When the writer Louise O’Neill was about to turn 38, her five-year relationship fell apart. A few months earlier, she’d been picking out pink tiles to renovate the bathroom of the home she and her partner had bought together in a coastal town in Wicklow, Ireland. Now she was moving back in with her parents, beset by a tidal wave of emotions that will be all too familiar to any woman in her thirties overwhelmed at the prospect of starting again.
“I instantly felt this panic, like ‘Oh my God, I have to get my eggs frozen, I have to get straight back on the dating apps, I should be engaged and pregnant by my 39th birthday if I rush,” O’Neill, now 41, tells me. And so she started planning out hypothetical timelines, ones that might fast track her life in the direction she’d always imagined: falling in love, getting married, having children.
