What She Said: My Husband Wants a Child. I Don’t

Every week, ThePress spotlights the unfiltered stories of women navigating life, love, identity and everything in between. 

What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

Adaeze* is a 36-year-old Chief Product Officer based in London who also runs a business in Lagos. She talks about knowing since she was a teenager that she never wanted children, building a life and a marriage around that truth, and losing the person closest to her because a doctor decided a woman’s body was her husband’s business.

I’m Nigerian, born and raised, though I’ve lived in the UK for about ten years now. I did my master’s here, stayed for work, and honestly never left. I’m a Chief Product Officer at a tech company in London. I also run a business back in Lagos because Nigeria never really leaves you, no matter how long you’ve been away. The business also made more sense back home than here.

In terms of who I am as a person, I’ve always been focused and driven. I knew early what I wanted from life, and I went after it doggedly. I’m not someone who does things by accident.

I turned 36 this year, and I am married. We’re mostly happy. I don’t feel like I can really complain. I have been lucky in life.

We’ve been married for five years. We met when I was 26, so we dated for five years before that. He’s a good man. A really good man, actually.

I’m an only child, which has shaped a lot of things about me. My parents were present, hardworking, and all of that. But because I had no siblings, my cousin was essentially my sister. We grew up together, spent every holiday together, and called each other about everything. She was my person. My first call for anything, good news, bad news, random Tuesday energy. She’s only 2 years older, and we were inseparable.

Oh, there were constant expectations around marriage and children. You know how it is. Nigerian families don’t really ask if you want something; they just assume and begin planning. Marriage was always a given. Children were always a given. Nobody sat me down and said, “What do you want your life to look like?” They just assumed they already knew.

But I was always watching. Even as a young girl, I was very observant. And what I observed growing up didn’t quite match the picture everyone was trying to sell me.

I mean, I was watching the women around me. Aunties, family friends, neighbours, women in church. And I could see something happening to them that nobody was naming. This slow erosion. Who they were before motherhood, their personalities, their ambitions, their energy, just quietly disappearing. Not all of them. But enough of them that I noticed. They became a shell of who they were. A mother and a wife. Almost nothing else. 

And then there was something else I was watching. The children were carrying their parents’ unresolved pain around like it was their own. Trauma passed down like an inheritance nobody signed up for. I saw that too, and it sat with me.

Honestly, early. Fourteen, fifteen maybe. I know people hear that and they say oh you were just a child, you didn’t know. But I knew. Some things you just know about yourself, and this was one of them. I did not want to be a mother. Not because I didn’t love children, I genuinely do, but because I could see clearly what it would cost me, and I didn’t want to pay that price.

People find it very convenient to use that against me, actually. I volunteer at orphanages, I donate to schools, and I show up for the children in my life. And people look at that and say, “But you’re so good with them, you’d make such a great mother.” As if the only valid way to love children is to produce one of your own. I find that exhausting.

You can love something without wanting it for yourself. I love the ocean. I don’t want to live in it.

Always immediately. I was never going to hide something that fundamental. In my early twenties, I was in a few relationships where I said it early, and the men either disappeared or tried to convince me I’d change my mind. One guy literally said, “You just haven’t met the right person yet.” I was done with him after that.

But when I met my husband at 26, something was different. He was different. And I still told him, within the first few real conversations we had, I don’t want children, I have never wanted children, and this is not something I’m going to change my mind about. You need to know this now before either of us gets any deeper.

He said it didn’t matter. That I was what he wanted. And I believed him completely because he meant it. I genuinely think he meant every word of it in that moment because of how he treated me in the following years. He also never brought it up or tried to convince or hijack me with it.

It was everything, honestly. Because it wasn’t just about the children question. It was about being known. He saw me, all of me, and he wasn’t trying to edit any of it. No one had ever loved me quite the way he did. So patiently, so completely, so specifically. He knows me in a rare way, and I don’t take that lightly.

We dated for five years and then got married when I was 31. And the first two years of marriage were just genuinely good, like bliss.

He came to me and said he’d been thinking, and he thought he did want children after all.

I want to be fair to him here because this is a public conversation and he’s a good person who deserves that fairness. People change. Life shows you things you didn’t know about yourself. He was watching his friends become fathers, his siblings, people all around him. Something had shifted in him, and he was being honest with me about it. I respected the honesty.

But I was also very clear with him. I said, “I have never lied to you. I told you from the very beginning exactly where I stood, and I told you that would not change. It hasn’t changed. Not even slightly. I have a full life. The lack of children doesn’t make me feel like anything is missing in my life.”

He heard me. He wasn’t aggressive about it or manipulative. But I could see the sadness in him, and I couldn’t pretend I didn’t. It became this thing that lived underneath everything. We weren’t fighting; people always imagine it must have been this explosive conflict, but it wasn’t. It was quieter and in some ways harder than a fight. Just the same conversation on a loop with no resolution. His pain on one side, my frustration on the other.

That I had been so clear. From day one. I gave him every opportunity to walk away before either of us was in too deep, and he chose to stay, and now here we were. I wasn’t angry at him for having feelings, but I was frustrated by the situation. Because I hadn’t moved. I was exactly where I said I would always be.

And he was frustrated too, not at me exactly but at himself, at the situation. Because he knew it was unfair to ask me to change. He knew that. But he also couldn’t help what he was feeling. We were both just trapped in this very honest, very painful loop.

While all of this was happening in my marriage, something happened with my cousin.

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She got married a few years before me to a man whom her family approved of. They seemed happy. She had her first child a bit earlier than she wanted, but she loved her baby. Still, she intended to keep the minimum 4-year gap she always wanted between kids. So she went to the doctor and asked about birth control.

The first thing they asked her was, “Does Oga know?” Meaning her husband. That was the first response to a grown married woman asking her doctor about her own reproductive health. Not, ‘what are your options’, not, ‘here’s what we recommend’, not, ‘let’s talk about what works best for your body’. But “Does your husband know you’re here?”

They told her to wait. Have a second child first, and then come back.

Yes, she did and only 2 years after. Still, she tried to go back but she got pregnant again before she could get there, just months after the second child. So now she had three pregnancies back to back.

It is. And after the third child, she went in immediately and asked for the implant. She wasn’t waiting this time.

They told her husband.

They told her husband.

He was completely against it. He blocked it entirely. Wouldn’t hear of it. And he also refused to use condoms. So she had no protection and a husband who wanted more children and doctors who had already shown her whose side they were on.

She stopped having sex with him for over a year. Just trying to hold the line around her own body because nobody else was holding it for her.

I can only imagine because she didn’t tell me what was happening. Not the full picture. I knew bits and pieces but not the whole truth, and that is something I will carry for a very long time.

She could feel him pulling away from her during that period. She thought he was cheating. And she was terrified of losing him, of losing her marriage, of what it would mean. So eventually she gave in, and they had unprotected sex because that was the only version on offer. And she got pregnant with the fourth child. Her body was not ready for it.

This was a pregnancy she did not want. A pregnancy she had spent over a year trying to prevent. A pregnancy that led to serious complications.

Too late. That’s the honest answer. She didn’t tell me until it was too late. I think she didn’t want me to go into warrior mode; she knew me, she knew exactly what I would do. Maybe she was ashamed. Maybe she thought she could handle it. I don’t know, and I’ll never know, and that not knowing is its own grief.