When we found out the pregnancy was ectopic and life-threatening, my husband vowed to never ask me to have children again.

It had been a 12-year negotiation. He wanted children; I didn’t. When we met in college, two foreign students in dizzying New York City for the first time, I never thought that a decade later, he would be lying next to me in bed monitoring my breathing in case my fallopian tube ruptured and he had to rush me to the emergency room, afraid I would hemorrhage to death.

At 20, I hadn’t given much thought to children except to know that I didn’t want them, not actively, as some do. Growing up in Singapore in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I hated the way people assumed that because I was a woman I wanted and would have children.

My own family had been broken and chaotic, my father absconding when I was 9, leaving us homeless and bankrupt, and my mother heartbroken, emotionally unavailable and volatile. Deep down I believed that family caused nothing but pain. There seemed little reward for forming one of my own.

So when, two years into our relationship, the young man who would become my husband casually remarked that he always wanted to be a father, I was taken aback.

“I’d be ready to have kids in a couple of years,” he said.

“A couple is two,” I said. “We’d be 22.”

He paused and looked at me strangely. Then: “Do you not want kids?”

On the surface, we had little in common. He was a Swedish-Lebanese math whiz from the upper-middle class echelons of pastoral Switzerland. I had come to college on a hard-won scholarship, having grown up in the pressure cooker of the Singaporean public education system, raised by an unhappy mother saddled with my absent father’s debts.

I was flinty, ambitious and guarded, having suppressed my vulnerability and passion to escape my childhood. I’d come to the U.S. to study economics, since my scholarship required that I work for the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund for six years after graduating.

He was an irreverent, funny and kind engineering student who loved beauty in all its forms. He also had just completed a year of military service, spent mostly in the Swiss Alps, and had improbably perfect abs and long, curly hair.

On cold days, we would set off in the dark from Morningside Heights to walk all over New York City, numb hands clasped tight. I dragged him to the ice-skating rink in Bryant Park — my first time skating, never having seen snow or ice in tropical Singapore — where he, accustomed to skating in the Alps, humored me, holding me up as we made slow circles amid lumbering knots of tourists.

He took me to eat spaetzle in Alphabet City, and I took him for roti prata in Flushing. Two young people far from home, trying to explain ourselves and our pasts to each other.

After graduating, we stayed together despite almost two years of long distance, with him in New York and me in Singapore, then we moved to London for my finance job, then to Austin, Texas, for my graduate program in creative writing. We got married, bought a house, got a mortgage. My estranged father died, alone and far away, and my husband held me as I fell apart. In this way, 12 years passed.

We kept talking about children but grew more entrenched in our positions. Entering the work force made me even more wary of motherhood, while a decade of corporate work and moving made him want family and stability even more.

He did not want to convince me to have a child. I did not want to convince him not to. So we put it off. He would not change his mind, I knew. He had too much love to give and nowhere for it to go.

He talked of teaching a child judo and chess. When I asked him to explain why he wanted a child — the way one might ask someone to explain the allure of bird-watching or free climbing or some other activity that inspires passion in some and bewilderment in others — he said he wanted to love and accept our children for who they were, something he felt he hadn’t been given in his own childhood.

In Austin, our lives began to diverge. Before, writing had been my secret hobby, my husband my first reader, editor and cheerleader all in one. Now it was my course of study, social life and job. I hung out with other writers, having long conversations about poets my husband didn’t know, books he hadn’t read, people he hadn’t met. In the summer, I would often attend workshops and residencies, leaving my husband alone in scorching Texas summers for months.

“I just don’t feel like we’re in it together anymore,” he told me.

“Of course we are,” I said. Hadn’t we just been approved for green cards, which would finally mean the stability we had been working toward for a decade?

As my program ended, I began applying for academic jobs, many in rural towns my husband wouldn’t be able to move to. We would figure it out, I thought. We had done long distance before. He might even be able to work remotely.

“When do we stop moving?” he asked. “Why do you keep trying to leave?”

That stopped me. The unsaid question, about whether to have kids, of course, was one we had avoided for years.

Then he said: “If you go, I don’t know that I’ll follow.”

For the first time, I faced the possibility of losing him. I couldn’t ignore the glaring fact that all my husband had done for a decade was support my choices, giving up opportunities to be with me. Of course, reciprocation is no reason to have a child. But what do you do when the person you most love wants something you can give him?

We became sloppy with birth control. The chances of conceiving, I thought, were low, even for couples who were trying. I never thought I would actually get pregnant. Until there I was, taking test after test, and then stupidly bursting into tears.

After 12 years, I thought I understood how much my husband wanted a family, but I had far underestimated his desire. In those few days he was the happiest I had ever seen him. As for me — I was nauseated, depressed and afraid. But my husband’s joy began to be infectious. By the time of our first prenatal appointment, I felt a glimmer of something else. Not happiness exactly, but curiosity, even excitement.

Then came the ectopic diagnosis. The embryo was in my left fallopian tube and had to be “resolved” before it grew large enough to cause massive internal bleeding. I was given methotrexate, a chemotherapy drug, and after six days of cramps so painful I feared my insides would fall out, the doctor told us the dose hadn’t worked. She would need to give me a second, larger dose. If that were to fail, they would have to do surgery to try to remove the fertilized egg; if that failed, the entire fallopian tube. In the meantime, we had to hope it wouldn’t rupture.

Two weeks of waiting, cramps and clots, all with the threat of massive internal bleeding hanging over me. Yet by the time the second dose of methotrexate succeeded, and my husband declared he was done with “the kid thing,” something in me had shifted.

I thought I had known the recipe for enduring love. Ours had been staked on the mutual respect of our individual needs, so I believed. I had thought that doing something you didn’t want to make someone else happy was the surest path to resentment. But now I understood what my husband had known all those years he had put aside his own desires to support mine — that love changes what we think we want, expands the scope of our desires beyond the realm of the individual.

And it was not entirely true that I did not want a child. There had been moments, like hearing my husband talk to himself in the shower, when I was overcome by an unbearable, unnamable feeling. The desire for more of him, more of us. Going through the ectopic pregnancy together, awful as it was, only confirmed this for me.

A year and a half later, we left the hospital in Manhattan with our newborn son on a cold November day, his first home just blocks away from the street where, 14 years earlier, my husband and I had set off on our meandering walks with no destination in sight, only the knowledge that we would return home together.

Rachel Heng is a writer in New York City. Her latest novel is “The Great Reclamation,” out in March.

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