Give boyfriend time to recover from shock of unplanned pregnancy

Q. I just found out I'm pregnant. I am only 21 and had been on the pill, so naturally this is a shock.

My longtime boyfriend has a stable job and is being very supportive, so practically speaking there are few qualms involved. But I can't get over the disappointment I have with his reaction. He showed almost no emotion and then said, "I hope you know we're not getting married."

Again, otherwise he's been great with this situation. I'm just hurt. I've always wanted kids. This isn't an ideal time to have them, but I still sort of hoped he'd be excited (especially since he's older, and this pregnancy will not affect his life plans as much as it will mine). I also don't know why he had to bring up marriage like that. I hadn't even thought about it, but I'm upset that the one thing this pregnancy brought to mind was the fact that he doesn't want to commit to me.

Honestly, the idea of having a child out of wedlock is foreign to me. Where I'm from, it just doesn't happen. I don't even want him to marry me (yet?), but I don't know if I can live with and raise a child with someone who is never going to want to marry me. Should I tell him all this, or would that be emotional blackmail? I guess I don't know how much responsibility it's fair to give him, and at the same time I don't know if I can handle any of this myself. Advice?

A. I think you'll be surprised by what you can handle by yourself.

But a pregnancy you were actively trying to prevent isn't your greatest obstacle to seeing that right now. What's blocking your view is a bunch of (bad pun, sorry) preconceived notions.

The most consequential of these at the moment is the notion that the first thing that came to his mind is also the most significant. You two aren't movie characters and moments aren't tests (though certainly we can forgive ourselves for thinking that way; how many thousands of tidy, scripted scenes have we all watched by the time we're your age?). People are complicated and so are feelings. When you drop a news bomb on people, their reaction is almost guaranteed to be underwhelming, especially when the news is of the good-thing-under-bad-circumstances variety. You want people to leap at the good - and it hurts when they don't, I get it - but they usually react to the bad first.

So maybe he is emphatically not marrying you, but you don't know that yet.

In these situations, the kindest course for both of you is to be patient for the full, reasoned response to come out. Sometimes it takes a day, a week, even months for someone to grow into a new reality. And that's OK. Even if his response remains disappointing, your ability to handle that will have ripened, too.

The next preconceived notion hurting you is an offshoot of the first: that his age and employment status dictate a more graceful response. Creating and being responsible for a life might not be anyone's idea of a novelty, given the earth's 7-billion-plus current and former babies, but to the person new to it and blindsided by it, it's an earth-shaker. The answer again is to give him, and yourself, some time.

Preconceived notion No. 3 is the big one, though: that an out-of-wedlock child "just doesn't happen." We can go on all day about what is right and healthy for the child, for you and for society - let's not - but I find it hard to fathom you've hit 21 without significant exposure to parenthood outside marriage. The 2012 census has households with children under 18 breaking about 60-40, married couples vs. some other arrangement. (www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p20-570.pdf) It happens, it might be happening to you, and it's time to mom up and treat it as a prepared-for possibility instead of a fled-from crisis.

That can mean, of course, that you choose some reproductive option besides raising the child yourself, though I suspect you'll follow through because you want to be a mom. I also suspect a man who has "been great with this situation" will be a steady partner in doing the right thing - which is your True North. It's not about anyone's expectations.

Raising a child, specifically, is about providing a stable, loving, supportive childhood, and there's no one right way for parents to accomplish that. (I advise strongly against sharing a home, though, unless you fully embrace the terms.)

While feelings are still raw, I suggest you set the big questions aside and concentrate on small steps toward making healthy decisions: Be honest with yourself; listen to him; resist the impulse to react by questioning your assumptions and waiting for all the facts; and work with what you actually have instead of dwelling on what you expected.

• Email Carolyn at tellme@washpost.com, or chat with her online at 11 a.m. each Friday at www.washingtonpost.com.