My father wasn’t infertile, but he believed having natural children was illogical, because there were so many unwanted children out there. He wanted to adopt. My mother won that argument and I suppose I should be thankful, but I also don’t disagree with him.

I never had good luck with dating (or any luck, really) in school/after, so my dream was to make enough money to support a kid and then just adopt one while I was young and worry about finding a partner later.

I actually almost got “reverse adopted” (I’m not sure there’s an actual term for it) when I was in my late teens. Long story short, this kid’s mother got pregnant young, and the guy took off to live with family in another state. The family said he was trash anyway. So she has this kid and raises her alone. She has boyfriends, but they’re young and they don’t want kids. No one said abuse happened, but it probably might have? I don’t know. For my part, my cousins had this friend I thought had a crush on me, until she went to confess and said she was looking for a father instead. She figured her mom was shit at picking boyfriends, so she’d pick her one who was good with kids. And apparently, she went back to her mother, told her she found her a boyfriend who would marry her (the mom) and adopt her (the kid) and she (the mom) told her (the kid) she couldn’t hang out with those friends (my cousins) anymore. They reconnected after high school, I think.

It was kind of a weird situation, but if I’d hit it off with the mom, I would have adopted that kid and I’d have grandkids now.

OP, I think the problem is, a lot of men aren’t paternal in the sense that women (and young women, and girls) are maternal. However, some of us are. Another problem is, there are a lot of perverts out there doing wrong by women (and kids) that make the rest of us cautious about every interaction. It’s not a bad thing that men are more aware of what women and girls go through, but it is changing gender dynamics. And then, as others have pointed out, there are a lot of men who don’t like kids unless it’s their kids. And then, there are a lot of guys who only want sons and nephews, they don’t care about girls until they’re old enough to be attractive — they definitely don’t want to help raise them. That sounds barbaric and over simplified, but I’ve met men like that. My oldest niece called me dad a few times, because hers wasn’t in the picture, and her mother’s loser boyfriend actually told me he is not changing a diaper if the baby is a girl “because he doesn’t want to get accused of messing with her.” So I did all the stuff he wouldn’t. Anyway, there are a few guys out there who are good with any kid who don’t want to hurt kids (or women). I don’t know how rare we are. I suspect a lot of women (particularly, those who have been hurt before) think we’re like unicorns, one in a million or less, or lying. And I really don’t have anything to say to that other than that I know myself and this is who I am… and I’m also not single. Coming up on 20 years of marriage in a few months.