Parenting & Family Quote by Henry Rollins

Rollins doesn’t dress this up as a manifesto; he makes it sound like a scheduling preference. That bluntness is the point. Coming from a musician whose public persona has long been built on endurance, discipline, and a kind of self-forged intensity, “I don’t want a wife and I don’t want kids” reads less like a rejection of love than a refusal of the default life script.

The specific intent is boundary-setting, not confession. The phrasing is stripped of excuses: no “not ready,” no “someday,” no nod to social expectation. It’s a hard stop aimed at the crowd that treats marriage and parenthood as inevitable milestones rather than choices. By repeating “I don’t want,” he centers desire instead of duty. That’s quietly radical in cultures where the “why not?” interrogation always follows.

The subtext is an artist protecting the conditions that make his life legible to himself: mobility, solitude, creative obsession, maybe even the freedom to be difficult. Rollins has often framed his work ethic and independence as non-negotiable; partnership and parenting aren’t condemned here, they’re named as incompatible with the kind of life he’s built and the person he’s willing to be.

Context matters: punk and post-punk scenes have long marketed authenticity and anti-bourgeois posture, yet they also age into domestication like everyone else. Rollins’ line functions as a refusal to perform that maturation arc on cue. It’s a plain sentence with a cultural argument hiding inside it: adulthood isn’t defined by who you acquire, but by what you choose not to.