A woman on Reddit says that she ended her engagement because her fiancé kept saying she’d “give him a baby” after she told him to stop. Despite the fact that the Redditor wants children, this framing gave her the ick, and he only made it worse every time he ignored her feelings about it. Now, his family is trying to change her mind on his behalf.
Commenters, however, raised their red flags over the fact that he kept saying something that was making her uncomfortable. It’s bad enough that the phrase gave some of them “brood mare” vibes.
‘So that’s my job now?’
In the post, Reddit user Low-Astronomer-1834 states that she and her former fiancé were together for two years, including a six-month engagement. They’d both expressed a desire for kids but hadn’t talked about when. Then he started making it weird.
“Lately though, he’s been making comments about how I’ll ‘give him a baby’ once we’re married,” the OP wrote. “The first time I let it go but when he said it another time I joked back, ‘So that’s my job now?’ and he just said ‘Yeah, you’re the one making it.’”
“I told him that the way he was wording it was rubbing me the wrong way, and he rolled his eyes and said I was overthinking it. But he said it like that a couple more times later. I started to feel less excited about starting a family.”
The Redditor probably would have forgiven one instance of invalidating and dismissing her feelings, but when she spoke up again, the man kept doing it.
“I told him straight up that it was making me uncomfortable after he said it like that again later. He laughed and said ‘It’s not that deep, that’s just how it works.’ And in that moment, I was starting to feel done.”
When she called off the engagement, her fiancé still did not apologize or promise to stop, but called her “ridiculous” and said it was just a “poor choice of words.” Now he’s got his family saying she “misunderstood.”
Was it a poor choice of words, though?
The “Am I the A**hole” forum has yet to render its official verdict, but the top comments are overwhelmingly in the OP’s favor. Many Redditors took issue with her fiancé and his family, claiming that the issue was a “poor choice of words” when the OP told him the choice was poor, and he kept making it anyway.
“Would have been a poor choice of words, one time, but multiple times?” wrote user notyoureffingproblem. “That’s all him.”
“This, exactly!” agreed Sweet_Celebration688. “He knew it bothered OP. but kept saying it that way.”
Others had similar stories that ended much better than the OP’s, demonstrating that it’s actually very easy to stop saying something that makes your partner uncomfortable.
“When I was pregnant with our first, my husband said something about me being his ‘baby mama,’” said almost_cool3579. “I just don’t like the term. It has very negative connotations to me. I tried to blow it off the first time or two, but it couldn’t shake the yuck feeling it gave me. The next time he said, I told him how I felt about the term.”
“You know what that asshole did? He hugged me and never said it again.”
“His personal womb-on-legs”
Others took issue with how poor his choice of words was, understanding exactly what gave the OP the creeps. They found the use of the verb “give” to be grossly transactional and possessive.
“Nah, you didn’t ‘misunderstand’ a damn thing,” said 410Writer, “you finally clocked that man for what he really sees you as: his personal womb-on-legs. He wasn’t talking about having a baby with you, he was talking about you giving him one, like it’s some sort of transaction.”
“Imagine what they’d be like if you actually got pregnant….telling you how to birth, raise, and probably even name his child,” they added. “You didn’t call off an engagement. You escaped.”
Other Redditors went so far as to say he was treating the OP like a “brood mare” and continued to urge her to think about the future. User Nova9z advised her to “take a step back and put that behaviour into other scenarios, ignoring concerns and repeating behaviour despite clear communication from you, and see if you would be happy in that relationship.”
The harm of emotional invalidation
Writing for Psychology Today, Amy Lewis Bear, MS, LPC, calls emotional validation “the core of a healthy relationship” and warns that the opposite can hurt both the relationship itself and the self-esteem of the target. Repeated over time, it can become part of a pattern of emotional abuse.
“Emotional invalidation upsets the power balance in a relationship and leads to uncertainty and self-reproach,” Bear writes. “You may think that to stay in the relationship, you must swallow any feelings that are not acceptable to your partner. Disregarding your feelings leads to disconnection from your authentic self.”
A 2012 review of studies researching the prevalence of emotional abuse in relationships found that some reported around 80 percent of participants experienced some form of this type of treatment. Approximately 40 percent of women and 32 percent of men had suffered “expressive aggression,” while 41 percent of women and 43 percent of men reported “coercive control.”
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