A few years ago I went for a drink with a female friend who had been dating for some time, but hadn’t met anyone in it for the long haul, and she was adamant that she wanted to have children. She felt the ticking of her biological clock acutely, but was frustrated that the men she met acted as though they had all the time in the world. “I’ve decided that I’m not going to wait around for some man to get his shit together and commit to me and the possibility of a family,” she announced, citing the Danish phenomenon of the solomor, or solo mother. “I’ll give it a couple more years, and then I’m getting a sperm donor and going it alone.”
I admired her. Being single in your 30s is not the quagmire it perhaps was in the 90s, when “singletons” had to negotiate a world of “smug marrieds”, as Helen Fielding satirised in Bridget Jones’s Diary. Today’s thirtysomethings are more open to alternatives to heterosexual monogamy as a relationship model, being single is less stigmatised, and, in the current post-recession economy, the markers of adulthood are less clear-cut. For the first time, in 2020, the Office for National Statistics found that half of women in England and Wales had not had a baby by their 30th birthday, an increase of 32 percentage points in 50 years. That is a radical societal shift, and one that reflects women’s increasing access to education and career opportunities. But for thirtysomething women who want children or are open to the idea, looking for a partner in the modern dating economy can be tricky.
