why is every man I date an expert on what I should do when/if I have kids?
So last night I (32F) went on a date with this guy (38M), and at some point the conversation gets onto kids and childcare and he mentions, pretty casually, that he’s anti-nanny. And he just launches into it. How the mother-child bond is biological, how kids need their mothers present, how nannies and daycare disrupt early development. Said it the way you say something that’s just true. Like he was filling me in on how things work.
And there were a few things happening at once for me sitting there.
One is yeah, okay, I am the one who would actually be doing all of this, and I have genuinely never sat around forming opinions about it in the abstract. It’s never even occurred to me to develop a stance on nannies as a concept. So there’s something already strange about a man who will never be pregnant, never take a career gap, never physically do any of it, having thought about it this carefully.
But it’s also the way it was framed. It wasn’t “I think” or “I feel like” or even “I’d hope.” It was just biology. The bond. Development. Science. Dressed up as neutral fact so that there’s nothing to even push back on, because you’re not disagreeing with an opinion, you’re disagreeing with reality.
And the thing is I’ve been noticing this pattern across a lot of dates recently, and honestly I think it’s getting worse. Different guys, different topics, same basic structure. Breastfeeding, whether mothers should work, how long maternity leave should be. Always the same move where a pretty specific set of opinions about what women should do gets repackaged as just how humans are wired. And given everything that’s been happening culturally over the last few years, the mainstreaming of this kind of pronatalist thinking, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that more and more men seem to be showing up to dates with these views already locked in. It’s everywhere right now, and it’s finding its way into otherwise normal conversations with otherwise normal seeming men.
And it’s always so certain. There’s never any wondering, never any “I imagine we’d figure it out together,” just a fully settled position that was apparently never up for discussion.
I think what’s sitting with me this morning is less that he had opinions I hadn’t thought about, and more that the opinions were doing something. Like the biology framing isn’t incidental, it’s the whole point. It puts the conversation somewhere you can’t really go without sounding like you’re arguing against your future kids’ wellbeing.
Is anyone else seeing this pattern lately?