- Childfree couples, or DINKs, can sometimes feel lonely when their friends start having kids.
- But some DINKs find their 30s to be a great time for making new friends.
In the early stages of their relationship, Bing Gonzalez and her husband always assumed they'd have kids.
But once they were married and settled enough to try, they decided against it, at least for the near future.
Like many millennial DINKs — dual-income couples with no kids — the couple uses their free time and expendable income to focus on other endeavors, such as travel and social outings. In one year, they went to Greece and Hawaii, plus a host of local concerts and comedy shows. Gonzalez, 28, also told Business Insider that her flexibility as a DINK made it easier for her to pivot her career.
But opting out of kids came with a downside: being the last of their college friend group to be child-free.
"It was just surreal to see myself surrounded by my friends who are all having kids,"
Gonzalez, based in Virginia, told BI. "It's definitely affected our friendship in terms of we don't hang out with them as much."
Some child-free couples report feeling lonelier once most or all of their friends start families. Online commenters warn against DINK lifestyles: that opting out of kids also means opting out of the communities formed around kids, such as friendships with other parents.
But contrary to stereotypes of DINKs growing old alone, many are using their 30s to forge the deepest connections of their lives — from becoming aunties to their friends' children to forming relationships in the unlikeliest of places.
Millennial DINKs might not know where they fit
American households have changed dramatically since boomers were parents. In 1960, married parents made up 44% of all US households. By 2022, they were outnumbered by both single people and child-free couples — that year, there were 38.1 million married and childless households, a 140% increase over 1960, according to USA Facts.
In general, millennials are marrying later than past generations, Dr. Jess Carbino, a former sociologist for Tinder and Bumble, told Business Insider. If boomers followed more of a uniform timeline — get married and have kids in your 20s — millennials are hitting those milestones at different ages, or not at all. "We're in this in-between period for these individuals who are choosing to be childless," Carbino said.
Sandra Kushnir, 32, grew up in Utah, where her closest childhood friends now have families. The difference in lifestyles and schedules makes it hard to plan activities she'd love to do with them, such as group vacations.
She moved to LA with her husband to focus on their careers and find friends with similar lifestyles. But while they have plenty of childless single and coupled friends, that doesn't always translate to understanding, either. Some are "still doing drugs and drinking and going out," Kushnir said. "We don't want to do that anymore, but we also don't have kids."
Getting creative to keep up with parent friends
Because it's hard to be as spontaneous with friends who have kids, DINK couples have to make some adjustments. Gonzalez and her husband travel to their friends' homes a few times a year instead of meeting halfway.
Alex Alexander, 35, said she and her husband, make it a point to travel with friends' kids, such as an upcoming trip to Disney Paris.
"People with kids can't just go do something at the last minute," Alexander, who lives in Seattle, told BI. "That's probably the biggest thing we've had to shift, is finding friends who have more availability to maybe just drop things and go do something."
"It's a lot of work to tell people, 'I still want to be in your life,'" Alexander added. "Because I do think that there's this idea that once you have kids, you can't find any overlap. And I don't really think that's true."
Jess Lorimer, based in Southhampton, UK, said there are pluses to being the child-free friends, such as having disposable income and additional energy. Childless people like her "can be the fun auntie uncle energy that you might not always be able to be as the parent," Lorimer, 33, told Business Insider. She enjoys going on trips with her parent friends and helping their kids build sandcastles or bringing back gifts from vacations for the children.
Making new friends
Still, old friends being busy with kids can leave social gaps for DINKs that aren't always easy to fill. Making friends in one's 30s comes with unique challenges.
"Life gets busier," Gonzalez said. "There are more responsibilities, it's much harder to keep the same level of friendship where you're seeing each other multiple times a week."
Carbino said that DINKs have to look for groups or organizations where people are roughly the same age (or in the same life stage), share the same general interests, and are also open and available for new friends, too — something that gets tougher as people get older, settle into their schedules, and stick to their core friend groups.
Kushnir and her husband met some couple friends through Honeymoon Israel, a 10-day trip that she described as "birthright" for Jewish and interfaith couples.
"They have criteria where you have to be 2-5 years into your relationship, engaged or married," she said. "So they kind of try to match couples that are in the same life stage as you on the trip." They met multiple people just like them: interfaith couples with no kids (four of those couples went on to have kids around the same time).
Kushnir said they also made like-minded friends by continuing to show up to a local dog park. They befriended other child-free couples, or DINKWADs (DINKs With a Dog), people who were more likely to share some of the same priorities and routines as them.
Other DINKs have had to examine their ideas around friendship in their 30s.
"A lot of people just think of friendship as all or nothing," Alexander said. "If we really look at our friendships, we have people we go to for work problems, people we travel with — certain friends might fill a lot of buckets, a lot of needs." When some of her longtime travel buddies now had kids, she said she and her husband adjusted to inviting new friends on vacations.
Gonzalez, who's met friends through work and some interest groups, made some unexpected connections: age-gap friendships with parents of older kids.
"Since their kids are older, they can stay home alone or their kids also have their own events and social life," she said. "It frees the parents up a little bit more."
Finding deeper friendships than the ones forged in their 20s
DINKs deal with a big transition period once most of their friends start having kids.
The majority of one's friends having kids is a big transition period. "You suddenly realize that you are not the priority anymore as friends," Lorimer said. "You have to readjust your expectations of what your friends can reasonably manage."
But that readjustment can also bring DINKs and parent friends closer together. Lorimer said that having so many friends with kids (or trying for them) exposed her and her husband to conversations they otherwise wouldn't have had.
"We have friends talking about fertility, and we have work colleagues talking about infertility and miscarriages, which are just life experiences that we won't ever go through," she said. "I think it's been interesting from an empathy perspective."
While Kushnir lives far from her childhood friends, she still keeps in contact with them. "They ask me questions about my life and update me, and I share some of my fears about having a family with them," she said.
New friendships also have the potential to go deeper. Alexander tries to stay open to all new connections, including an older woman in her neighborhood. "When we see each other, we'll sit at the same table at our neighborhood coffee shop and we'll chat," she said.
For DINKS like Kushnir who eventually want to become parents, having more time means finding a stronger network of support for when she does have kids. "I would like to go through being pregnant and having a kid with somebody else," she said, and is trying to time her pregnancy with one of her friends.
Going against the grain has its perks
While being child-free has become less taboo over the years, some DINKs still feel judged, and roll their eyes at the stereotype.
"People seem to think that dinks are wandering around with Gucci handbags and spending all of their money and time frivolously," Lorimer said. But she siad she spends a lot of her time on work, charitable causes, and supporting her friends.
"One of the best things that I found about being child-free, particularly by choice, is that I've been able to be a lot more sympathetic to my friends who perhaps aren't child-free by choice," she said. She's not judgmental of friends who are struggling to conceive or who question having children at all.
While it's much harder to have frequent interaction due to diverging lifestyles, Alexander sees the "smaller value" in friendships. She's ok with having a friend solely to go paddleboarding with or to a cookbook signing, and she'll also try to invite those friends to bigger bonding experiences, such as trips.
"I've had a pretty easy time making friends, because I'll kind of just allow it to build," she said.
DINKs might have to figure out where they belong in their parent-friends' lives and in their communities, but they're also paving the way for the future.
"As conventions change, individuals will be able to adopt sort of a new model of what social life looks like among individuals who have smaller families and who choose to not have children at all," Carbino said.
Lorimer, who has two godchildren, said she and her husband work "very hard" to stay involved in their friends' lives. They always bring back presents from trips and make it a point to be involved in special occasions.
In turn, they've received deep understanding right back. "We choose to be child-free, and we've always been really honest about that with our friends," she said. "We've been very fortunate that our friends have taken the time to understand why we wouldn't make the same decisions around children that they are."