Dear Prudence: I'm childfree but faking a pregnancy to gain in-laws' approval

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Dear Prudence,
I am a career-driven woman recently married to a similarly career-driven man, and we both plan to continue our child-free existence. I happen to be the type of person who craves the approval of my husband’s family, but they have given me the cold shoulder. My husband’s mother and sister also see children as the most valued products of a relationship. Recently, in a moment of utter stupidity and desperation (and after a glass of wine or two), I texted his mother that I was expecting. Now they love me! I get messages during the day from my mother-in-law and sister-in-law, including lengthy emails full of pregnancy and child-rearing advice. We live far away, but at some point my lie is going to be revealed. I have asked my husband to stay silent until I can figure out how to fix things, but in doing so have made him an accessory to my lie. How do I come clean while minimizing the inevitable damage? I am normally clear-headed and smart, so I still can’t believe I did this and have allowed it to go on for over a month!

—Liar Liar

Dear Liar,
If you don’t straighten this out, and your in-laws are the type of people who insist on being there for the delivery, come next March you’re going to find yourself staging your own kidnapping in order to get out of having to explain it’s neither a girl nor a boy, but a lie. It's also a violation of your marriage, and your husband's relationship with his family, to make him party to your deceit. You need to correct this, all right, but it’s going to be difficult to explain to your in-laws what really happened. Saying that in an alcohol-driven moment of insecurity you sought their love by conjuring a nonexistent pregnancy is unlikely to make them re-consider their coldness. It would instead color all your interactions for a long time to come and make them question anything you said—along with your sanity and sobriety. This is especially the case since you don’t intend to ever make real your bogus claim about producing a child. So I suggest you say right away that unfortunately the pregnancy was a false alarm. Sure, this will inevitably result in a barrage of questions and concern about this turn of events: was the pregnancy wishful thinking, a defective test, a miscarriage. But you and your husband then have to be resolute enough to say that this is a private matter and you just don’t want to discuss it beyond confirming you’re not pregnant. Marriage is one of those great life shifts that has a way of bringing up long-buried psychological issues. You say this is totally out of character for you, so you should examine what’s going on that would prompt you to blurt out something so inevitably self-destructive in a search for approval from your new husband’s family.