DILDO or DINKWAD?
Childfree not by choice.
“Maybe I’ll just embrace the DINK lifestyle,” I told my friend over brunch, still trying to laugh away my infertility instead of fully face it. DINK, the hashtag I’d been seeing all over Instagram, stood out under photos of couples eating croissants in Paris, sipping cocktails on sandy beaches in Tahiti, living a life that somehow looked both effortless and painfully far away from my existence in suburban America.
“I actually think you’re considered a DILDO now,” she said.
I took a sip of my iced matcha, expecting her to laugh. She didn’t. Instead, she clarified, “Dual Income, Little Dog Owner.”
I waited until we said our goodbyes before I opened my phone and Googled “how little does your dog have to be to qualify as a DILDO?” Almost an hour later, I was still hunched over the screen in the front seat of my car, the windows fogged up, deep in a Reddit titled Are You DINKs or DINKWADs? DINKWADs meaning Dual Income, No Kids, With A Dog.
It turns out, there’s an entire childfree lexicon:
SINKs (Single Income, No Kids)
SINBADs (Single Income, No Boyfriend/Assets/Dude)
PODWOGs (Parents of DINKs Without Grandchildren)
DODOs (Dual income, Obsessive Doodle Owners)
I considered more fitting acronyms for my place in the infertility world:
ATWAB (Adults That Wanted A Baby)
POPI (Pissed Off, Processing Infertility)
FINKs (Fertility Issues, No Kids)
LIMBO (Living In Maybe Baby Optimism)
None of the labels fit. Not one brought me a sense of identity. Infertility drops you into a liminal space—not a parent and not childfree by choice. It leaves you with a longing, a void, a space you try to fill with something that makes the in-between feel less lonely. And that ache doesn’t disappear because you name it.
A few years ago, my husband and I were walking through Central Park. A crowd of people dressed in Medieval clothing were yelling in the distance.
“What are they doing?” I asked my husband. “Filming something?”
“They’re LARPing,” he told me.
“LARP, Live Action Role-Playing,” he continued after registering the confusion on my face. “It’s like Dungeons and Dragons stuff.”
“They look like they’re having so much fun.” I said, stopping to watch the group of strangers charge at one another with fake swords and makeshift shields. They were dashing around in velvet capes and a few of them even wore what looked like metal Viking helmets. In between sword fights and dramatic death scene reenactments, they were laughing together, high fiving, and cheering one another on.
My husband dismissed it, but I felt a pang of jealousy. I thought about community and the many ways people find that for themselves.
My husband shrugged off the LARPers, but I found myself glancing over my shoulder once more, wanting to see them again before they slipped out of sight. They looked a little silly, yes. But they also looked…connected, part of a circle I could only watch from the outside. As if they’d found a place in the world where they didn’t have to justify who they were or who they weren’t.
For years, I’ve been calling the ache I carry “infertility,” but that word often feels too small. Maybe what I’m really missing is belonging. At some point, my friends seemed to split into two groups—the ones who wanted children and had them, and the ones who had never been interested in being parents. And I was left somewhere in between, unsure where I fit.
These labels we invent for ourselves—DINK, DILDO, DINKWAD—they try to make a complicated thing simple. They’re shorthand, quick ways of saying “I’m here” without admitting how uncertain that “here” can feel. They give us a category but not a community.
These labels we invent for ourselves—DINK, DILDO, DINKWAD—they try to make a complicated thing simple. They’re shorthand, quick ways of saying “I’m here” without admitting how uncertain that “here” can feel. They give us a category but not a community.
For me, community has always been more accidental than intentional. It hasn’t been something that has been magically granted to me, but more so something that I gathered awkwardly while stumbling my way through a new phase in life. It has shown up in church basements, clutching a paper cup of bad coffee; in a familiar face at yoga class; through small talk in a sauna; in a group chat when someone finally admitted they were scared or angry or too tired to pretend they were fine. It arrives quietly, in unexpected places, and somehow reminds me that I’m not as alone as I feel.
I want this newsletter to be one of those places. For the childfree, the childless by choice, for the DILDOs and SINKs and DODOs and everyone stuck somewhere in between—this is your corner of the internet. No labels, no hashtags, no neatly packaged identities, just messy human connection and a lot of figuring it out together.
17 Signs You’re Officially a DINKWAD … according to Reddit.
You’ve rearranged furniture to accommodate zoomies.
Your dog eats better-quality food than you did in college.
