▸ Column · Contemporary Dragon Ball Earth — West City environs, Capsule Corp era
BULMA replies.
The letter
My partner of four years and I finally said the quiet part out loud last month — I want children someday, and she's been certain since she was a teenager that she never will. She was calm and kind about it, which somehow made it worse, because I could see this wasn't something she was still working through. It was decided. We just co-signed a lease on a new place, I've met her whole family, and I genuinely thought we were building toward the same future. Now I keep running two versions of my life in my head: one where I'm well past forty with no kids, wondering if I traded fatherhood for the woman I love most; one where I leave her and never find anyone who fits me this well again. I've watched you build a family with someone everyone called impossible. My question: is it okay to ask someone to reconsider something this fundamental to who they are, or am I the unfair one for quietly hoping she might?
Bulma replies
Here's what I'm going to tell you that nobody else will, because everyone else is going to make this about fairness and feelings: this isn't a problem you can debug. Not the way you want to.
I married the most difficult man in the universe — and I don't mean that colorfully, I mean the actual single most arrogant, stubborn, impossible person alive, who once spent years alone in a gravity chamber I built for him because admitting someone else was stronger wasn't something he could survive doing in public. I know something about choosing an impossible person. But here's what nobody says about how that actually worked: the difficulty between me and Vegeta was never about what we wanted our life to look like. That part we somehow always knew. The clashes were about his pride and my temper and who was right about what and whose plan we were going to use — noise I was qualified to handle. The load-bearing component was never in dispute.
What you're describing isn't that kind of noise. Your partner has known who she is since she was nineteen. That's not stubbornness you can out-stubborn — that's a direction she already finished building before she even knew you existed. You can reverse-engineer an ego. You cannot reverse-engineer a direction someone finished building.
"Is it fair to ask her to reconsider?" Wrong question. Neither of you is doing anything wrong here. But hoping she'll change isn't patience. It's superstition dressed up as patience. The choice is real and it's yours, and all that math you keep running? You already know what it says. You're just delaying the moment you have to believe it.
— Bulma
Frieza weighs in
Oh, how charming. Your partner settled this question when she was nineteen — well before you apparently thought to discuss it — and you've spent four years assuming love would eventually update her priorities to match yours. I find that genuinely staggering.
My colleague absolved you both. I won't. She knows precisely which throne she occupies. You, after four years, a family met, a lease signed, are still asking whether any of this is fair — which is another way of asking the universe to hand you both the woman and the child. It won't. It never does.
"Fair" is the favorite question of people who already suspect the answer and haven't gathered the composure to hear it plainly. What's worth examining is not her certainty — she finished that work a decade ago. It's yours. Four years in, still asking what you're owed rather than what you want. She is, I'm afraid, the stronger party here. And strength, as ever, simply sorts itself.
— Frieza
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