I’m Married but Not Having Kids Until I Finish My Travel Bucket List

When I got married in 2018, I imagined my husband and I would start our family within a few years. But seven years later, it’s still just the two of us and our dogs.

Many friends our age have kids, and we feel the pressure to start a family now that we’re in our 30s. However, we’ve prioritized pursuing career opportunities and travel adventures over settling down.

Over the last decade, we’ve been eagerly checking off destinations from our bucket list — and I don’t regret taking more time to focus on our marriage, careers, and travel dreams together.

For us, having children would mark the end of a chapter filled with freedom, spontaneity, and adventure. That’s not a decision we take lightly.

Travel has been a foundational part of our relationship since the very beginning

As a little girl, I fantasized about traveling all over the globe — and when I met my now-husband in college, I was giddy that he shared the same dreams.

Soon, we fell in love with exploring the world together.

He applied for his first passport to meet me in Morocco and England while I studied abroad. Throughout college, we worked summer jobs to save up for a bucket-list cruise to Asia.

A few months later, he proposed on a bridge in Venice during a Mediterranean cruise. Within the first months of marriage, we honeymooned in Italy, experienced the magic of Christmas markets in Prague, and jetted off on a spontaneous weekend trip to Tokyo.

However, our travel plans changed as my husband kicked off his military career less than a year after our wedding.

Although we squeezed in a two-night trip to London during a training break, we couldn’t take another trip together for nearly two years.

Then, a pandemic and another military deployment meant we once again had limited time to chip away at our travel bucket list.

As a couple, we’ve decided to focus on growing our careers and traveling to make up for lost time

Between deployments, we squeezed in as many adventures as possible — and starting a family still wasn’t on our radar.

Between trips, I kept busy as my husband spent months away from home. I prioritized my data analytics career, worked on my MBA, and traveled with family and friends to Japan, China, and Austria.

I planned trips to Hawaii, Scotland, the Caribbean, Alaska, and England. I wrote about my travels, and my freelance-writing career began to take off.

Suddenly, I was being paid to go on trips and living a dream I hadn’t even imagined. My husband was supportive and relieved that I was making the most of his time away and embracing new opportunities.

After he returned from his second deployment, we took a much-needed getaway to the Canary Islands — a destination that had topped our bucket list since we first met.

As many of our friends began planning for kids, we continued planning trips to Iceland, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and back to the Canaries.

Over the next few years, we have once-in-a-lifetime adventures planned in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, New Zealand, and Australia.

We hope to start our family once we’ve crossed the last adventures off our travel bucket list

We still have dreams of traveling the world with kids if we have them, but we know it won’t be the same.

For now, we’re enjoying the freedom and flexibility of planning trips with just the two of us. Prioritizing ourselves and our quality time has only made our marriage stronger.

This isn’t the timeline we envisioned, but I don’t regret taking a few years to focus on ourselves and our travels.

I hope our future kids will be proud that we followed our dreams and crossed all the destinations off our bucket list.