David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

It took meeting the right woman and letting her

convinced me that this was the right idea before we even got started.

I didn't have starting my own family on the list of priorities in my late 20s or even early 30s.

It was really the impetus of meeting my wife, Jamie, and her telling me, this is what I want.

I want to have a family.

I want to get married.

I want to have kids.

I want to have three.

And me going for a second, like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

And then, all right, let's do it.

And I think that's the kind of happy accident where some parts of my life have been very driven, where I knew exactly what I wanted and how to push forward to it and what the payoff was going to be.

But when it comes to having a family, that always felt like a very fuzzy, abstract idea that, sure, someday, maybe.

And then it became very concrete because I met a woman who knew what she wanted.

And looking back on it now, it almost seems...

crazy.

There's this fork in the road of reality where if that hadn't happened and I had been sitting here now, not being a father, not having a family, the level of regret, knowing what I know now about the joys of having that family would have been existential, would have been

I don't know if they would have been devastating.

I think men have a little bit of a longer window to pursue these things than women do.

There are just certain biological facts.

But ending up with the family I have now, ending up with my three boys, have been just a transformative experience in the sense that here's something that turned out to be the most important thing