An author and mother urges single people not to treat dating lightly and instead like a serious process that demands being as transparent as possible about their future plans.
In the wake of the divorce of Hollywood couple Joe Manganiello and Sofia Vergara, which seems to be related in part to the 46-year-old Manganiello’s desire to be a father, in her new column, Bethany Mandel said it’s tragic that he may have missed out on fatherhood due to him and Vergara’s possible differences on the all-important question of having children.
Page Six reported that Vergara already has one son from a previous marriage and was embroiled in a custody battle with a former beau over frozen embryos from IVF treatment in 2013. The tabloid added that Manganiello, known for his work on HBO’s “True Blood,” wanted to have children, and their split was mainly due to that difference.
Mandel wrote, “A lot of things are important in a marriage: love, respect, trust, laughter. But perhaps most important is to remember that it’s a partnership for life; and as such, dating should not be considered fun, but instead like a job interview for the most important role you’ll ever have, that of a spouse.”
She also cited a recent “Today” column from author Bianca Turetsky, who’s frozen her eggs and pays a high fee to keep them in storage despite knowing she’ll almost certainly never become a mother because her husband doesn’t want kids. In the piece, Turetsky noted that her previous boyfriend, who already had kids, waited years to reaffirm that he didn’t want to have any more, leaving her heartbroken.
In her column, she wrote that part of growing up was realizing you can’t get everything you want, but Mandel immediately rejected that idea. She wrote, “She deserved more than settling. She deserved a man who wouldn’t help her with IVF injections to freeze her eggs but instead set her free to meet a man who would want to fertilize them himself.”
She continued, “And yet, these are the literal proposals that Turetsky and (perhaps) Manganiello agreed to when they decided to marry people who wanted fundamentally different things out of life. It doesn’t mean their spouses were wrong; just wrong for them. I don’t know, though. Maybe they were also wrong. It’s cruel and unethical to waste someone’s precious time if you know you won’t want the same thing; you don’t get those years of fertility back.”
Comparing the process to a job interview, Mandel relayed a previous relationship she had with someone who recognized early on that the two had different paths in mind; they’re now happily married to other people – him with two children and her with six. Mandel has frequently written about the joys and challenges of her large family.
She asked, “If you were interviewing for a job, would you allow the process to drag on, long after you know it’s the right fit (or not)? Would you take the job (AKA get married) if you weren’t in agreement about what you both wanted out of the partnership?”