Family Feuds·
THE GENDER GUESS, DIVIDED ROAD
A couple clashes over a gender reveal when a husband sticks to math to guess the baby's sex, sparking a tense car ride and questions about support.
Was he honest, or should he have softened it?
Be one of the first to vote.
The baby was a boy again, and the wife turned the drive home into an argument over how he had guessed it.
That weekend, the poster and his wife went to a friend's "gender reveal." The friend already had two boys and had told the wife she was hoping for a girl this time. So when they were in the car on the way there, the wife asked what gender the poster thought the baby would be.
He guessed boy.
His reasoning was blunt and statistical: babies are born at roughly "105 boys for every 100 girls," so, as he put it, there was still about a 51% chance this child would be a boy. The wife pushed back. Because the couple already had two sons, she said there would "surely be more chance of a girl this time."
He disagreed. The two boys, he said, were not relevant to the sex of the child they were expecting. His answer was based on the numbers, not the family history.
At the "gender reveal," the announcement came down: it was another boy.
The friend did her best to look happy, but the disappointment was obvious. The wife looked disappointed too.
The mood stayed sour on the drive home. The wife got upset and told him he "could have been more supportive" and "shouldn't have been so mathematical" with his guess. In her view, he should have been supportive, not analytical, especially since he was guessing the baby would be a boy after the family had already hoped for a girl.
He didn't see it that way. He said his response had been perfectly reasonable to the questions she had asked him. She had asked what gender he thought the baby would be, and he had answered with his best guess and his reasoning. He also stood by the point that the previous two boys did not change the odds of this pregnancy in the way she seemed to think they did.
After that, the wife said little. She stayed quiet for the rest of the drive home.
So the weekend ended with a confirmed baby boy, a disappointed set of parents-to-be, and a couple in the front seat still stuck on the same question: whether the poster should have been more "supportive", or whether he had simply answered "what gender I thought the baby would be" the way he honestly thought best.