ABSTRACT
This chapter will consider these attitudes as they appear to influence the involuntarily childless, and the ways in which they experience their situation. This discussion will be used to place these feelings in their context, and offer some insight into the distress and sense of difference which childless couples will describe in the results of this study. I shall be concerned in particular with the impact of these norms on the married couple. Perceptions of marriage are still almost inextricably interwoven with expectations of child-bearing.
