Each week i asks experts to answer readers’ questions about love, sex and relationships
I found out my partner donated sperm before we were together and it makes me uncomfortable. I hate the idea of him potentially having other kids, meaning that if we have kids they are not his first. Will his other children possibly want to build a relationship with him?
He said he did it because he wanted to help women who couldn’t have families and I support that in theory. I have a girlfriend who has had a child on her own thanks to a sperm donor and I think that’s great it just feels weird and my partner potentially has a kid (or many) out there.
How can I get my head around this? I feel like a hypocrite.
Counsellor Lucy Cavendish says:
First off let’s name it: your boyfriend is a really good man. He donated sperm to help women have families. So that is a green flag for you, especially if you want to have children with him. We spend a lot of time talking about red flags but we rarely talk about the green flags, i.e. all the ways this person is showing us that they are a good person. So this is a green flag. Your partner is altruistic, he likes and supports the institution called “the family”. He is one of the good guys. And you obviously know this. I’m sure that is part of his attraction for you.
Secondly all this happened before you met him. It might feel rather different if he was doing this currently but it predates your existence in his life.
However it is bringing up issues for you. So you are stuck in a very difficult position.
You have first-hand experience of the joy a sperm donation has brought into your girlfriend’s life but that probably feels slightly removed. It’s her life and it’s her child and your boyfriend is not the sperm donor. We can often applaud “good” things but it all changes when it suddenly lands on our doorstep.
Emotions are complicated things, especially when they are in conflict – we can be happy and sad both at the same time; we can be in love and in hate both at the same time. We can want honesty and dishonesty, clarity and obfuscation. The list goes on. It’s a bit like the emotional version of Schrodinger’s cat whereby it is possible to be alive and not alive at the same time.
Your challenge is to find a way of being able to tolerate two different states without giving in to your internal critical voice. Are you actually being hypocritical? Or are you being honest? I suggest the latter is a more appropriate way to look at this. It’s totally fine to let your partner know that, whilst you can understand why he donated sperm, it is causing some issues for you.
You could let him know that, on one level, you can admire him for being a good man but on another level – on a far more intimate level – you are struggling.
It’s not dissimilar to this sense that we want the person we love to only be in love with us. Some people really struggle with the fact that people have loved other people before them. They want – and even need – to be The One. The idea that someone can love another makes people feel not “special”. I have seen many couples coming into my therapy room struggling with that. This is often why people feel threatened by their partner’s exes.
If you take this analogy and you put it towards having children it is the same thing. You want the children you are potentially going to have with your partner to be his “only” children.
I think he would understand this. I think if you sat down and told him how you felt he would listen and probably have a great deal of empathy for you. That doesn’t necessarily change the situation. He can’t take his sperm back (as far as I know). But he can hear you and probably reassure you that the children that you are going to have together will have a completely different place in his heart than the children who exist outside of your relationship.
Of course we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. You might be imagining scenarios whereby you have to tell your own children that they might have all sorts of brothers and sisters scattered all over the land. This is not an easy thing to do but you have time on your side.
Here’s a question to ponder: how big is your heart? One way to come to terms with this is taking a position of a warm-hearted, generous being who wishes love and well-being towards pretty much everyone. I know. Easier said than done. But remember that these children are innocent beings who can be brought into your own circle of love.
This is at the heart of the Buddhist meditation practise of tonglen, which focuses on the cultivation of compassion. The practise involves visualising oneself taking in the suffering pain or negative energy of others on the in breath and sending out compassion, love and positive energy on the out breath. If you practise this every day you will find it is a powerful way to develop empathy and increase your capacity for love and compassion and, as you become comfortable with the practise, you can extend it beyond individuals to include different groups, communities and ultimately all sentient beings.
If you practised tonglen every day, I think it would shift your energies around this, allowing you to have your own special family with your partner, you can also embrace the fact that he may have these other blessed children that may or may not become part of your life.