I don’t know Dom Knight, but I do know that he would love to have a baby with someone and he seems to have a pretty realistic expectation about what that entails. A broody male is a really, really nice thing, if you ask me. A realistic broody male is the jackpot.
But Dom’s been broody for two years now by his own estimation. There are so many women and men out there who are in the exact same boat. It kills me that they aren’t all meeting each other and falling in love and having babies.
It’s the ‘falling in love’ bit that gets in the way. We all know you don’t need to be in love to procreate so why do we hold onto the notion that you need to be in love raise a child together? I’m not sure. I think you definitely need to be ‘in like’ and ‘in trust’ and you need to love each other, yes you do, but it seems a ridiculous notion to suggest that you need to be in love to be good parents.
Now, I say that as a woman who got very lucky and is very much in love with the father of her children, so I’m not even remotely qualified to be writing this post, and yet…
So many couples fall in love, get married and have babies, but the trouble with being in it is you can get out of it as well. I can think of so many couples who I doubt actually like each other very much at all. ‘In love’ is the romantic, blinding, self-absorbed, shaggable stuff that ideally we keep aside for one special person. ‘Love’ itself is the kindness, the compassion, the caring, the fondness and, if we’re lucky, it can be found everywhere. The ‘in love’ bit is amazing for sure, but it seems that for the most part it’s really hard to find, especially as so many people have such high expectations about what they might fall in love with.
Kids basically just need parents who think the world of them and respect each other just as much. Engaged parents don’t need to be actually engaged. What would be wrong with having babies with someone we just love, but aren’t in love with? Would that take the pressure off all the women and men who are ‘of a certain age’ and panicking because they haven’t had kids yet and haven’t ‘met the one’ to have them with? There are more friendships in this world that have stood the test of time than love affairs. I think good friends could make really good babies together.
I reckon it’s not even the having sex together thing that would freak them out… ! … ! … I think most people angst that if they go the family route with a very dear friend they might miss out on being with the ‘love of their life’ one day. One day. Frankly, I think missing out altogether on raising a family is a very high price to pay for waiting for ‘the one’. And, just quietly, I think a lot (a lot a lot!) of people who have those long lists of qualities that they’re looking to fall in love with end up ‘settling’ down the track anyway, their list long forgotten. The great bit is that it doesn’t feel like ‘settling’ because they’ve grown up enough by then to realise that you don’t fall in love with a list, you love a whole person.
So, just putting it out there for you, Dom. Got any really good girl friends who are in the same boat as you? I think you’d better get to it…
[Image by Brandon Christopher Warren via PhotoPin; words by me]