In 2022, Lauren Pounds appeared on Netflix’s reality TV dating show The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On to decide whether she wanted to commit to her partner Nathan Ruggles. One big sticking point between them? Nathan wanted kids, and Lauren wasn’t sure. For reasons that will soon become obvious, it’s rare to see a woman appear on reality TV and say that she isn’t sure she wants kids, and even rarer for it to happen on a show all about finding love. That’s because the conversations they have will usually go like this.
In episode 1, Lauren is approached by fellow contestant Colby Kissinger, who seems to show genuine interest in why she’s not sure that raising kids is in her future. Lauren opens up to him — she’d come on the show, she tells me months later, in the hopes of having exactly these tough conversations, though she’d hoped they’d be with Nathan and a licensed therapist. She tells Colby that she has fears about pregnancy, that she worries about how the work of parenting would be split between her and Nathan. Colby tells her that her concerns make sense, and Lauren seems to relax a little. And then —
“So, you think it’s something you could possibly overcome in the future?” Colby asks her. Lauren lets her face go blank, a guard snapping back up. She reminds him that she’s never drawn a hard line: “I don’t think I would have come here if I was a hard no,” she says. Colby beams at her like he’s just won a chess match.
This kind of conversation will be familiar to any woman who has ever said she may not want kids. First, there’s the casual curiosity; then, the prodding, getting you to admit that no, you’re not 100 percent sure you’ll never change your mind. Half the time, you’ll admit this just because it so visibly sets the other person at ease, because it’s easier than continuing to be vulnerable about what you want and having someone argue against every point you bring up. What Colby says next, to producers, will be even more familiar to women who have considered a child-free life.
“She wants to have kids,” he reports back, dripping with confidence. “I can tell she wants to have kids.” The concerns she’s laid out are things that Colby can “help her through.” After all, Lauren is his first choice to date of the other contestants — ”after we got over the kid thing,” he says.
Women who don’t want kids or may not want kids have heard this kind of thing all their lives: You’ll change your mindwhen you’re older, when you find the right person. You’ll regret it forever if you don’t. Lauren herself was used to these kinds of comments long before coming on The Ultimatum.
“[My parents] would always say, oh, you’ll change your mind when you’re older. You’re just still so young, and you’ll change your mind,” she tells me on the phone. “And then I turned 28, 29, 30. And I was like, ‘guys, I still feel this way.’”
Lauren ends up leaving the show early engaged to Nathan. Show producers had told her during casting that there would be therapists on-site with whom she could talk through these difficult issues, but she left soon after realizing the therapists they had in mind were co-hosts Nick and Vanessa Lachey.
“We were like, this is not a therapist,” she tells me. “And none of the other guys there felt the way I did — they all wanted kids. So I was like, who is really going to help me solve this problem? It became increasingly obvious that we just needed to get out of there and work on this on our own.”
Despite feeling like the “black sheep” of The Ultimatum cast for her views on kids, Lauren saw an outpouring of support from other women after the show aired, thanking her for representing this rarely-seen point of view.
“I got a lot of women reaching out to me like being like, ‘Thank you, it was so nice to see someone on TV represent what feels like such a small circle,” Lauren notes. “It was kind of what everyone was thinking — ‘We don’t ever see girls go on TV and talk about not wanting to have kids.’”
When The Bachelorette’s Katie Thurston shared on TV that she was “open to all scenarios” regarding motherhood, including “if someone doesn’t want children,” she saw a similar rush of gratitude from people who felt the way she did, but never got to see their point of view on TV.
“I received a lot of support for being open on possibly not wanting kids,” Katie tells me in an email. “Based on the messages I received, there are plenty of people out there who may not want kids or have a desire to have biological children, but it’s just not talked about enough.”
Studies confirm what Katie suspects — in 2022, there’s a growing population of men and women alike who don’t think they’ll ever have kids. But that point of view is as underrepresented in pop culture as it is maligned in day-to-day life, with studies also showing that child-free adults — and especially child-free women — still face significant social stigma for their choices. When people like Lauren and Katie go on reality TV and talk honestly about even just being unsure they want kids, it’s still a really big deal — and the way contestants and viewers have responded to them prove how far our culture has to go in embracing the right to choose a child-free life.
Bella Frizza, another one of the small handful of women who has gone on reality TV looking for love and admitted to not wanting kids, faced the same on-screen dismissal that Lauren did. On Married at First Sight Australia, she told a group at a dinner party that she’s known for 10 years she didn’t want to have kids, and was told by Craig Keller that she was “weird,” then pressed to say whether she might change her mind in the future. She admitted that she might, and Craig doubled down.
“Knew it,” he told her forcefully, adding in a lecturing tone that raising a kid was “the greatest gift you can give to the world.”
When it comes to Lauren and her reality TV story, she didn’t just face dismissal of her views from Colby, but from viewers who wrote in to criticize her, “especially from men who think that if a woman doesn’t want to have a kid, it means that she just doesn’t love her partner.” Others wrote in telling Lauren she would “end up being a bad mother” if she changed her mind.
Even Katie, who received respectful reactions to her comments about motherhood from fellow contestants, faced some audience members who couldn’t quite take her stance seriously.
Katie tells me she encountered “occasional backlash as if my approach to motherhood (or lack thereof) was an attempt at being different or trendy” — and that, truthfully, she understood where those reactions came from.
“Younger me used to judge women who didn’t want children,” she admits. “It was easy to default to the old school views of find a man, get married, start a family.” But while Katie has grown past those views and realized she has “so much more to accomplish,” and that her goals aren’t actually tied to that expected progression through life, our culture has failed to evolve at the same rate.
“I wish that [there were more] people who just don’t want kids at all being more in media,” Lauren tells me. “You really do feel this pressure, like, oh, there’s something wrong with me because I’m not wanting the same things out of life as everyone else.”
As the percentage of people who would be happy with a child-free life grows, it will be increasingly untenable for our culture to continue to treat them as aberrations and outliers, and to mount the same pressure against them that they face today. Better representation of women with these views would be a meaningful step towards normalizing the choice to be child-free, which Katie says is a goal of hers after seeing the reaction to her Bachelorette season.
“I realized how little the topic was discussed and do want to normalize the conversation,” she explains. “I would tell [other women who may not want kids that] they are not alone. In dating, it’s important to never settle and to truly be who you are and find someone who is accepting of that.”
When women like Katie, Lauren, and Bella can’t go on TV and so much as question whether motherhood is for them without backlash, we have to recognize the need for a change — and while the onus for this cultural shift in how we treat the child-free isn’t on reality TV alone, it’s a powerful marker of where our culture currently stands.
“Some people really just don’t feel like they have to have children to be fulfilled in life,” Lauren says. “That’s a real thing.”
Right now, reality dating shows make it seem as if looking for love is synonymous with wanting kids. When they start to show more of what Lauren describes, we may finally know that our culture is entering a new era of treating every choice about parenthood with equal respect.
Before you go, click here to see celebrities who have opened up about not having kids.
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