Carolyn Hax has definitely seen this play before

[laurajv]

CW this husband is creepily controlling (link)

Dear Carolyn: My husband and I are trying for a baby. We've had many talks about parenthood and are mostly on the same page.
One part leaves me cold: He says he needs paternity tests for all our kids. Every aspect of our relationship is solid and wonderful except for this. We've never cheated on each other, but when he tells me he wants the test I feel like he doesn't trust me. He says that's not the case.
He says it's not "fair" that a mother always knows the baby is hers while the father can never be 100 percent sure. I'm completely in love with my husband and want to have a child with him, but this is ruining the entire experience for us. I'm pregnant and I haven't even told him yet. I know he would be ecstatic and would love to know, but I feel none of this really matters until the paternity test — and then he can finally love our child, with proof it's his.
Am I overreacting? Should I just let him have the paternity test?

Pregnant: OMG.
No.
This is hideous on so many levels that I fear for you and the coming child.

“We’ve never cheated” is just a flat-out nonstarter. You can love and trust each other and feel sure, but you can’t KNOW what the other has (not) done. Not firsthand. Not provably. You just can’t.

I’m starting here because in making this unmakeable declaration, you’re carrying his water for him. Someone as dead certain as he is that the whole world is out to cheat him — do you know what that often means? That he himself is cheating. That’s his certainty. It’s called projection.
I obviously can’t say he is for sure but, wow, the pieces are in place. He’s got you declaring his innocence for him. Perfect cover for bad acts.
That’s before we get to the slack-jawed horror show of his treating you like a cheater from within a “solid” marriage, like cheating’s a given, no matter what you’ve actually done. This is call-an-attorney behavior. I am so sorry you’ll be doing this now while pregnant instead of before.
I don’t know, by the way, how you can be “completely” in love with someone who is “ruining the entire experience for us” — not accidentally, but by dark emotional design. That alone is call-a-therapist cognitive dissonance, but the whole package belongs in a therapist’s office, SOLO, not with him and his monstrous paranoia and control. ASAP.

And finally, though extraneously, after all the “Get out!” advice prior:

Do you think the world is fair? Do you believe you are owed fairness by higher powers, biology or humankind?

Someone who has such an emotional need to get what he thinks he should get, who is ticked off at nature for not guaranteeing him fairness, is not well. Seriously not well.

Yes, we all want fairness and go to some lengths to ask it of employers, friends, government, institutions. But this guy has a beef with nature. And he thinks he’s entitled to defame you just to get the upper hand on biology. It’s appalling, and I’m worried about you. Therapist, domestic abuse hotline (1-800-799-SAFE), online threat assessment (mosaicmethod.com). No way his control efforts stop here.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

*uses icon of a woman watching a volcanic eruption*

I really hope LW listens.

[jadelennox]

Thank god Carolyn gave unequivocal get out advice with a hotline number.

[pensnest]

If he can only 'love' the child if it is definitively his, I don't think he'll be a very good father. Besides, that kind of attitude will never be satisfied. What if he decides the paternity test is wrong? There's a margin of error in these things. How many paternity tests will she have to take? What if the child looks like her side of the family and not at all like his? If he won't believe in his wife's honesty, what will he believe?

Run.

[cereta]

YES. I will NEVER get over these men who find out that a kid they've loved and raised for 12 years doesn't share their DNA and decide that they just don't care anymore. NEVER. You could tell me the Teenager came from MARS, and I would still fight you tooth and nail to keep her.

[melannen]

I guess today is the day I go all #mra on agonyaunt! :P

LW, it's possible that your husband really does just believe, as a matter of principle, that paternity tests for newborns should be routine and unremarkable, and he's invested in living by that principle. Is he a person who tends to be rigid about his private principles in general? Is it something you like about him, when it's a different principle?

It's possible he could find a mother for his children who agrees with him about that principle! - there are arguments in its favor, even feminist arguments in its favor - or a mother for his children who doesn't fully agree, but finds his strong feelings on the matter admirable, and wouldn't blink at going along with it.

You are clearly not that woman, LW. And he is clearly not interested in listening to him when you tell him that you're not okay with it. There are definitely problems here beyond your disagreement over a simple medical test, and you need to figure them out before putting a child in their way. It sounds like, beyond the question of cheating, you're worried that he's the kind of man who would only love a child that was biologically his, and you don't want to be married to a man who believes that (after all, there are ways other than cheating that could result in that). That's also a really valid principle to want to stand by, and that's probably something you should discuss with him explicitly!

(Also, if you're afraid to tell your husband you're pregnant, for any reason, your relationship is not "solid and wonderful".)

[resonant]

If that's a strongly held principle of his, it should have come up in the pre-marriage stage. That's what the pre-marriage stage is FOR.

I once worked for someone who had a strongly held principle that saying "Bless you" to people when they sneezed was a ridiculous bit of magical thinking. Wonder if he was smug, superior, rigid, and generally more interested in what he called 'reason' than in other people? Reader, you will be shocked to learn that he was!

[melannen]

True, but it's the kind of thing where I can see husband thinking it's just the obvious corollary of stuff she agrees with, and besides neither of them would cheat so it's just rubber stamp and no big deal. And the kind of thing where he might have mentioned it before and she didn't take note because she didn't care either way - until it was her pregnancy and marriage and she did.

I mean chances are Carolyn's right and he's just a lying cheating POS who thinks everyone is as dishonest as he is. But he could just be the sort of smug, rigid, rationality-obsessed asshole you describe - I have known men and women of the type - and they can make fine, loyal spouses for someone who likes that sort of thing, if they figure out that part about other people's inner lives, anyway. I don't think LW is someone who likes that sort of thing, though, and husband probably should work on the 'other people' part some more.

[purlewe]

Last statement is the gold.

[tielan]

"if you're afraid to tell your husband you're pregnant, for any reason, your relationship is not "solid and wonderful".

Set it to a tune and sing it to the moon...

Oh yeah.

[lemonsharks]

If I were this woman's personal friend I'd be advising her to terminate the pregnancy and divorce the man and come sleep on my sofa because holy forking shirtballs batman, U do not believe for one second that he won't turn into a flaming ball of controlling garbage the second something trips his rambo switch.