For context I (32M) have been in a relationship with my husband (40M) for 10 years. He has always been quite career driven and has an excellent, now quite high profile corporate job. I am a nursery teacher, and although not the most lucrative career I love my job and love working with the children.

Despite this I have never really felt that I wanted a child myself, I am not totally closed off to the idea, and I do love spending time with my nieces, but I very much like my current lifestyle. My husband on the other hand has expressed that he would love a child, and feels that as he is getting a bit older it will be less likely that he would be able to adopt or find a surrogate.

After some discussion I decided that it would be something we could pursue, and even started to feel a bit excited myself. However the other day when we were talking about things he said “Oh, it’ll be great for us because we can get childcare on X and Y days from X and Y person and when you reduce your days at work you can watch the baby the rest of the time.” (That is a very condensed version of what he said for anonymity). This led to an argument because I told him I like my job and wouldn’t be reducing my hours, I assumed he would be reducing his. He said since he makes quite a considerable amount more money than me it wouldn’t make sense, we would have to change a lot as our income would drastically reduce. We stopped talking at this point and have not spoken since last night.

I can see his point of view, but I don’t want to work less for something he wants more than me. Am I the Asshole?

Edit / Update:

Hi, sorry, did not expect this to get the amount of comments that it has, I’ll try and respond to some of the things people have said / asked. Firstly myself and my husband are both male, we are in a same sex relationship. Secondly we have discussed this before, lots of times, but we were both (at those points in our lives) not feeling strongly one way or the other, and had different things going on (family member illnesses, moving city ect). It’s recently that since our lives have started calming down it has become something he wants to pursue more, and I am not saying that I don’t want to pursue it, I am just less sure. I can also say that I don’t think my husband is selfish or delusional, he is aware of what he is doing, he just knows that financially we rely on his job far more than mine, and I am not delusional either, I know this is what has allowed me to have a nicer quality of life (vacations, eating out ect). I think maybe I generalised his point to much in my initial post as I was worried about the word count, he is excited to look after a child, he wants to spend time with the child, he just knows what “is better financially”. I also don’t mean this to be rude here too, but as for my job, I don’t wish to be promoted, I love my current role, I come in and do what I enjoy and clock out at my designated time. That will always be there for me, and my husbands point is I can reduce my days, so still work, and then increase them again once (if) things change. He cannot do that, and he is far more driven at work than me and always seeks promotion (usually he gets them). But yeah, hope this extra information helps and answers some questions!