“My Husband Refuses to Have Children with Me!?!”

I am planning to feature this wife’s journey occasionally as she takes her first steps towards healing in Christ as she faces a very painful situation in her marriage. I hope that this email correspondence may bless other wives who have very similar issues in their hearts. We will call her “GraceAlone.”

I believe that this wife’s struggles and concerns are extremely common and she has agreed to allow me to share her journey. That takes an incredible amount of courage. She hasn’t even taken the first step yet – but is willing to allow me to share her story publicly. She is still very fragile, so I know that all of you will rally around her to love, encourage, pray for and support her as you do every hurting wife. 🙂

We are going to go in very small steps. This is going to require a complete overhaul of this wife’s heart, mind and soul. I can’t fix her. I can’t change anyone. I am not the key ingredient here – God and His Spirit are. I can point her to God’s truth and the power of Jesus. 

The responsibility will rest on her to decide to accept or reject the help, hope, love, power, healing, grace, mercy and forgiveness of Jesus. This will be PAINFUL. Not as painful as staying where she is – but it is very painful at first when God opens our eyes to what He wants to change in us. She will have to allow God’s Word and truth to shine brightly into the darkest, most sinful recesses of her soul and allow Him to remove everything that is not of Him and radically change  her by giving her a new heart, mind and spirit in Christ.

He will expose the spiritual foundations upon which she has built her life and she will have to choose to allow Jesus to be LORD and rebuild everything completely on Him alone and His Word. This will involve her being willing to discard everything she thinks she knows about being a godly woman, about God, about herself, about masculinity, about femininity, about being a Christ follower and about marriage and replacing all of that with the truth from the Bible.

Despair, depression, misery, anxiety and the spiritual frustration are inevitable when we build our lives on anything but Jesus – which we all do unless we allow Jesus to radically change us. Please realize, this wife is a believer in Christ. She and her husband are in ministry in the church. Her husband is a sinner, too, as we all are. He has plenty of things he needs to work on himself – NO DOUBT. But we will trust God and His Spirit to work in him as Gracealone focuses on herself and her walk with Christ. That is where her power is:

GRACEALONE’S EMAIL #1

I grew up in a Christian home. My husband was not a Christian when we very first met, but was saved quite a while before we got married. He did not grow up in church. We went thru pre-marital counseling and the question about kids came up.  My husband said he would want kids , but would like to wait a few years first before having them. My deepest, greatest dream has always been to be a wife and mother.

• I noticed that every time I would bring up children, my husband would not want to talk about it. I finally pressed a little more, and he eventually told me that he does not want children – ever.

I was shocked and heartbroken beyond words. I asked him about what he said in premarital counseling, and he said at the time he thought he would want kids, but decided after we were married he did not.

This sent me into a spiral – I gained a lot of weight, found out I had a medical condition that affects fertility (maybe a direct result from weight gain) and was depressed beyond measure. As a result, our sex life has almost stopped. Maybe once every 8 weeks. I hate my body now, and my husband when asked , admits that he struggles due to my weight gain.

I do not know how to move on or heal from this fully. I have tried many many times to pray, surrender, pray more, but feel as though I keep failing. I want kids badly, but feel as though with my medical condition, it will be too late to have my own if my husband comes around later.

I see no sign of him changing. I have no desire to lose weight because I feel like my motivation to lose weight was to have a baby. My primary love language is affection—so to have that gone is unbearable. My husband and I have talked so many times about these things. I’m at the point now to where I don’t know what to do. My husband is a good man, but I don’t feel like he wants to go to counseling.

I know God hates divorce and there are only a few biblical reasons for it, but I would be lying if I said I don’t think about it. How do I stay with a man who never wants children and barely has intimacy with me? Both biblical commandments.

GRACEALONE’S EMAIL #2 (Peacefulwife’s questions are in bold)

As I was reading over your questions to me, the question that keeps coming back to me is How?

• How do I respect my husband when he talks down to me?
• How do I respect him when I get so frustrated at the mass amount of time he spends on the computer?
• How do I show a loving attitude to a man that barely touches me physically?
• How do I keep bitterness from a man who doesn’t want children?

I know that the answer is probably prayer and God. There are so many times where I feel like I have tried that and through praying get increasingly more frustrated. I cannot tell you how many times I feel like I have tried to do the right thing – only to find that I get hurt and become so much more weary of trying. I will try to answer your questions as best I can.