The worrying real reason women are freezing their eggs
oday is my birthday – I’m 36. I’m celebrating, since you ask, with an outing to Richmond Deer Park, followed by champagne and pizza in the garden. I know: so civilised and mature.
Anyway, just over a year ago, heading for 35, I was sitting in a pub with my father in central London and I asked him a favour. With his coolly quantitative analytical skills – he studied physics as a young man – could he please help me decide whether I should freeze my eggs before I turned 35? I felt overwhelmed by the data, and extremely stressed about the widespread idea that as soon as I hit 35, my fertility would fall off a cliff. The problem, however, was that at that moment in time, I didn’t have a clear read on wanting children. I could go either way.
My father combed the research and a week or so later helped me decide not to do it. First, it seemed that 35 was not the cliff I had thought it to be. I had more time. Plus, in light of my ambivalence about having children, the exhausting intrusiveness and expense of the procedure (around £10,000) rendered it simply nonsensical for me. So I laid the question to rest, and said to myself that if I wanted to have a child in the next five or so years, then somehow or other it would happen.
I didn’t think too hard about whether the “right” man to do it with would appear. In fact, I have always thought the desire to be a mother must trump romantic uncertainty. If need be, I’d find a male friend (or try to find one) to co-parent. If I really wanted a child and nothing else offered itself, I could always go the sperm bank route.
It turns out that in this respect I’m a bit different from my peers. A report last week found that women are freezing th their eggs not becaus because of their careers, a as has been commonl commonly assumed, but to giv give themsel themselves more time to fi find a good partner w with whom to start a family. The Yale University study, which wh analysed the th eggfreezing mo motivations of 150 Israeli and Am American women, found th that women “weren’t freezin freezing to advance, they were facing the overarc overarching proble problem of partne partnership”. “The overarching problem of partnership.” Indeed. Thanks to the internet, women may have more romantic and sexual options than ever
Tbefore, but the quality of options is downright depressing. Clearly, many women freezing their eggs think it’s possible that the right t man can eventually be found with a few extra years’ searching.
I’m more pessimistic. Have you ever scrolled through the male e options on the dating apps Tinder, nder, OkCupid, or Bumble? Try it. It’s t’s not pretty: man after man gurning g from a cringingly contrived mirror selfie, elfie, big black sunglasses on, too much h hair gel, leering or vacant expressions, ons, and an incoherent word or two o by way of “profile” description. Often the man is posing, topless, with h some kind of animal. (I don’t know why that’s a thing, but it is.) There’s s very little boyfriend – let alone father er – material about.
When one does manage to find nd anyone halfway nice looking and able to hang a sentence together, good luck actually arranging a satisfactory meeting with them. My friend Katrina, 37, who happens to have just completed three rounds of egg freezing, is a case in point. Like the women in the study, she froze her eggs not for the purposes of her (extremely successful) career, but in the hopes of finding a partner. In her attempt to do so, she has doggedly trawled a number of dating sites and apps, and tried speed dating events for hipsters and posh people. She’ll
Have you scrolled through the male options on dating apps? It’s not pretty
often be chatting with several men at once. But when it comes to actually meeting up, they simply vanish into thin air – or, like one mysteriously occupied “entrepreneur”, keep ignoring the fact that she has a demanding day job, and suggesting impromptu coffees at one in the afternoon instead of the evening drinks she offered.
It’s all very frustrating, and leads me to think that women who want to be mothers should go a nontraditional route, be that sperm bank or something else, rather than waiting around for a Mr Right that may well never appear.
Some posit that the mismatch between successful women in their 30s and their male counterparts comes down to women being now the more educated sex. Certainly, my single friends and I all feel that as the quantity of options facing women in their 30s has soared, the quality of the options has dropped off a cliff.
Education may be partly to do with it. But perhaps it’s just that women – trained from an early age to be self-aware, emotionally astute and good at multitasking – reach a peak of all-pistons-firing personhood in their 30s and 40s that men simply can’t match.
Whatever the underlying cause, as long as egg freezing brings women relief from stress, I’m all for it. I just hope the gamble pays off, because the Tinder-eye view is anything but reassuring.