‘I can’t believe you’re about to have your third baby and I haven’t even had my first,” said an old girlfriend wistfully over supper the other night. This was not the first time I’d noticed this, although no one really talks about it, that women, when they enter their mid-to-late 30s, suddenly become very starkly divided between those who have children and those who don’t, with the ones who don’t suddenly facing the very real prospect of remaining that way for ever.
We agreed that she mustn’t worry and that, aged 35, she still had some time to find the right man, get married and have babies. My mother, I pointed out, met my father at 36 and had me at 37. This friend’s mother had started similarly late, having her first baby at 38 and her second at 40. Indeed, I have a cousin who had her first at 40 and her second at 46. It worked out for them and it most probably will for her too if that’s what she really wants, we agreed.
But I know, if it were me, I too would be starting to feel the pressure at this point. We all know that women’s fertility starts to drop off at 35, and that by the time they are 40 their chances of conception are low, especially if they’ve never had any children before.
I had a similar conversation the other day at a reunion of school friends. We noted that out of the 10 of us, only half of us had children, while out of the other five, only one said she actively did not want to have children. That left four out 10, that’s 40 per cent – all lovely, attractive, clever women – involuntarily single and childless, which seems to be an unnaturally high number. I’m not sure we would have predicted this 20 years ago, when we were all at school together.
So what is going on here? Is it a lack of men generally, or perhaps a lack of those wanting to settle? There is certainly an element of both around – I can think of hardly any single men to introduce to the swathes of wonderful single girlfriends I seem to have.
When I was single, the men I did meet of around my age who weren’t gay seemed somehow lost and were clearly in no way looking for any kind of responsibility, something I imagine has not been helped by the prevalence of dating apps which offer endless choice and a phone to hide behind. The whole business was endlessly disappointing and dispiriting, and that was pre-Covid, when society still operated in a vaguely normal way.
Which is where my theory comes in, which is that this overabundance of single, childless women is shaping up to be one of those unforeseen consequences of Covid and lockdowns.
These girls will have been 32 when Covid struck, at which point most of them were out and about enjoying themselves, meeting people, working hard and not fretting too much about their biological clocks. Time was on their side, they still had a few years to settle down and there’s always IVF and surrogacy, they were thinking, if things don’t go to plan – easier to contemplate when they are far-off abstractions rather than the gruelling, expensive and not always successful ordeals they prove to be in reality, not to mention the ethics involved.
But then Covid struck, followed by relentless draconian lockdowns and at least two years of meeting people in a normal fashion – at parties, in the office, on the train (?!) – came to a dramatic halt. In many cases, particularly as regards office attendance, life has not really returned to normal even now (which begs the question as to how the Gen Zedders are going to fare in the love game, but that’s for another column). Suddenly, all these women are in their late 30s, with those absolutely crucial years just totally lost to oblivion. Will we find that a whole chunk of women – those born in the mid-1980s – missed the boat? Sadly, I think we might.
I was very lucky. Thanks to an introduction from the editor of this very magazine, I managed to get in there a couple of years before Covid hit. Personally, I went for a divorcé 20 years my senior, a course of action I perhaps shouldn’t be recommending in the Catholic Herald (we were able to have a proper Catholic wedding). But it’s one I do recommend to my friends in private, because the great thing about older men is that they generally know their own minds and they move fast, especially if they want children, which can only be a good thing when time is of the essence.
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