Reproduction, and the Timing Thereof

So I had a lovely date last night with a charming, droll fellow who made me laugh and think and remember what the “ooh” feeling can be all about.

When you meet someone online through a matchmaking-type service, it is considered acceptable to quiz them on aspects of their online profile. So I asked him, lightly and jokingly, “Hey, you didn’t fill in the checkboxes for have kids and want kids, anything I should know?”

His response: “Hmm, I thought I had filled those out. Well, kids yay, and I swear I would know if I had any (laugh)…but y’know, I’m 31, and I am nowhere near ready to have kids.”

I brought this up to A. at work this morning, because she is wise, and she flinched when I told her. Her response: “What’s sad is that feeling that way is so not an option for women that age who want to have [biological] kids.”

So I set about mentally ignoring the quasi-red flag, in order to retain the shiny feeling a bit longer, and even told someone about my date and claimed there weren’t any red flags.

Then I saw this, posted at Compound Interest in response to a book that Mary felt was proposing bad things:

[it is grossly false that] …we have any control over whether our menfolk want to settle down and raise children….who [is it] that we’re supposed to be marrying in our early to mid-twenties[?] Surely not men in that age range, who from my own experiences in the dating world, are empathically NOT interested in getting married and making babies any time soon. My male peers realize they have decades to postpone reproduction. One young man I used to date told me he was interested in having children “some day.”

“When would that be?” I asked.

“In my forties,” he replied.

Obviously he didn’t intend to have them with a woman his own age.

Serves me right for attempted denial. I’m not claiming to actually know his mind from one casual comment, but ignoring evidence serves me not.

Damn reality.