I’ll never forget the day Nathan and I found our first apartment together. It was this tiny place that, quite frankly, looked like a shithole. Despite that, we looked at each other and I said, “But I think we can make it our shithole.”
We filled out an application and the landlady asked us a few questions. They began as simple questions that seemed pertinent to renting an apartment. Who was our previous landlord, if we were married, and when we said yes, for how long. At the time we had been married for a few months. As soon as we said that, she asked the question every person has ever asked whenever they find out we’re married:
When are you having kids?
This is one of the questions I hate being asked the most. It’s right up there with, “What do you do for a living?” and “Where do you see yourself in five years?” The inquiry about children is a private question mired with all sorts of judgments and societal expectations.
It is asked under the assumptions that 1) the woman being asked even wants to have kids in the first place, 2) she is physically capable of having children, 3) she isn’t already trying to have children, and 4) that it’s not an extremely rude and personal question.
We politely told her we were waiting (our standard, canned answer). She, in…
