The comforting answer is yes — they're honest about their uncertainty, honesty is rare, people work things out. The comforting answer is what friends say, and it is what you will want to hear, because by the time you are asking this question you have usually already met the fencesitter and they are usually already wonderful.
The honest answer is: almost certainly not — and the reasons why are worth understanding in full, because they are not about the fencesitter's character. They are about structure.
First, credit where due: an honest fencesitter is displaying real integrity. Saying "I genuinely don't know if I want children" out loud, in a dating market that punishes uncertainty, is harder than picking a lane and performing it. The fencesitter is not the villain of this guide. There is no villain. That is precisely what makes the situation dangerous — nobody has to do anything wrong for it to end in wreckage.
The structural problem: your presence rigs the coin
The fantasy version of dating a fencesitter goes like this: they are undecided, you are patient, and in time they will complete their deliberation and — being with you, loving the life you share — land on no. Notice the trick the fantasy plays. It assumes their decision process runs independently, and you simply await the verdict.
But that is not how humans decide anything while in love. A fencesitter in a happy relationship with a decided childfree partner is no longer weighing "do I want children?" — they are weighing "do I want children enough to lose this person?" Those are different questions, and the second one produces a specific, well-documented answer: not right now. Year after year, not right now. The deliberation you were patiently waiting out has quietly stopped; what remains is deferral wearing its costume. The coin never gets flipped fairly, because you are standing on it.
And deferred is not decided. The classic detonation schedule puts the reckoning at 35 or 38 — a milestone birthday, a sibling's baby, a therapist's question — when the fencesitter finally runs the deliberation to completion and discovers the answer was yes, and has been for some time, unexamined, because examining it was too expensive. Now the relationship is eight years deep. Now everyone pays.
The asymmetry: who pays, and how much
Weigh the outcomes honestly. If it works — the fencesitter genuinely lands on no — you get what you could have had with a decided partner, minus years of low-grade uncertainty. That is the best case: the same prize, at a markup.
If it fails, the costs are asymmetric and brutal. You lose nearly a decade of your dating life — and if you are a woman dating in your thirties, that decade is not refundable in the way anyone's twenties are. The fencesitter loses the same years plus, sometimes, the chance at the parenthood they discovered they wanted. The bill arrives largest precisely when it can least be paid. A bet where the upside is "what I could have had anyway, later" and the downside is "the irreplaceable decade" is not a close call. It only feels close because the fencesitter is sitting across the table being lovely.
The one version that is defensible
Is there any honest way to do it? One, and it has strict conditions. The fencesitter must be actively deciding — actually working the question, with something like a timeline — not passively "open." You must be genuinely willing to leave when the timeline expires, and say so out loud: "I'm settled on no. If you land on yes, or can't land at all by [honest date], we end — lovingly, but we end." And you must never lobby. Not once. A no you argued them into is a loan that gets called.
Members who report fencesitter relationships that worked describe exactly this shape: short deliberation window, zero persuasion, a real willingness to walk. Members who report the eight-year wreck describe the other shape: open-ended patience, quiet hoping, and a conversation postponed until a birthday forced it. The difference is not luck. It is whether anyone was willing to price the risk out loud at the start.
The honest answer, in one paragraph
Dating a fencesitter means volunteering to co-sign a decision you cannot influence without corrupting, on a timeline you do not control, where delay favors no one and the failure mode consumes your best remaining years. The fencesitter deserves the space to finish deciding — genuinely, freely, off the clock of your relationship. You deserve a partner whose deciding is done. Those two sentences are both kind, and they point in opposite directions, away from each other. Follow yours. It leads somewhere better than waiting: it leads to the people who already know.