What a Childfree Life Can Look Like with Danni Duncan

Not every woman's path looks the same. And that's exactly the point.

In this episode, Jess sits down with Danni Duncan, content creator, community builder, and founder of The Others Club, for a conversation that's a little different from our usual. Danni has spent years building one of the most engaged childfree communities in Aotearoa and beyond, and this episode is for every woman who has ever felt like the path laid out in front of her wasn't quite the right fit.

They start with acne, something Danni has navigated since her teenage years, through cystic breakouts, two rounds of Roaccutane, and the complex relationship between skin, hormones, stress, and self-worth. She shares what's finally helped her reach a place of consistency with her skin, why simplifying her routine made more of a difference than any trending product, and the honest truth that she still doesn't know exactly what fixed it, and has had to make peace with that uncertainty.

Then the conversation opens up into childfree life. Danni shares the full arc of her journey, from assuming she'd become a mum one day, to the two years she spent on the fence in her early 30s, paralysed between two paths and feeling completely alone in that experience. She talks about what finally shifted for her, why she started sharing online when there was nobody else in her life who understood, and how that vulnerability turned into a community of hundreds of thousands of people who felt exactly the same way.

They talk about the messy, tender parts of this conversation that don't often get airtime, the friendships that shift when you're the only one without kids, the unspoken expectation that childfree women are somehow the flexible ones, the people who've been told they're "taking something away" from their partners, and why Danni believes the only way through that tension is to talk about it rather than bottle it up.

Danni also introduces The Others Club, the online community and platform she launched two months ago that already has almost 200 meetups listed across New Zealand, Australia, the US, UK, and Europe. It's not just for childfree-by-choice women. It's for anyone who doesn't quite fit into the parenting world, whether that's by choice, by circumstance, by loss, or by the kind of not-quite-sure that so many women quietly carry.

There's a beautiful moment in this conversation where Jess admits she has FOMO about the meetups, and realises she can't actually remember what her hobbies are. It's one of those moments that will quietly land for a lot of people listening.

This is a warm, funny, thought-provoking episode that we think will offer something for almost everyone in The Cyclist community, whether you're choosing a childfree life, questioning what you want, navigating a woman's health journey that's made that decision complicated, or simply craving a conversation that isn't about anyone's sleep schedule.

Find Danni at @danniduncan__ on Instagram and The Others Club at theothersclub.com

Follow and connect

Instagram: @wearethecyclist

Website: wearethecyclist.com

Hit play. Whatever your path looks like, there's a place for you here.