Some Women Want Motherhood Before Marriage, and That Is Allowed

This content is for educational and entertainment purposes only. It reflects what I have lived and learned, and it is not professional, medical, or legal advice.

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Most of us were handed the same script. Meet someone, get married, then have the baby. Say it in a room full of women and you will see a lot of heads nod.

But not every woman is wired that way. I am one of them.

This post comes from a short clip I pulled out of a longer Conversations episode with Kira. In that episode we were talking about the Hulu series Betrayal, and somewhere along the way we drifted off topic. I automatically went into a little rant about motherhood, marriage, and how my brain is wired, and that is how this discussion started. If you want the full context, listen to the full episode. It is where this clip comes from.

In that tangent I said out loud something I have felt for most of my life. Even when I was young, I knew I wanted to be a mother, and I knew it whether or not a man ever decided I was wife material. Marriage mattered to me. It just was not at the top of my list.

This post is me picking that tangent back up. I want to talk about the women who put motherhood ahead of marriage, why we almost never say it out loud, and how we can disagree about it without turning on each other.

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My Brain Ran the Order Backwards

For a lot of girls, the order is clear. Marriage first, children second. Mine ran the other way. I knew I wanted children, and my thinking was simple: find a good person I get along with and build from there. If marriage came along, wonderful. If it did not, I was still going to be a mother.

I have asked myself more than once why I was wired like that. Most girls I grew up around had the opposite plan.

What I noticed as an adult is how the conversation goes when you ask women what they want. I would ask, do you want children? The answer was often, yes, but I have to be married first. So I would ask again, okay, but what do you want? And somehow it always circled back to marriage.

I had no problem saying, I want to be a mother. A lot of women do not say it. Some are scared to. I suspect there are more women who think the way I do than we will ever hear from, because it feels like the wrong thing to admit.

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Single Motherhood Is Not Only for Women Who Skipped Marriage

Let me say something that gets lost in this conversation. Being a single mom is not a status reserved for women who never married. Things happen after the ring too. I have talked on the show about circumstances that come up inside marriage, and I will not go into detail here.

The point is simple. Marriage is not a guarantee of how your family ends up looking. So when I say I put motherhood first, I am not saying I planned to raise a child alone. I am saying children were the thing I was sure about, and I was willing to let the rest unfold.

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Where Kira and I Landed Differently

Kira sees this through her faith, and she was clear about it. She would not have had children outside of marriage. For her, doing it God’s way is a matter of the heart, and she believes scripture is not something we adjust to fit what we want. I respect that, and I heard every word.

Me, I am a woman of faith who asks God a lot of questions, including this one. I have had a long running conversation with Him about why my brain works the way it does. Kira said that sounded like a topic for another episode. She is probably right.

What stood out to me is that neither of us was throwing stones. Kira said it herself: however anyone walks their walk, that is between her and God. And after all of it, she pointed out that we took two different roads and still ended up in the same place, feeling unprepared for the hard things that came later in our relationships.

Different path, same lesson. Nobody gets a guarantee, whichever order they choose.

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What the Numbers Say, and What They Do Not

I went looking for numbers, because I did not want to just assume. The CDC’s final data for 2024 shows about 1.43 million births to unmarried women in the United States, which is 39.5 percent of all births. That is roughly four in ten.

Now I have to be careful here. That number does not mean four in ten women decided that motherhood comes before marriage. It includes surprises. It includes women who were done with a relationship. And it includes couples who live together and are not married. Pew Research found that in 2017, about 35 percent of unmarried parents were living with a partner.

So I cannot tell you how many women chose this path on purpose. That data cannot tell us either. What it does tell us is that raising children outside of marriage is far more common than the silence around it would suggest.

That same Pew report shares a reason women might stay quiet. In a 2015 survey, two thirds of adults said that more single women raising children on their own was bad for society. When that is the public mood, of course a woman hesitates to say that motherhood came first for her.

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The Women Who Choose Motherhood on Their Own

There is another group of women we did not get to in the clip. They do not date their way into motherhood. They decide to become mothers by themselves, often using donor sperm. Researchers call them single mothers by choice, or solo mothers.

A Cambridge study published in 2016 looked at 51 solo mother families and 52 two parent families. All the children were conceived through donor insemination and were between four and nine years old. The researchers found no difference in how the children were adjusting, and they concluded that solo motherhood in itself does not cause psychological problems for children. What did matter, in both kinds of families, was money trouble and parenting stress.

I do not want to oversell it. It is one study, and a small one. The authors also note that many solo mothers would have preferred to have children inside a traditional family, and went on their own because time was running out. So wanting to be a mother and not wanting a partner are not always the same thing. Some women want both and feel they cannot wait. That story deserves respect too.

The same researchers point out that when single motherhood was unplanned, children can face harder outcomes, and those are tied to money stress and parenting stress more than to marital status. In other words, what a family has to work with seems to matter more than the shape of the family.

If you are looking into fertility options for yourself, please talk with a doctor or a fertility specialist who can walk you through them. I am not that person.

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You Can Disagree and Still Show Up

Here is what I took from all of this. We all operate from our own perspective, our upbringing, our beliefs, and what feels right in our own eyes. You can look at a friend’s path, not agree with every part of it, and still love her. Support is not the same as agreement.

There is a limit, though. I am not talking about backing a friend in foolishness, or in something that hurts her or her children. The support I mean comes from a healthy place.

I am not telling you what to do. These are just the questions I ask myself when someone I love takes a road I would not take:

• Is she safe, and are her children safe?
• Is this decision coming from a healthy place?
• Am I supporting her, or am I trying to run her life?
• Can I love her and still see it differently?

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If You Have Been Quiet About This

If you have always known you wanted to be a mother, and marriage was never the headline for you, you are not wrong for that. If you are the woman who waits for marriage because your faith or your heart says so, you are not wrong either. Both are real, and both are held by good women.

If the pressure from family, friends, or your community about how you build your family is weighing on you, a licensed counselor can be a good place to talk it through. I am not a licensed professional. I am a woman sharing what I am learning and what I have lived.

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Key Takeaway

There is more than one way to want a family. You can disagree with a woman’s path and still support her, as long as that support comes from a healthy place.

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Keep the Conversation Going

As I said at the top, this was a short clip from a longer Conversations episode with Kira. If you want to hear how we got here and the full back and forth, listen to the full episode, and find more episodes in the Conversations series.

I would love to know where you land. Did you grow up believing marriage had to come first? Did motherhood come first for you, or did the two arrive together? Tell me, and if your answer is different from mine, that is welcome here.

If you want more on what happens when real life does not follow the plan, read You Can Do Everything Right and Still Be Betrayed. And for a conversation about growing, setting boundaries, and accepting what you will never fully know about someone, listen to Celebrating and Surviving 25 Years Together.

We are rooting for you. We always are.

Sherley’s Show

P.S. Wanting what you want is allowed. I made a free permission slip affirmation you can keep close, and you can find it on the relationship resources page.

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Sherley’s Show is learning and growing every single day. We aim to uplift all marginalized voices both on this podcast and in real life. Please note that we are always striving to change the problematic language that society has internalized in us. Thank you for your patience as we aim to strip certain phrases from our vocabulary.

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