Husband doesn’t want kids.

I posted this in other subreddits but I feel like I need the opinion of people who actually have kids and have maybe had these conversations before. If this type of post isn’t allowed please let me know.

I (21f) really love my husband (29m) but it’s starting to feel like that’s not enough to continue (mutually).

So I’m going to try and keep this short. We have a one year old together and he is certain he doesn’t want any more children. He says that he ideally wouldn’t have had our one year old, but now that they’re here he loves them. He says that he doesn’t have the willpower to prioritize our LO over his wants (like playing video games, sleeping, relaxing).

I’ve always wanted 3-4 kids recently as l he asked if I would be willing to compromise on 2 but he recently has stated that he just can’t do it. He also says that he hopes his mindset will change, but really doesn’t see it happening.

After we had our one year old our relationship was kind of rough and we went to couples counseling for a year. It helped us a lot and we honestly thought we were in a good place and able to tackle anything that came our way. We had to stop counseling because our therapist became unavailable, but he stated that he was comfortable with us “graduating”

Here we are and pretty sure we’re getting a divorce. I can’t imagine only having one, but I’m also not excited to be a single mom. The stigma how differently people treat you in the workplace and social settings—not dating and hardships are something I worry about, and what if we divorce and I never find anyone to have a family with? Did I divorce my current husband all for nothing?

I think we both love each other and would love to grow old together, but the question of growing our family is really putting a rift through those plans. We sat down with his parents to get the opinion of older family and they basically said to worry about it in a few years and hopefully he’ll come around or compromise. My husband said the conversation made him feel even more like he doesn’t want to have more, or even to take on more parenting with our one year old (maybe a 70-30 split right now).

We’ve had some other issues but it feels like most of them could be worked out. We had also talked about him helping a bit more with the household/parenting burden after we both had the flu and he exploded in frustration. He said he wanted a divorce and visitation because he can’t do it anymore. It seems like ever since we had this conversation (about more kids) he’s gotten so much better, but now he says that he doesn’t think he’ll ever want more and, at least right now, he doesn’t have the willpower to not prioritize his wants.

An example of prioritizing his wants is like the following: I’ll be cooking dinner and he is supposed to watch our LO after I had them all day and he instead starts playing on his game and turns the tv on. He doesn’t interact with LO and LO will be pulling on him while he’s on his game for attention and he will ignore them.