Dan, incredibly brave of you to write this.

As a fellow independent writer who is about to have his first child next month, I have wrestled with this same vexation.

Kids ruin things.

Sleep, career ambition, sex, friends, time, travel, etc.

Why would anyone subject themselves to the pain and inconvenience?

These are the thoughts of DINKs, the Double Income No Kids couples. My wife and I are DINKs.

But after DINKs have kids and become parents, they’ll die on a sword for their kids. Most of them, that is (not that Facebook group you found — holy damn).

I’m at the cusp of giving up my “DINKness” and entering parenthood.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe about next month.

You love what you sacrifice for.

Do you have a dog?

Do you wake up and take the dog out in the bitter cold morning so it shits?

Do you have to arrange for a dog sitter to fly out of state?

Does the dog ever chew up furniture?

Have you had to clean up the dog’s nervous pee or vomit on the carpet?

Does the dog ever not get along with other dogs or people?

All this pain, and yet it’s 100 percent worth it. Because people love their dogs.

Dogs are optional to own.

Kids are optional to birth.

Kids are like dogs but a billion times more meaningful.

And meaningfulness grants us deeper, less fleeting happiness.

This is why people have kids.

Your decision to not have kids is utterly up to you. Everyone else’s opinion be damned.

But you may miss out on a deeper happiness only known to those who give their lives up to raise a little one.

So this familial judgment and societal pressure may actually stem from peoples’ desires for the best for you and Alex. They’re totally presuming that they know what’s best for you, but then again, they have millions and millions of reasons to back up their presumption (i.e., every parent ever who cites their children as a source of happiness).

As a 28-year-old who has been lukewarm about having kids for seven years of marriage and also has an intense fear of settling down, I find myself bracing with white knuckles for the pain and excitement of our incoming daughter, while also preparing for the maturity I know I’m missing that will (hopefully and probably forcibly) come with fatherhood. I may not be as happy, but I’ll be more mature. And maturity has a number of positive effects on one’s life, career, marriage, relationships, and happiness.

Thank you for being honest, Dan. Thank you for letting me think through my next chapter that starts next month. I’m going through a once-in-a-lifetime personal evolution inside and your words allowed me to explore this further. So thank you.