If your husband really wanted a boy

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Chinese and Middle Eastern people really want boys, even if they're feminists.

I have an Egyptian friend who did ivf with pgd for a boy

My American WASP husband also wished for a boy. I don't think it's rational. I absolutely wanted boys - I have 3 brothers and 8 male cousins and I'm the only girl in the family, so this is all I knew. Boys and men are very simple, very easy to live with; they have very simple needs. I love my nieces to death but I'm not equipped to deal with the richness of emotions, especially as teenagers. I also had a fraught relationship with my mom growing up, because she wanted to re-live her childhood through me and thought that having a daughter would be like a second chance to her life.

DP. I think this is a very damaging attitude. I have two sons and a daughter, and the boys are just as emotionally complex as my friends and I were at their ages (DD is a baby). The idea of boys as unemotional is outdated and inaccurate.

PP here, I didn't say they are unemotional, I said simple. Mine are older (one in college, one in grad school) and I stand by my statement. As your DD gets older, you will have to navigate the complexity of the social relationships between girls, and those start in elementary school. Who plays in what group, who gets excluded, who gets invited to what parties etc. I love my boys to death, they are smart and sensitive, but they don't have the same emotional bandwidth, I don't know how to explain it. I honestly don't think men have the same level of emotional intelligence or if they do, it is not readily expressed.

There is a lot of interesting research about the differences.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-brain-and-emotional-intelligence/201104/are-women-more-emotionally-intelligent-men
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-the-manager/201603/new-research-women-consistently-outperform-men-in-eq
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/good-thinking/201406/are-males-and-females-equally-emotional

I was a little girl, and then a teen girl; I understand those dynamics. My boys' interior lives seem similar. I think it's difficult to measure relative EQ in men versus women, given how differently they are socialized in our society across the population.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Chinese and Middle Eastern people really want boys, even if they're feminists.

I have an Egyptian friend who did ivf with pgd for a boy

What? No, I’m Arab and I wanted a girl so badly I cried when I found out I was having a boy.

[Anonymous]

My husband said once that he didn’t know what to DO with a girl child at first. His whole upbringing had prepared him to raise a boy, but no one had ever told him anything about girls. He said it took him some time to relax into it and realize it’s basically the same thing.

I was fascinated with that because he’s the kind of guy who 100% sees adult women as equals. But now that I think about it, I always wanted a girl and would’ve needed the same adjustment process with a boy child. (And turns out our kid identifies as nonbinary, so in the end we’re just raising our kid and leaving “what girls need” and “what boys need” out of it altogether.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Unless you're married to a duke or the world's biggest a-hole, I can't imagine this being a real concern.

This.

I don't even think entailed estates are even legal anymore.

Surprisingly, it’s still a thing. At least I think so? All I know is from this article I read a while back:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/11/feminist-aristocrats-who-want-daughters-rights/617067/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t marry someone so misogynistic/macho that they’d have such a pronounced desire for a male child. What is this, the 1300s? Grow up.

Oh please. Almost every white American woman I know wants to have a daughter and somehow it is OK and not considered misogynistic

I mean, that’s because misogynistic means anti-women, so it literally is not…