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In spite of being exposed to a bunch of supposedly relevant data in the past few weeks, I feel compelled to ramble about myself / my family / other narcissism-flavored anecdata.
So first of all, divorce would appear to run in my family. My maternal grandmother maried at least thrice, and my paternal grandparents maried young and died single. As my parents were maried 3 months before I was born, well, grandma was starting on marriage 3 at the same time, so I'm not sure that "shotgun marriage" is accurate, but...
Then my parents divorced before my episodic memory kicks in, and I remember things (and remember remembering things) from before I was 2 (with evidence, and yeah, there were times when my memory and the evidence disagreed, but that's a whole other ramblement.) I don't remember a time when my dad wasn't dating his current wife / my stepmom, but I do remember when they were dating and vague images of their wedding. My mom took longer to find a second husband, but seemed to always be dating someone in the interim. She's currently on #3, after dating him for several years.
My paternal grandparents had 6 children, 18 grandchildren, and when my grandmother died at 71, 42 great grandchildren and 1 great-great grandchild. My maternal grandparents are harder to figure, because they didn't talk much about family members I didn't know, so ... 2 or 3? Maybe 4? I actually did meet my great grandmother on my mother's side, and it seems she had close to as many children as Grandma, ±- 1. That side of the family did a lot of migrating, so has been harder to keep track of. Stepmom is the oldest of 2, and her sister is still childless.
On my great grandmother's deathbed, my mother and her sister-in-law both promised her they'd have another child. Mom did; aunt did not. My mother's stated goal was to keep having children until she got a girl. She got 3 boys, and then a broken work/life balance, turned out second husband was abusing my brothers, ... wait did she pay for that big roadtrip we took in 2002 with divorce money? :O I just realized that makes a bunch of sense. ... anyway, then she had to have a hysterectomy, so has 3 boys and last I heard, 1 grandchild from the middle brother.
My dad and stepmom had my sister, then my dad got a vasectomy... then they got two more kids, because my cousin went to prison and they were the only family members responsible enough and healthy enough to trust with them. We've always lived closest to my dad's extended family, though on the opposite side of town. Stepmom's family are in the same general area, maybe 30min away by car. Mom's family is a lot of military people who have moved around a lot, but somehow they always arranged it so Grandma was around to help.
So going any further without tripping over my weird identity crap is tricky, particularly as I'm starting to suspect the subjects are somewhat related... But by the time I got to puberty, I defaulted to wanting children. However, I was not at all interested in finding a partner, and one of the earliest instances of me imagining myself with kids I remember, I just kinda handwaved away their mother with "we probably got divorced; everyone gets divorced." I had one flash-in-the-pan crush in high school that lasted all of until I found out she already had a boyfriend. Plus, my dad told me in no uncertain terms that I should not mess with girls until college. I got to college, and was not interested in anyone there, even though the hormones would not STFU.
By that point, I'd flipped on the subject of children. Theidea was terrifying, and luckily the antinatalists and environmentalists had given me pre-made rationalizations. It wasn't until I got out of college, was exposed to the likes of Lesswrong, and started questioning even more that I concluded that, no, I always wanted children, but when I got enough wisdom to realize how big a responsibility it is, and how antiprepared I was, and also the conflicts with my special snowflake identity crap, I recoiled in panic and took shelter in rationalizations.
Oh, and my sister has one kid, and finds it so stressful that she's got a progesterone implant and stepmom encourages brother-in-law to get a vasectomy (he is not comfortable with the idea).
My dad is the only of his siblings to avoid jailtime, avoid substance abuse, get out of the white trash ghetto, go to college, hold a long-term job and own multiple businesses, and send 3 of his four kids to college (the other took up welding and farming). Though he is a bit more pronatal than stepmom, his branch of the family appears to be an evolutionary dead-end. It kinda pisses me off when I think of it that way. He did everything right, lived the American Dream and pulled himself up by his bootstraps when that was going out of style, but unless my nephew single-handedly raises family TFR, it seems to have all just been converted into a Disney Vacation Club membership. ... OK, now I'm more sad than pissed.
But for me, personally, that "wants children, but is repelled by the things that go into making them" thing, combined with the super atomized and isolating social situation, renders that super unlikely. Even were I to go back to HS or earlier, I doubt I'd have much success overcoming that, unless a magic marriage candidate just randomly appears.
... So, about that time a magic marriage candidate appeared, and I couldn't convince myself it would work long-term, or be worth the sacrifices (she was clearly not planning to live anywhere near me, so I'd functionally be giving up everything I couldn't bring with me on a gamble that it would work out)... At a not-to-be-repeated 9-month training center that was bizarrely effective at constructing a halfway functional temporary community.
What is the unifying factor in all that mess? ... IDK; economics? Social pressures? Too much aspiring to travel? Parenting failing to adapt productively to the changes in technology resulting in Boomers, GenX, Millennials, and GenZ all having unique excuses that are probably manifestations of an underlying unifying principal?
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