Dear DSO: "I can't wait that long! I need to make a baby now!"

Okay, if you're a frequent listener of the Dad Starting Over podcast and you find yourself saying, "Yeah, that sounds like me," well, you don't need another podcast episode. What you need is support. The Help for Men Brotherhood is where men go when they're done pretending that they got it all handled. You know, your dead bedrooms, your divorce, your loneliness, your rebuilding life. We have private forums, frequent live Zoom meetings, one-on-one coaching, courses, all my books at no additional charge. And yes, we get together in person. Real men and real conversations. So stop doing this alone and join the Help for Men Brotherhood today at help4men.com/join. I look forward to seeing you in the next member meeting. All right, I got a message on my Facebook page, and you can follow me at Dad Starting Over on Facebook. Just go to facebook.com/dadstartingover. Dad Starting Over, all one word, or do a search for Dad Starting Over and you'll see all kinds of videos and posts in my page with my beautiful bald head. You can also follow me on YouTube, same name, Dad Starting Over, X or Twitter, as well as TikTok. This message came from a lady and I thought it'd be a good one to talk about. It's very interesting. We'll call her Paula. She says, hi Ralph. Well, hey Paula. She says, I have been following you for a while and I love your videos. Oh, that's very nice of you. Thank you. I actually agree with most of them, but one of them really made me angry. Uh-oh. She says, you talk about how men should wait 3 years before marrying a woman that they are dating. She's right. I've often said that you don't really know a person unless you've been with them for a good 36 months. It goes by pretty fast. You see them with life's ups and downs. You see them when things get good and bad and everything in between. And you're really, you know, you're putting them through a prolonged interview process for a person, you know, to be your life partner. It's a really big deal to pick that person. You shouldn't take it lightly. It's not just something that you do, which is something that I hear from a lot of guys when they're in really dysfunctional relationships with a woman who seems to be really dysfunctional from day one. And I was like, what are you doing marrying this woman? And most often the guys will say, I don't know, it's just what you do. Not good. But I, I digress here. And she says, um, on the other hand, I've heard many women say that you should know if a man is husband material after 6 months. Bit of a discrepancy there. And he should propose around that time frame. Oh wow. If he doesn't, he's just wasting your time and you should move on. He's just using you. I think 6 months is way more realistic than 3 years. She goes on to say, my situation is that I was in school until I was 27, in parentheses, to get my advanced degree. After school, I went into work. I had to move to a different state and didn't have a group of friends or family. Uh, it's taken me a while to build up my social group here, and I have just recently started dating. I am now 33. My ultimate goal is to have a family. Like most women, I want a husband and at least 2 children. As you're aware, time is important to me. I don't have years to wait and see if a partner is worthy of marriage. Only to find out that it's not and have to start all over with another guy. Oh, I see. If I do that, I will literally be in my 40s and unmarried with no kids. Your suggestion is unrealistic, and it will leave a lot of women like me without the family that we've worked so hard for. Then she ends up by saying, I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Well, Paula, Um, you know, there are aspects to this mating, dating, courtship game that are not nice. There are aspects of this mating, dating, courtship game that do not correspond to the modern-day template for what we have come up with as a society for our lives. So in other words, um, and this is going to sound kind of callous on my part, A little insensitive, but let's just, you know, cut to the chase here. Mother Nature is one thing, and Mother Nature, as you know, which you're kind of hinting at here I assume, is that you have a finite number of years of fertility basically where you can in a healthy way make babies. There are plenty of women that have children into their 40s But ask any medical doctor and they will say, mm, to say you're playing with fire is probably a little too strong, but it's your chances of difficulties with the baby itself, such as the chances for things like chromosomal abnormalities, Down syndrome and other things, autism, go up exponentially after the age of 35, for example. I remember with my first wife, when we had our third child, when she got pregnant, she was 36 years of age, I believe. And I'm telling you, every doctor we went to see, if it was, you know, the initial consult with the, the family doctor, the OB-GYN, the person doing the scan, the, the, um, oh, what do you call it, the ultrasound Every single person we touched were like, oh, you're 36, oof. And I remember, um, we sat down with, with the baby doctor, and it was a, um, 30-something woman, and she took us into her office. And I remember she was all flustered. She just got done like delivering a baby, and she was tired, and she was kind of cranky. And she called us into her office, and she just sat down behind her desk and reached into a big drawer and pulled out a flip chart and just put it on her table. Boom. And it was all about, um, the difficulties that you will have in pregnancy, or potential difficulties you will have in pregnancy after the age of 35. And she just went through this flip chart of all these issues that mom will potentially have, that baby will potentially have. And we just left there like, oh my God, they really shame you into— yeah, don't do this. Or now that you've already done it, shame on you for doing this. By this I mean, you know, conceiving past the age of 35. I think they are a little more lax about it these days. In fact, I've heard some medical practitioners bump that age from 35 to 40, 40 being kind of the cutoff of, uh-oh, this is when things start going bad. I don't necessarily know if that's in the name of science or if that's in the name of a more progressive and inclusionary, uh, mentality. In other words, we don't really want to be so mean and turn off a bunch of people and hurt their feelings and risk lawsuits and everything else. So okay, ladies, let's say 40 now. But I digress. So that's what you're hinting at, is you only have so much time, and then there's a lot of difficulties. There's difficulties in getting pregnant, for one. It's, um, becomes more and more difficult as time moves on. And then we have the problems I talked about potentially with you during delivery, during the pregnancy, with the baby itself all kinds of issues. You know, one thing we don't talk about often is that, um, if you're an older gal, you're probably with an older man, or roughly your age, maybe a few years older. And, um, we know that there is in fact a correlation between older men and their older sperm and things such as autism and other disorders. So it's not like old eggs woman is, you know, to blame for everything. Sometimes it's the man is contributing to the problem too. So in other words, older age, let's stick with like 40+, making babies, be careful. So with that being said, you said at the end of your message here, I'm not, and I'm not picking on you, but I'm trying to make a point. If I do that, which you say is, you know, waiting 3 years, it doesn't work out, trying a new relationship, waiting another 3 years, you say if I do that, I will literally be in my 40s and unmarried with no kids. Your suggestion is unrealistic and it will leave a lot of women like me without the family that we've worked so hard for. I don't mean to go on some kind of sexist, misogynistic rant here. That's not my intent. I'm not putting you down as a woman or whatever. I'm just putting the, I guess, scientific facts out there. Your studies well into your late 20s, your work, building a home base for yourself and building up your social group and dating and so forth. And now you're in your early, almost mid-30s. You know, this sounds like the template for a lot of guys that I know. You know, if you know, I don't know what your education is. Well, into your late 20s, sounds like possibly like a medical field or something like that. Doctor, psychology, I don't know. But it may sound, you know, for that late into your 20s with the school and so forth, this may be like your true calling in life kind of thing. Like my wife is a medical doctor, and she doesn't see her career as just like, you know, a 9-to-5 puncher clock kind of thing. It's like very much part of who she is. Uh, her calling, as I say, is to help others, to be a healer. She's a surgeon, so she loves what she does, her craft, and she studies it and, and, you know, has worked very, very hard to get to where she is. Um, so she identifies herself a great deal by her profession. Maybe that's what you are too. So I'm not going to belittle you for that in any way, shape, or form. Congrats, kudos to you for your achievements. But, uh, going back to the old Mother Nature here, uh, Mother Nature really doesn't give a shit. And for you to say, uh, doing all this stuff is the working for— of, you know, that you've worked so hard to earn this to get a family, it doesn't work that way. You've worked, you've done all this work with career and moving and everything else to better yourself career-wise. That doesn't necessarily correspond to family-wise, as you are learning. If we want to get really technical about it, this current stage that we're in as human beings, very hyper-egalitarian. The women, as I've mentioned in many videos, are beating the pants off of men in the university and in the corporate world. We're starting to see the tables even out, if not the women going a little bit above us here. That doesn't necessarily correspond too well with what Mother Nature has instilled in us as the human animal for hundreds of thousands of years. For hundreds of thousands of years, Mother Nature has said to young ladies, "Hey, you're this post-pubertal age, make some babies." Now, a lot of people go, "Dude, what are you saying?" No, I'm not saying that this is a good thing for teenage girls to run out and have babies. Please don't do that. I always tell women, wait until like your late 20s, early 30s to have kids. But Mother Nature seems to have other ideas. And Mother Nature is most definitely not saying to women in their mid, late 30s and early 40s, now's the time to make babies. In fact, in the early 40s is when we have this biological process in women called perimenopause, which is the beginning of the old menopause, which is Mother Nature turning down the dials of this hormone and that hormone slowly but surely to take you out of the baby-making game. And a lot of women are kind of awakened by this fact when they have irregular periods and different emotionality and things like that. They go to the doctor saying, "Something's wrong. Maybe it's, you know, I need to take a different medication or something like that or supplementation." And the doctor says, Sweetheart, you're 43 years of age. This is the old perimenopause. This will probably happen for the next 5+10 years or so until you hit full-blown menopause. Sorry, but it's time for this process to take place. And a lot of women are taken aback like that, like, wow, I still consider myself a young woman. Are you kidding me? Again, Mother Nature doesn't really give a shit. So when it comes to the family planning, make baby Or let's back up. Find mate, the courtship process, make baby, settle down, house, picket fence, 2.5 kids, the whole 9 yards. Mother Nature is telling you early 20s at the latest, get started with that process. You have all of your 20s to do all that work to prep for, you know, the parenthood and everything else. Now I'm not telling you women, you know, set aside career and everything else, barefoot and pregnant, let the men do the work, yada yada nonsense. But at the same time, I'm also not going to be one of these people that tells you, focus on your career, to hell with men, just wait until your late 30s, early 40s, and then start coming, you know, worrying about the baby-making stuff. It doesn't work. And I'm not about to tell men, hey, set aside any kind of rational thought about finding the proper mate in order to fulfill this woman, this woman you just met 6 months ago. Let's say 6 months, 180 days. So that's, uh, 4 times 4, 16. 16 dates. Let's round it up to like 25 dates. So you see this woman that you've been on 25 different dates with, now's the time to commit to her, put a ring on her finger, ask her to marry, move in, start making some babies. A lot of men over the years have kind of fallen for that mindset, if you will. A lot of societal pressure. You're not getting any younger. You need to settle down. You need to stop running around. This is a great woman. What are you doing? Don't let her go, because if you let this courtship process go too long, you're going to lose her, and there are not many good women out there. This is just what you do, as a lot of men have heard over the years. Find woman and quickly turn her into wife and make babies. And what a lot of men have learned years later is, oh shit, I should have taken my time. Because we learn a lot about them after the subsequent months and years where we see the real them. There is very much a process of, uh, the honeymoon stage, new relationship energy as we call it, where you two are very hyper bonded together and you're head over heels in love, and that really clouds your judgment and it really puts you in a very almost primal baby-making mode. This is why a lot of sex gets done during that timeframe. It's, you're hyper, hyper lustful for each other. And Mother Nature saying, hurry up, quick, make babies while you're together. And eventually that super connected, in love, lustful feeling kind of dissipates a little bit. And then when you get married and everything is safe and the feelings of insecurity and uncertainty are gone, for some people we've noticed, especially with a lot of the ladies in our lives, let's be honest, that libido really falls down, and their body and brain is just basically saying, um, you got the guy, you've made the babies, turn the knobs down and just start taking care of the family unit. It's time to move on to the next chapter of your life. And what a lot of men learn is like, oh wow, it's a little bit of a downturn is expected, but to go from a 10 to a -3 on the, uh, sexual connectedness department is not good, not healthy, and I'm about to lose my mind. And then when you talk to these men, well, how long did you know your wife prior to, you know, getting to know her and so forth? Just a matter of months, maybe even like a year. You didn't get to know the woman yet. Give it 3 years, I tell the men. In 3 years, you'll really get to know the real her. The honeymoon phase will subside. Those lustful, in-love, puppy love feelings will go down, and then you'll see the real her, because at the honeymoon stage, that ain't the real her. Um, you know, our lives are typically not a series of honeymoon stages. Our lives are honeymoon stage, down, and then flatlines for a while. And for a lot of us, we do what's called serial monogamy. We fall in love, we pair bond, we stick with somebody for a period of years, usually enough for that honeymoon stage to subside, and then we get bored with each other and go, what, what am I doing with this guy or gal anyway? And then we go and find somebody else and do it all over again. So it's, you know, boop, boop, Using that serial monogamy template, what if you're with this guy, you're head over heels in love, at 6 months, at the 6-month mark, the guy says, it's been 6 months. I heard you say that, you know, you only want to date for 6 months, you're ready to make a baby. Let's do this. And let's say by the end of year 2, you've had a child, you've moved in together, and you look across at him and you go, I don't even like this guy anymore. Now that I've had the baby with him, now that we got married, I realize I don't really know this guy all that well. I don't like this about him. I don't like that about him. Some stuff has come out about him that I didn't know before that I don't like. He has this habit and that habit. He has this vice and that vice. And oh shit, now what? Well, the now what for a lot of people is divorce or a very dysfunctional, quote-unquote, toxic relationship that drags on for years and years. And the kids sit back You know, the kids sit back and watch this and they do the same thing. It's a very generational thing when all that could have been remedied, in theory at least, by waiting, by learning from each other, by taking time with each other, traveling with each other, seeing what each other are like in good and bad situations. But again, this doesn't align with the old biological clock very well, does it? It's not fair. Life, Paula. Is not fair. I don't know what to tell you, but thank you for reaching out. I appreciate it. And if you're a guy or a gal, you'd like to reach out to me, you can do so via the messaging on Facebook and so forth, or you can go to deardso.com. That's deardso.com, and fill out the form. And if your question or your comment or story or whatever is a good one, I'll create a video out of it here. And we also have the ability now on the deardso.com page on the form that you can select to actually do a live interview with me where You will not be on camera. We will just hear your voice, kind of like a radio talk-in show, and we can go back and forth as opposed to just hearing me talk. So check it out at dearDSO.com. And Paula, thank you so very much for your comment. I appreciate it.