She doesn’t want to have children

I’ve been married going on 4 years. My wife loves me completely, and I love her too. She gave up seeing her friends and family and moved thousands of miles to be with me when we got married. An issue for me is that she has since decided she doesn’t want to have children. I’ve been struggling with this for a while.

Over the last year or so, I’ve been becoming friendly with this other woman who I get on unbelievably well with. Like my wife, she’s smart, funny, a good person, very pretty. The difference is that I find her easier to communicate with than my wife. She understands my position on things, even if she doesn’t agree. She has also told me several times how she desperately wants children, if she could just find the right man.

I’m not planning on cheating on my wife, but I have a sense that if I’d met my friend before my wife, things would have gone a different way. Maybe I would be a dad now. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently. I don’t want to hurt anyone, and it seems that doing anything would end up hurting someone, or everyone, so I won’t do anything. I don’t feel regret about marrying my wife because we get on well but I fear feeling regret in old age, or finding out that I somehow did the wrong thing now.