Fertility preservation can relieve some of the pressure women feel to find a partner by a certain point, although egg freezing is expensive and offers no guarantees. Illustration / Kimberly Elliott, The New York Times
For some single women in their 30s and 40s, their biological clocks add unwelcome stress to an already fraught process.
In the past, Kelly Shara, 31, often found herself doing fertility maths when she was on a date.
“OK, if we date for a year, then I’ll be this age when we get married,” explained Shara, who lives in Austin and works in tech sales. “Then we have a year, and then we could start having kids. And then that means I’ll be this age when I become a mom.”
She absorbed the message for years — “from rom-coms and so much societal pressure” — that she should be married and having babies by age 30, she said.
For the most part, Shara now finds that expectation silly. She has great friends and a fulfilling career and is unwilling to settle for a partner who isn’t a true teammate.
If it weren’t for her pesky biological clock.
“I would still love to have kids on the soon-ish side,” Shara said. “But there is an opportunity cost toward rushing dating and marriage and courtship and trying to find the right person.”
The stubborn notion that women’s fertility falls off a cliff at 35 has slowly shifted in recent years, thanks to changing cultural norms and leaps in assisted reproductive technology. Despite growing alarm among conservatives over the United States’ historically low birthrate, women over 35 are actually giving birth in relatively large numbers. The birthrate among American women aged 40 to 44 has even risen over the past four decades.
“With many celebrities becoming first-time parents later in life, it often gives the public the perception that fertility is something you can delay,” said Dr Natalie Crawford, a fertility doctor in Austin and the author of The Fertility Formula.
Still, the fact remains: women’s fertility tends to peak in their 20s and declines with time. Men also experience age-related fertility declines, but continue to make sperm throughout their lives; women’s fertility eventually comes to an end. That can shape their approach to dating.
The feeling that women are up against a biological time crunch can create enormous anxiety, said Beth Gulotta, a psychotherapist in New York City and host of the Quiet the Clock podcast, which focuses on fertility and dating.
“What I see happen is that the pressure sort of clouds the judgment of who people are dating, so there’s a lot of flexibility and willingness to overlook red flags,” she said. “There’s this urgency.”
Lydia Desnoyers, 41, said she had sometimes struggled to silence the little voice in her mind whispering that every man she dated could be the father of her future child — even if there was no real chemistry.
“My ovaries were a third wheel on every date,” said Desnoyers, a certified public accountant from Miami. “Like: ‘We’re not wasting any time! This has got to be your husband. This is going to be the father of your kids.’”
But that mindset led her to stay in relationships with the wrong people.
“I was overlooking red flags,” she said, like partners who drank too much or who lacked ambition. “My brain was saying, ‘Leave this relationship.’ But my ovaries were like: ‘No girl. We don’t got time. You got to make this work.’”
Dr Lori Husband, a psychologist in private practice in Nashville, runs a digital class for women in their 30s and 40s who are dating while facing a fertility deadline. She said she often saw women end up in a kind of “panic partnership”. (It happened to her too: in her early 40s, she married, and she and her husband tried in vitro fertilisation, which didn’t work. Within a year, they divorced. Now, she is happily remarried and a stepmother.)
“I see two ends of the spectrum,” Husband said. “I see people panicking or having almost like a fairy-tale mindset, like, if it’s meant to be, I will find my person.”
Kelsey Wonderlin, a licensed therapist and dating coach also in Nashville, said she spent a lot of time talking with her clients about the pitfalls of dating from a place of urgency. First, she aims to reassure them that “there truly are tons of incredible, emotionally available men out there who want to build a life with someone and have kids”.
Wonderlin and Husband talk to their clients about the importance of dating strategically, a big part of which is getting clear on what they can (and cannot) settle for in a potential partner and co-parent. Husband, for instance, has worked with clients who have realised that they don’t care if their dates earn less money than they do. But she encourages them to be careful about compromising on things like mismatched values. “Insane physical chemistry” isn’t a must, Wonderlin tells her clients, but attraction is a non-negotiable.
Wonderlin said she spent a lot of time helping her clients build back some of the confidence they have lost after spending a decade or more on the dating apps, so they “don’t crumble the second that he takes longer to text back, or you don’t become this anxious version of yourself the second that you catch feelings”.
And she reassures them about the importance of being upfront about their priorities when it comes to parenthood.
“You will still get some guys who are like: ‘Whoa. So intense!’” she said. “And those are not your people.”
In a moment when politicians are trying to persuade families to have more children, some women are still struggling to find a partner interested in having kids at all. And the prospect can be exhausting.
Gulotta, the psychotherapist in New York City, said that she often saw women in her practice who are “dating from a place of burnout” — swiping right almost compulsively, while feeling a sense of hopelessness about their prospects — because they want so badly to become mothers.
Her advice may sound counterintuitive: “The best use of your time is really to step back and regroup,” she says. “Take a break. And then come back to dating with more clarity, more energy and more positivity.”
Gulotta, who freely shares her own experiences with fertility pressure, urges her clients and podcast listeners not to become so hyper-fixated on what they don’t have that they don’t recognise what they have now. That might mean something as simple as starting a gratitude practice, she said, or limiting time on social media to avoid getting caught up in other people’s timelines.
Fertility preservation can relieve some of the pressure women feel to find a partner by a certain point, though egg freezing can cost thousands of dollars per cycle (plus yearly storage fees) and offers no guarantees.
In her early 30s, Desnoyers had a relationship with a man who regularly blew her off in favour of his friends — a relationship so bad, she said, she just kind of snapped out of it. She suddenly saw clearly that she was settling for mediocre dates and relationships because she wanted so badly to become a mother.
So at 35, she froze her eggs. And at 39, she had her daughter. She is thrilled to be a single mother by choice, she said, and has “no desire” to date.
Last year, Shara froze her eggs, something she now discusses with her dates early on. For the most part, those conversations have gone well.
On occasion, she has had to explain the mechanics of egg freezing to somewhat confused dates. But her candour has also spurred frank discussions about if and when they want to have kids — information she’d prefer to have upfront, she said, rather than “play the cool girl for six or nine months, and then drop the bomb”.
For now, at least, it has taken some of the pressure off, added Shara, who is no longer doing fertility equations in her head.
“I’m really proud of the fact that I did this,” she said. “But the hard part is, there are no guarantees.”
Written by: Catherine Pearson
Illustration by: Kimberly Elliott
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