I’m 45F, my boyfriend is 42M and has no kids. He says if I had two children with my ex, I should want two with him too. Are we fundamentally incompatible?

I’m 45F and have been with my boyfriend (42M) for three years. I have two children from my previous marriage, a son who is 16 and a daughter who is 12. My boyfriend has no children, he's also divorced, about 4 years ago as well.

I never really loved my ex-husband, although I tried very hard to be a good wife. I financially supported our family when he was unemployed for two years and stayed much longer than I should have because I thought that was what a wife was supposed to do. I finally divorced around 40 because I realised I wanted to experience actually loving the person I was with.

Then I met my current boyfriend, and I genuinely love him.

He is great with my children. He and my daughter have a particularly close, playful relationship, although obviously her biological father is still very involved and lives only two minutes away. My son gets along with my boyfriend but isn’t particularly close to him.

My boyfriend has also been extremely generous to us. Over three years he has probably spent around $50,000 between money he has given me, family holidays, meals, groceries and other expenses.

The major problem is children.

I told him very early on that I was open to having another baby and actually told him within the first few months that I wanted one with him. He thought that was too soon, which I understood.

We have now been trying naturally for about a year without success.

He wants us to take fertility treatment much more seriously. He wanted me to see a fertility specialist last year, but I said I wasn’t comfortable going down that road unless we were engaged.

He says he can’t get engaged until he knows what I’m willing to do if natural conception doesn’t work.

IVF and donor eggs are especially complicated for me because I’m religious and, personally, I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with them. I know several friends who have used IVF and I know intellectually that millions of healthy children have been born through IVF. However, my tiny personal sample has included children with autism or other medical/developmental issues, and although I know that is anecdotal and doesn’t prove IVF caused anything, emotionally it has made me nervous about interfering with nature in that way.

Despite that, I have told him I would consider IVF because I love him.

My condition is that I’m not willing to make those kinds of medical and emotional sacrifices while we’re still simply boyfriend and girlfriend. I want us engaged and committed to actually building a household together first.

There’s also donor eggs.

We’ve spoken to two clinics and were told that finding a properly screened South Asian donor could take around 6–12 months. I’m honestly very conflicted about it.

I know I could love a baby I carried using a donor egg, but I struggle emotionally with the fact that the child would not be genetically mine. My two existing children are wonderful kids, intelligent, attractive, confident, funny, great personalities, and I’m ashamed to admit that part of me worries that if a donor conceived child struggled in some way, I might irrationally compare them with my existing children and wonder whether it was because of the donor’s genetics.

I realise that may be unfair thinking, which is partly why I don’t want to rush into donor conception before I’m emotionally ready.

My boyfriend’s position is also quite emotional.

He says that if he had fallen in love with a woman who had never had children and medically couldn’t have them, he could accept that and stay with her.

But because I did have two children with another man, he says marrying me and never having children with me would feel very different.

He says he cannot understand how I can say he is the love of my life while being unwilling to do everything possible to have his children when I had two children with a man I say I never really loved.

He describes the idea of raising another man’s children while never having children with me as emasculating.

He also says he would ideally want two children with me because I had two with my ex. I keep telling him that children aren’t proof of love and that I don’t owe him two children because I had two previously.

I have asked whether, if having another baby genuinely proves impossible, he could love my children as his family. He struggles with that because he desperately wants biological children of his own.

There are practical issues too.

If we marry, he would probably need to move out of the city he loves and into my area because my children, schools and their father are all here. He feels he would already be sacrificing a lot to fit into a family structure that existed before him.

He also doesn’t want to live in the house where I lived with my ex-husband.

Emotionally, I understand that. Practically, I think moving while pregnant would be ridiculous, and my current home makes sense while my children are still at school. I’ve told him I would expect him to move in with me once I was pregnant and we could eventually move somewhere new together.

So everything has become conditional:

I don’t want fertility treatment without serious commitment.

He doesn’t want to commit without knowing I’ll pursue fertility treatment.

I don’t want to promise donor eggs before knowing how I genuinely feel about them.

He doesn’t want to risk spending several more years with me and losing his chance to become a biological father.

I love babies and would genuinely be happy to have another child. I’m not refusing motherhood. I’m just much more comfortable continuing to try naturally and then considering IVF if we’re married and it becomes necessary.

He thinks, at 45, waiting is gambling with something incredibly important to him.

And sometimes his fixation on children makes me wonder whether he really wants me, or whether he wants a woman who will give him children. He says that’s completely wrong and that if all he wanted was children, he could simply date a younger woman. He says he wants children specifically because he loves me and wants a family that belongs to both of us.

So I’m interested in outside perspectives.

Is it understandable for him to feel differently about infertility because I already had children with another man?

Is his desire to have the same number of children with me as I had with my ex understandable, or is he turning children into some kind of measure of love?

And am I being unreasonable for saying that IVF/donor eggs are things I will consider only once we are engaged, committed and actually building our life together?