When I met Ben, I knew immediately that he was the one. We had both studied literature, felt culturally connected to Judaism, and loved to travel. And perhaps it was because I felt so comfortable around him, so immediately at home, that I told him on our second date that we could keep seeing each other only if he wasn't interested in having kids.

I've known since I was a teenager that I never wanted to be a mother. While this is an intensely personal decision, I've been quite open about sharing my story. In fact, since I was part of a Today show segment about women choosing not to have children, the Google autofill suggestions for my name are childfree and I don't want kids.

Ben (not his real name) and I were on the same page about kids and about our relationship. We loved our downtown New York City life and envisioned a future full of spoiling our cat (less expensive than spoiling a kid — no saving for college tuition!), dorking out about TV shows, traveling the world (we took trips to Niagara Falls, Northern Ireland, and Wales), and being the cool aunt and uncle to Ben's siblings' kids. We moved in together and began to talk about getting married.

But after we'd been together for nearly two years, Ben dropped a bombshell — he had changed his mind. Now that his friends were starting to get married and have kids, Ben had softened to the idea of becoming a dad himself someday. I'd been told since I was 15 years old that I'd change my mind about being a mom when I met the right guy. Instead, I met the right guy, and the right guy changed his mind.

Although I sometimes used to feel like the only woman in the world who didn't want to have kids, I quickly learned this wasn't the case when dozens of like-minded women reached out to me after seeing me on TV. Celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres, Zooey Deschanel, and Oprah Winfrey (see more below) have talked openly about choosing not to have children. George Clooney has also publicly stated that he isn't interested in being a dad — but he gets less judgment because he's a man.

Even as a kid, when I imagined what kind of life I wanted to have as an adult, I pictured myself as an aunt or a godmother, the cool older role model and friend who could help with the problems you were afraid to go to your parents about. When I think about the women who were inspirational in my life, I think about my grandmother, but I also think about her best friend, a childfree woman who spent her afternoons taking my sister and me on picnics or teaching us to braid hair.

I'm part of a growing group. According to a recent Pew study, 1 in 5 American women ends her childbearing years without having had any kids, up from 1 in 10 in the 1970s. And 46 percent of the survey's respondents said that it "makes no difference" whether a woman opts to have children. The numbers are even higher in Western Europe and Scandinavia. With 7 billion people already on the planet, I feel OK about not adding any more to the mix.

For two weeks after Ben's confession, I spent every day weighing out the possibilities, twisting and turning our relationship into pretzels. Maybe he could be the stay-at-home dad and agree to do the bulk of the childcare, so I wouldn't have to change my lifestyle or work schedule too much. Maybe we could adopt or be foster parents so that I didn't have to be pregnant or give birth. But no matter how much twisting I did, one clear answer remained: I simply didn't want to. I'd found the right guy. It was the right time. We had enough money, enough of a support system. It was the best possible set of circumstances for bringing a baby into the world. And still, I absolutely didn't want to have a child. There was no way I could convince myself otherwise.

Leaving Ben was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. But I know what would have been even harder: bringing a life into this world, knowing I was having a child to keep a man, not because I genuinely wanted to be a parent.

I have been called a lot of things over the years: selfish, lazy, bitter, a bad woman, a bad Jew. I've been told that I will die alone and no one will ever want to love me. Ben, to his credit, never said any of these things. Instead, after we split up, as I was hauling boxes out of the apartment we'd shared, he used another word: brave.

People assume that I had some kind of fucked-up childhood that scarred me permanently or I've chosen my career over parenthood. Neither of those things is true. Sometimes it's hard to explain exactly why I don't want kids — it's like asking me to explain why I have brown eyes or why I'm right-handed. I believe, quite simply, that I was born this way. And I also believe that there's a man out there who was also born this way, who I will find, and who is the life partner I've been looking for.

This article was originally published as "He Changed His Mind About Kids" in the August 2014 issue of Cosmopolitan. Click here to subscribe to the digital edition!

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