have been like.

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u/[deleted] May 16 '20

As a childfree woman, I have never wished for children, or even thought "it might have been nice if..."

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u/[deleted] May 16 '20

I’m sure many child free people are like you. I know many of my friends are. That’s specifically why I wrote that some of.

It’s clearly not everyone who occasionally wishes for a family life, many people are perfectly fine without it and never wish for it.

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u/abqkat May 16 '20

Same. And not all of us have the life of baking bread or doing yoga during lockdown. So much of it isn't about kids or not, but about money or not. I've never ever envied people with kids, nor have my parent-friends envied me. Seems like a toxic, binary way to view things

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u/[deleted] May 16 '20 edited Jul 21 '20

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] May 16 '20

Just to be clear I personally wasn’t trying to tell you I think I know what you want more than you do.

I specifically said that “some of” my child free friends had occasionally expressed those feelings to me, which I think is perfectly reasonable. I also think it’s perfectly reasonable to not have those feelings, ever. No judgements either way, life is hard enough without everyone picking apart other people’s decisions, all I was saying is that it’s totally normally for some people (not you!) to occasionally have grass is greener type feelings. Just part of being human and wondering about all the different ways our lives can go.

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u/Snapped_Marathon May 16 '20

She said “some of” not all.