“They will—once there are so many old and terminally ill people that they threaten to knock our teetering health care system out completely. Your doctor will write you a prescription, it will be cheap and easy to fill, and it will all be perfectly legal. No more having to go to the dark web.”

“You really think that’s going to happen?”

“It’s the only practical solution—and the only compassionate one, in my view.”

Except that most people won’t choose it. Was our joint unspoken thought.

—

We know that the belief that it is ethically wrong for human beings to procreate isn’t new. In fact, it is ancient. Life is suffering, birth feeds death, to bring a person who has no say in the matter into this world is morally unjustifiable, goes the anti-natalist philosophy. That life might also bring an individual a great amount of pleasure changes nothing, the anti-natalists say. Unborn, the person would not have missed life’s pleasures. Born, he or she has no choice but to endure its multitude of physical and emotional pains, such as the pain that comes from aging or disease or dying. The possibility of a happier future, in which suffering would be vastly diminished, cannot be a justification for the suffering that exists today. And in any case, according to a leading contemporary anti-natalist, a happier future is an illusion. The main problem was, is, and ever will be human nature, the anti-natalist says. Everything could have been different, true. But that would have required us to be a different species. Humans don’t learn. They make the same terrible mistakes over and over, he says. “We’re asked to accept the unacceptable. It’s unacceptable that people, and other beings, have to go through what they go through, and there’s almost nothing that they can do about it.”

When he’s asked whether or not he has any children, the anti-natalist won’t say.

IV

Later, I found myself confessing the truth, that I’d gone not to the gym that morning but to meet my ex, and that in spite of the promise of silence I’d made her I had told him everything.

A week ago, maybe, that would’ve bothered her, she said. She didn’t ask me why I’d changed my mind.

Time. We were both keenly aware that it had become a different element from what it had been before we crossed the threshold of that house.

So strange, she’d said earlier, on one of our walks. Sometimes it feels as if we’d been here for years.

I knew what she meant. Within a week our relationship had grown to such a degree that it eclipsed the friendship of our youth. And it was this new intimacy that made secrets and lies intolerable.