in the early days of courtship, he didn’t feel that he had found the ideal match. Instead, in headlong pursuit of revenge, he “got stuck” with Rayann through pregnancy; just twelve months after they met, she gave birth to their daughter at the Cape May Regional Medical Center on the South Jersey Shore, where she had moved five months into her pregnancy—to get away from John. Little language of love or even attraction (except her initial attraction to him) enters into John’s narrative, although there may well have been attraction involved. Though John says he badly wanted to “be in love” during this period in his life, things with Rayann just didn’t click. Nor does his use of the phrase “a little while” indicate much commitment.
The conception that made John a father—occurring just three months into the relationship—was actually Rayann’s second with John, following immediately after an early miscarriage. John suspects that in reality, Rayann’s mother forced her to get an abortion. “Yeah, and then we’re making another baby,” John says. How did these conceptions come about so quickly? “You know, like she was always cheating on me. So whenever I would catch her cheating on me the first thing she would do is she would turn to sex because she was a nympho. It made me forget about the other guy,” John recalls. In the afterglow of these postfight reunions, “She would start talking that she knows she wants to have a baby.”
Despite these “discussions” John would hardly characterize the pregnancy that culminated in the birth of his daughter Naomi as planned. Indeed, John claimed surprise and even disbelief and insisted they make a trip to Planned Parenthood to confirm Rayann’s news. When he told his mother, she called him “an asshole and stupid.” Rayann’s mother, the alleged impetus of the earlier forced abortion, hated John so badly that to preserve family peace, Rayann decided to name another man—the on-and-off boyfriend she had been secretly seeing on the side and that her mother liked better—as the father. John is proud to say that he finally put this false claim to rest with a paternity test he paid for himself when his daughter turned two.
In spite of these strong negative parental reactions, John claims that neither he nor Rayann even considered ending this pregnancy, perhaps because a surprise pregnancy after only a few weeks or months “together” is not unusual in the neighborhoods young men like John inhabit.12 Here, families are often formed through a pregnancy brought to term in a relationship that is neither entirely casual nor serious. John’s story hints at a common truth, that children can often ensue from relationships that have a haphazard, almost random quality. The women who bear these men’s children seem to be indistinguishable from others that they “get with” but don’t happen to become pregnant.
Tim, down in Fishtown, also “ended up with” his child’s mother. At seventeen this high school dropout’s main occupation was getting high. When Tim was introduced to Mazie he had just broken up with Andrea, his girlfriend of two years, because she had chosen an abortion over bearing his child. Andrea was also seventeen and was already caring for a son she had had at fifteen from another man; she didn’t feel she could cope with a second child. This argument held no water with Tim, who discovered—after the fact of conception—that he was desperate to be a father.
One weekend shortly after the breakup, Tim met the woman who ended up fulfilling that dream. He was “hanging at a friend of mine’s house, and Mazie and a couple of her friends were there.” Mazie had just broken up with Tim’s best friend: “My friend was trying to get back with her, and I ended up getting with her,” he explains, as if poaching other men’s girlfriends is fair game. “I really wasn’t having sex with her too much,” Tim confides. “She was only fourteen.” But nonetheless, “we were only together for about two months, and she was getting pregnant!”
How did Tim respond to the news that he had gotten a fourteen-year-old he barely knew pregnant? “I didn’t mind at all!” he declares. When pressed to explain his reaction, Tim notes that he “thought I really cared” for Mazie at that time. But, as he is careful to explain, this doesn’t mean he ever considered Mazie a “real girlfriend”—he reserves that designation for Andrea, his first love. Nor is he willing to characterize his bond with Mazie as a “real relationship.” In fact, he specifically asserts that it was not.
Like John, Tim only “ended up getting with” his baby’s mother—he didn’t choose her. The courtship was exceedingly brief—only two months in duration—but the two were more or less “together” when conception occurred, and there was just enough cohesion to prompt a positive response to the pregnancy. Plus, in Tim’s case, Mazie’s pregnancy was a way to satisfy the strong desire for a child evoked by Andrea’s conception. Mostly, though, Tim is perplexed by the question we pose. Why would he mind, the tone of his answers imply.
BEING TOGETHER
So what does “being together” imply? Generally, it means that the two are spending regular time with one another and view the relationship as something more than a mere sexual encounter.13 Being together is more than a “hookup,” borrowing from the terms more privileged high school and college students use; hookups have no distinct beginning or end, while the termination of these liaisons requires a “breakup.”14 There is an expectation of fidelity, at least in theory; outside relationships are still usually designated as “cheating,” though this norm grows a lot stronger once a baby is on the way or has entered the world. Tim clearly knows he’s done wrong when he’s caught having sex on the couch with Andrea one night when he thinks Mazie and his child, Sophia, are asleep in bed. But, as the ambiguous language men use to describe these ties suggests, at the point of conception, Tim and his peers seldom view their unions as serious or “real relationships.”15
For simplicity we refer to this stage in men’s romantic relationships as “being together.” But blacks and whites use somewhat different terms. In poor black neighborhoods across the Philadelphia metropolitan area, like Amin Jenkins’s Strawberry Mansion, youths and adults alike frequently use the description “associate” to denote persons they spend time with but who are not “friends.”16 In the same way, the terms “affiliate” and “associate” depict a bond that is more than just a one-night stand but not exactly a boyfriend or girlfriend relationship either. In economically struggling white neighborhoods like John’s Kensington or even Tim’s more respectable Fishtown, the language tends to be simpler—Tim “gets with” his baby’s mother, while John and Rayann are simply “together.” These terms are as distinctive in what they include as what they do not: much evidence of a search for a life partner.
We asked each of our 110 fathers to tell us “the whole story” of how he got together with the mother of each child, what the relationship was like before pregnancy, and how things developed over time. As was the case with Amin, the prepregnancy narrative is often startlingly succinct: the couple meets, begins to “affiliate,” and then “comes up pregnant.” Few men even mention, much less discuss, any special qualities of their partners or any common tastes or values that drew the two together. Usually, the girl lives on his block, hangs out on the stoop near his corner, works at the same job, is a friend of his sister’s or the girlfriend of a friend, and is willing to “socialize” with him.17 Obviously, there is a spectrum here; Amin was with Antoinette much longer at the time of conception than Tim was with Mazie. It is also true that some conceptions are to very stable couples who may already share children, while others are the result of one-night stands. In the typical scenario, however, couples are usually together, but for only “a minute”—just a few months is the norm—before their first child together is conceived.18
In sum, a common feature of our fathers’ narratives about the nature of the relationship before pregnancy is the brevity and modest cohesion of the tie.19 Only rarely do such couples “fall in love,” get engaged, or get married before conceiving a first child together, though they may do so later on. Indeed, they rarely even refer to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. As we have already indicated, and show in chapter 2, planned pregnancies are rare, yet once the pair deems
