When it comes to childlessness, the associated sadness and feeling of emptiness is often handed over to women, as if they were the only ones capable of feeling this way.

However, a British sociologist has rubbished this assumption, saying the pain for men is just as real as for women.

Over the last decade, British sociologist Dr Robin Hadley has studied more than 100 men who described themselves as ‘involuntarily childless’, including himself. After all these years, he has come to a clear conclusion, that although it can be hard for these childless men to express just what they’re feeling, there’s a pain there that is related to not having any children.

“It’s an unexpressed grief,” Dr Hadley says. It’s a sadness in your pocket. It’s always with you.”

Much in the same way depression sufferers describe their illness, Dr Hadley keeps coming back to the word ‘black’ to explain the sadness he feels at his own childless life.

“I don’t see the future. And if there’s one thing that kids give you, it’s a sense of the future,” he says.

During the course of his research, Dr Hadley met with many men who had found themselves in a unenviable position. Although they yearned for children, the circumstances simply weren’t right, and would not ever be right for them to have kids. In particular, Dr Hadley noted, there was a sense that as a man, one’s legacy died with you as an individual. Without children to pass those things along to, there was a sense that you didn’t reach into the next generation, but rather faded out of this one.

A Personal Undertaking

Nobody understands this better than Dr Hadley himself, who despite being raised in a large family of eight children just never found the circumstances right to have kids. His first marriage split up, and then in his 30s, another relationship failed as well. At this point, although he was very eager to have children, even describing himself as ‘broody’, he had no partner with whom he could procreate. Then, by the time he had met his second wife in 1995, it was too late, they were both too old to have children.

Feeling a strong lack of fulfilment in his life, particularly related to his broody nature, Dr Hadley set out to explain it, unexpectedly becoming something of an expert in the area of childless men.

“There was very little about men’s experience and the desire for fatherhood but there’s an awful lot of research around women and motherhood, and it seemed incredible to me,” he says.

When he began to dig deeper into the concept, and into his own feelings and those of the men around him, he realised that our assumptions were entirely mistaken. A study undertaken by Dr Hadley at Manchester University found that 59% of men and 63% of women wanted to be parents, and almost equal amount of yearning. Along with that, research he did with involuntarily childless men found that these men seemed more depressed and angry than women about their situation.

“There was a much more emotional reaction than there was for similar women,” he says.

The men also felt considerably more isolated than women in similar situations, and felt uncomfortable trying to seek out situations in which they could interact with children less they be seen as paedophiles.

Childless Men In Australia

In Australia, the numbers of childless men are quite high. Statistics suggest that in 2014, around 530,000 Australian men aged over 45 where childless, or around 13% of men in that age group. This was quite a bit more than the 9% of childless women in the same age range.

Many of the men involved in the study, and who have come forward since then noted that they felt women were able to get more emotional and physical support from the people around them. Men, on the other hand, were not always offered this support, perhaps because people were not aware of their feelings.

Clearly, there is a strong need to have children present in both men and women, and a better understanding about the challenging feelings that not achieving this brings up may see an improvement for both genders.