On Tuesday night, I met with a friend for dinner, and then I joined her at Local Edition, a speakeasy-type bar afterwards, to hear some live jazz, and also see her and a group of her friends dance. The dance floor in the bar is quite small, but she told me that it attracts quite a large crowd most Tuesday nights, many of whom are in her dance class in Golden Gate Park. Their moves were so fun to watch depending on the songs being sung and played; it looked like a mix of both swing and jazz dance.

One of the women who joined our table to watch was really quiet, but we made some small talk that eventually became a lot more serious than I thought it would be. She was asking me a lot of curious questions about my marriage, for whatever reason fascinated that I’ve been married only a year. When she eventually revealed she was also married, but had two children, that was when the melancholy became clear all over her face: her marriage was at its end, and there was nothing either she or or husband could do to save it. Everything was great until they had kids; then they slowly became different people, started fighting more, and eventually stopped communicating about important things completely.

“Don’t ever stop communicating,” she said to me. “If there’s one thing you have to fight against, it’s the end of communication because that will literally be the end of everything, and there will be no going back.”

I also had an Uber driver give me advice the other day to not have children: “JUST DON’T DO IT! IT WILL RUIN YOUR MARRIAGE!”

Yep. Can’t wait to have kids now.