agonyaunt | Carolyn Hax: Boyfriend is paranoid about pregnancy

Dear Carolyn: My boyfriend and I have been together for about six months, and he’s a great, loving, generous, fun and caring guy, but he’s so paranoid that I’ll get pregnant that it makes me crazy. When we got together, he told me that he’s not sure about kids and definitely isn’t ready now. That’s fine by me; I’m 24, six years younger than he is, just starting out in a competitive field and not even totally sure about kids yet, either. I’m on reliable birth control and have been since I was 18 with no problems. He also wears a condom, which is also fine by me.

On top of that, he tracks my periods, and on the day I’m expected to get it, he’ll text me until I assure him that I got it. It makes me feel as if he doesn’t trust me or have my back, so I finally talked to him and he said he went through a pregnancy with a girlfriend when he was younger, and although the woman terminated in the end, it was all horrible.

I’m finishing up something big at work, something that’s either make or break for the next step in my career, and, as always when I’m super stressed, my period was late last month. I explained this to him, but he still insisted I take a pregnancy test, which I did. Of course it was negative. He still didn’t relax until I got it. He asked whether the same thing could happen this month, and I said probably or that I might not even get it, and he’s completely freaked out but also asking me to be patient and not break up.

I think I might love this guy, but I’m also wondering whether he’s worth this stress.

— Is He Worth It?

Is He Worth It?: Yikes.

He didn’t ask me, but here’s my advice to him: Start work ASAP with a therapist on the trauma of the previous experience. If the anxiety doesn’t start to diminish soon, then talk to your doctor about sperm banking and getting a vasectomy.

He is 30, and unless you left something out, he is self-supporting, reasonably mature and has no significant health issues. If a reasonably mature and healthy self-supporting 30-year-old is this maniacally opposed to raising a child, even an oops, then he needs to take full responsibility for 100 percent effective birth control, which means surgery or celibacy.

My advice for you is to decide whether you see this as a potentially lifelong relationship. Obviously it’s early, but you probably have some idea. If you do think there’s something durable here, beneath the contraception-cray-cray, then it’s time to let him know that you will not live or scramble or talk/text/test in service of his trauma and that you would like him to get professional help.

Approach him kindly with this, but don’t mince words.

How he responds to that — to the line itself and to the fact that you’re drawing one — will tell you a lot about his willingness to face difficult things, which in turn is the single most useful predictor of whether people are able to hold up their end of a long-term commitment, to you or anyone else.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

::Deep Breath::

Run run run run run run run run run run.

There are a lot of issues, ranging from, "anyone want to bet he hassled and nagged and wore down his previous girlfriend until she terminated," to, "does he know pregnancy tests don't work like that?" here, but for you, LW, they all resolve down to one thing: he is being extremely controlling about one of the most intimate, personal experiences you have. Even if he is struggling with anxiety, his response to that anxiety is to control you rather than attempt to control himself. That is a very, very bad sign.

You're young. It's been six months. End it now, before things get worse.

"sperm banking and vasectomy" is the only rational choice for this guy to make, and if he doesn't make that choice when it's pointed out to him, then he's just controlling your fertility because he's a control freak, and you should run.

Carolyn, as usual, has a solidly good answer.

To the BF: Snip snip, motherfucker.

To the LW: Run now. You can do better.

This went so much further down the weird than I expected. I have a slightly irrational fear of getting pregnant {it's mostly family history of Very Bad Pregnancies, and Current Events aren't helping}, and hot damn this guy is like, wow. Dude. My husband cheerfully got the snip and totally gets my slightly irrational issue, what is your problem?

I, who have an irrational fear of getting pregnant when I was having PIV sex.. made it my problem to deal with so I took my BC and I asked my partner to wear a condom. If I wanted to I could have said no actual PIV sex, we will only do X Y or Z from now on.

if he does not want to get pregnant with her than HE NEEDS TO DO HIS JOB. get snipped, or not have PIV sex. It is not his job to badger the LW about her period. It is not his job to text her and track her period. It is his job to et snipped or do other things for sex OTHER than PIV. Also getting therapy for this sounds like a good idea for him.

LW, run girl.

All of that, although I would add the caveat: it is possible for a woman to get pregnant without actual penetration. If he ejaculates close enough to the vaginal opening, that is sometimes enough. I owe my oldest niece to that fun fact.

(Also, I have to say: if there were ever a time when a woman would not want to leave a record of her cycle, it is now.)

very true. But if Dude is as freaked out as he acts Dude should be wearing a condom even if not PIV.

And yeah I did think about that no tracking your cycle right now. But really that LW should run.

it is possible for a woman to get pregnant without actual penetration

As the little books of advice for teenagers in the 50s-60s always used to caution in their warnings about 'heavy petting' (along with all its other dangers).

Yeah, I learned it from Dear Abby. I did not think to tell my sister, but boy, have I made sure the Teenager knows.

Carolyn is spot-on. The man is 30. The man can probably find a doctor somewhere in the US who will give him a vasectomy. The man needs to do this instead of outsourcing his anxiety onto his girlfriend. If he's not willing or able to do this, he needs to stop having vaginal intercourse. (And if the man votes Republican, he needs to find a different party's candidates to vote for.)

I don't know what kind of trauma he went through before, but it doesn't justify him being a controlling asshole now.

Dude. Get the snip. That he has not gotten the snip is, like, WTF.

I say this as someone who formerly had the overall sort of reproductive anatomy that required a rather more invasive procedure to eliminate any chance in hell that I could ever be forced to be pregnant and also someone who wanted very much to eliminate that chance, and, guess what? I did it. And I'm not sure if I've said it here, but my hysterectomy has been about the only thing between me and a mental health crisis during the whole spate of attacks on the bodily autonomy of anyone who is anywhere on the uterus-having and/or female spectrum that have been coming since 2016.

Dude, you will really, really feel better after having this snip, especially if you also get your sperm count tested regularly in case it reverses itself so you can get a do-over. Also, stop putting your dick anywhere near a woman's vagina; it can't feel good enough in the moment to be worth the amount of anxiety it's causing you the rest of the time. Not to mention that the combo of "snipped + won't insist on PIV sex" might open you up a whole new dating pool. Which you are going to need because your current girlfriend should cut her losses with you. You need to get that snip, and, yes, possibly some therapy. (There is IMO no problem that wouldn't benefit from talking it through with a competent mental health professional which is my bias.)

And once you get the snip, you can thereafter revisit your control-freak tendencies in general. That your solution to this is to badger and micromanage your girlfriend's body rather than take control over your own is not a good look, and I say this as someone who shares your horror of reproducing, see above.

Also, as the other commenters have pointed out, now is a really terrible time for anyone at all to have access to data on someone's menstrual cycle, and this is something like quintuply so for this dude since what he would want her to do with a pregnancy is clearly to abort it.

I can't imagine the sex is good when he's this anxious. Certainly not good enough to offset all this.

I just throw this out here, but even if he had a vasectomy, would he find something else to obsess over?

Probably. The fear of pregnancy isn't even a good reason, there are way more effective and secure ways of managing that risk and fear. It feels to me like the point is to reinforce that she bends over backwards whenever he wants, no matter what else is going on in her life.

She's got a big project at work on the cusp of delivery and now he's on her ass like a stupidvisor about tardiness--because he tracks her period in real time via text alerts, but hasn't bothered to learn jack about menstruation or conception.

I'm not super convinced, at 6mos, that trapping her with a baby isn't in the long game, or that the next phase isn't, "you're so stressed at work it's affecting your health," kind of more active financial sabotage.

Carolyn Hax: Boyfriend is paranoid about pregnancy

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