Labor of Love (28 page)

When everyone has so little time to spare, dating starts to feel less like a pleasurable diversion and more like one more thing to fit in. It can feel risky—and strangely intimate—to spend time on someone new.

A columnist for
Elle
magazine recently confessed having spurned a date for no other reason than that the thought of spending an entire evening with a stranger made her nervous. “I recently declined a dinner invitation because I didn't think I knew the guy well enough to be alone with him for two hours.” Her feelings are understandable. But they also seem to preclude ever going out with anyone you do not already know.

While part-time workers and freelancers have more flexibility, mostly they have it worse. Not only do they make less money and get few or no benefits. They are also under pressure to make themselves constantly available. A janitor can rarely afford to turn down an extra shift. A massage therapist who gets paid by the hour does well to keep her evenings free, in case a client suddenly throws his back out.

As the freelance worker hears the ticktock of every hour passing, so, too, do many daters fret about the opportunity costs of committing to any given partner. Young women, in particular, are warned to remain vigilant. We are constantly told that we are dating on a deadline. Let down your guard, and next thing you know you may have “wasted years.”

I wasted years with [Name of Lover].
Has a straight man ever said this? Not that I know of, but when a woman does, after a breakup, everyone immediately understands what she means. Men and women alike are taught that female bodies are time bombs. Any time that a woman throws away on a relationship that does not pan out—which is to say, does not get her pregnant by a man who is committed to helping her raise their offspring—brings her closer to her expiration date. At the stroke of midnight, our eggs turn into dust.

*   *   *

The first warning came on March 16, 1978. “The Clock Is Ticking for the Career Woman,”
The Washington Post
declared on the front page of its Metro section. The author, Richard Cohen, cannot have realized just how relentlessly this theme would come to dog daters. His article opened on a lunch date with a “Composite Woman” who is supposed to represent all women between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-five.

“There she is, entering the restaurant,” Cohen began. “She's the pretty one. Dark hair. Medium height. Nicely dressed. Now she is taking off her coat. Nice figure.” Composite Woman has a good attitude, too. “The job is just wonderful. She is feeling just wonderful.” But then her eyes fall.

“Is there something wrong?” he asks.

“I want to have a baby.”

Cohen insisted that all the women he knew wanted to have babies, regardless of the kinds of romantic relationships they found themselves in.

“I've gone around, a busy bee of a reporter, from woman to woman,” he attested. “Most of them said that they could hear the clock ticking. Some talked about it in a sort of theoretical sense, like the woman who said she wanted five children and didn't even have a boyfriend yet … Sometimes, the Composite Woman is married and sometimes she is not. Sometimes, horribly, there is no man in the horizon. What there is always, though, is a feeling that the clock is ticking … You hear it wherever you go.”

*   *   *

Within months, the Clock was stalking Career Women everywhere.

A staff writer for
The Boston Globe
, Anne Kirchheimer, reported that “the beneficiaries of the women's movement, a first generation of liberated young ladies, this new breed of women who opted for careers, travel, independence rather than husband, home, and baby are older now and suddenly the ticking of the biological clock is getting louder and louder.”

One woman Kirchheimer interviewed, a psychiatrist, jokingly diagnosed the affliction from which she and her other single friends were suffering as “withering womb syndrome.”

Statistics did show that the birthrate had dropped precipitously over the previous two decades. In 1957, the average American woman had given birth to 3.5 children; by 1976, that number had fallen to 1.5. Even women who would eventually become mothers were waiting longer to do so. By 1977, 36 percent of women were giving birth to their first child at thirty or older. It was starting to look as if many might use birth control and abortion to put off motherhood indefinitely.

Would this be the way the world ended?
Not with a bomb but the pill?

Stories about the biological clock said no.

In 1982,
Time
ran a cover story on “The New Baby Bloom” that reported that baby boomers were getting pregnant in droves and that anyone who aspired to motherhood had better get on it. “For many women, the biological clock of fertility is running near its end,” the author, J. D. Reed, warned. “The ancient Pleistocene call of the moon, of salt in the blood, and genetic encoding buried deep in the chromosomes back there beneath the layers of culture—and counterculture—are making successful businesswomen, professionals and even the mothers of grown children stop and reconsider.”

Time,
Time
said, stopped for no one. Women could dress up in pantsuits all we liked, but in the end, our bodies would call us out.

Even if women were now competing with men for high-paying jobs, and sleeping around outside of marriage, these stories said that free love and the feminist movement had not really changed the fundamentals of what women were. Women continued to be defined by motherhood; even the most successful Career Woman would eventually yearn for children.

This may have sounded like a description. It was an order.

*   *   *

Naturally, dating on the biological clock was stressful. The fact that women had this expiration date meant that they were not as free as men to enjoy a single life or to focus on their careers. Changing social mores and the pill might make it seem that way, but really they were just dating on borrowed time.

In August 1979, Anne Kirchheimer published another story on
The Boston Globe
's front page: “Single Searching and Scared.” The opening described a dire dating scene. A male and female friend decide to cohost a mixer for successful professionals. For twelve women, only two men show up, and one promptly gets stoned to take the pressure off.

Kirchheimer said that the odds were stacked against the “typical woman.” “She's gotten those degrees, the high salary, and a sense of self-assuredness in the male-dominated working world and she's getting tired of dating around. She may want marriage and children and be hearing that biological clock ticking. She's ripe for what, in today's vernacular, is called ‘a commitment.'” But, alas, “if a man isn't scared off or turned off by those standards then he probably has what it takes to play the field.”

Commentators like Cohen and Kirchheimer warned female readers that they would feel pressure and panic if they put off getting pregnant too long. At the same time, they expressed a set of rather new ideas about masculinity. Namely, that men's bodies programmed them not to want relationships or offspring. Free of the time pressures that dictated the love lives of women, men naturally wanted no-strings sex. Never mind that as recently as the 1950s most American men had said that they considered marriage and family the cornerstones of personal happiness. Experts of the 1980s seemed to believe that men and women were destined by biology to approach dating with directly opposing goals. A man had forever to play. But if she hoped to catch a worthy partner, a Career Woman had to plan.

By the mid-1980s, baby boomer women had become an army of “clock-watchers.” That was what the journalist Molly McKaughan called them. With the help of two psychology professors from Barnard, and editors at the glossy
Working Woman
magazine, McKaughan designed and distributed a survey that asked “How Do You Feel About Having a Child?” She received more than five thousand responses. She found that women's anxieties about finding partners to reproduce with determined how they were approaching their love lives, as well as their careers.

Her 1987 bestseller,
The Biological Clock
, reported that women who otherwise held widely diverging attitudes were all “consumed by the subject” of having children. A few expressed remorse for having waited too long to begin their hunt for a father. However, most women had recognized early that they had to date strategically.

A twenty-eight-year-old working in finance told McKaughan, “I have planned every day of my life since I entered college, knowing that I wanted to be extremely successful: first in my career, then in marriage, and finally, in my home life with children.”

This Clock-Watcher accepted that to stand a chance of having the kind of life her male colleagues took for granted, she had to plan tirelessly.

“Time can literally pass a woman by,” McKaughan reflected, “if she waits too long.”

*   *   *

To this day, evidence of exactly how much female fertility declines with age remains hazy. As the psychologist Jean Twenge has pointed out, many frequently cited statistics concerning female fertility are misleading. In an article in
The Atlantic
, Twenge exposed the shaky bases of many facts handed down to women as gospel. After scouring medical research databases she discovered that, for instance, the oft quoted statistic that one in three women age thirty-five to thirty-nine will not be able to get pregnant after a year of trying came from a 2004 study that was itself based on French birth records kept from 1670 to 1830. The chance of remaining childless was also calculated from historical populations.

“In other words,” Twenge wrote, “millions of women are being told when to get pregnant based on statistics from a time before electricity, antibiotics, or fertility treatment.”

Another problematic element of data on fertility is that, in general, the information we have comes from patients who visit doctors because they are experiencing fertility problems. It is very difficult to assess what is going on with the population as a whole. How many couples are not conceiving because they do not want to? How many are practicing birth control? It is nearly impossible to know.

Strong scientific evidence has demonstrated that the quantity and quality of a woman's eggs do diminish over time. To this extent, the anxieties of the Clock-Watchers were well-founded, even if the exact time lines proposed to them could be dubious. But most of the vast body of writing about them fails to mention another, crucial fact:
Male fertility declines with age, too.

A few famous men who fathered children when they were septuagenarians are often cited as proof that men have as long as they like to play the dating market. Early in the movie
When Harry Met Sally
, Sally confidently declares to two of her girlfriends that she is not worried about locking down a husband: “The clock doesn't
really
start ticking until you're thirty-six.” However, when she learns that the longtime boyfriend who recently broke up with her plans to marry the next woman he takes up with, Sally becomes hysterical. She calls Harry and begs him to come over to her apartment to console her. He finds her pitching around her bed in a bathrobe.

“I'm gonna be forty!” she whimpers through her tears.

“When?” Harry asks.

“Someday.”

He laughs kindly. “In eight years.”

“But it's
there
,” she insists. “It's just sitting there, like some big dead end. And it's not the same for men. Charlie Chaplin had kids when he was seventy-three.”

Despite the famous exceptions, the widespread belief that male fertility is invulnerable to aging is simply false. Among couples seeking treatment for infertility, about 40 percent of cases are caused by the “male factor,” 40 percent by the “female factor,” and a final 20 percent cannot be explained. A large and growing body of research shows that sperm counts, and quality, also sharply diminish over the years. The children of older fathers have a much higher risk for autism and other conditions than those of younger ones do. And often “old sperm” simply flail around and perish around an egg they are trying to fertilize.

These facts have been reported occasionally—almost always as news of a “
male
biological clock.” The need to include the adjective “male” hints at why this data has mostly gone ignored.
Our society speaks as if only women had bodies
. Our assumption seems to be that reproduction is a female responsibility first and foremost. Anything going wrong with it must be a woman's fault.

*   *   *

Female reproductive systems are not actually like clocks. Our bodies move roughly by the month, rather than precisely by the second hand. As anyone who has experienced PMS can attest, the way every four weeks pass does not feel uniform. Yet despite these inaccuracies, the metaphor of the biological clock captured something real and important that was happening in the American economy.

Two kinds of work time were clashing. The nine-to-five jobs that had been common for most of the twentieth century divided life into two kinds of time: on the clock and off the clock. In the 1950s and '60s, work done on the clock was thought of primarily as male. Women worked at home, providing care that followed different rhythms.

Anyone who has tried to work from home while tending to a child or an aging parent soon learns that you cannot schedule precisely when someone will need you. It is not easy to quantify exactly what you are doing while you wait for an infant to cry out so you can feed her, or to finish her food so that you can clean up. A time-use study would say that technically you are not performing child care during those moments. But neither are you free to turn to other tasks.

It is hard to focus on work you have brought home while waiting for an elderly person you love to need to be helped to the bathroom. Nor does the state of readiness in which a caretaker waits to perform such a task dissipate once she—it is usually she—has done so. The heart does not beat by the billable hour.
Is her bruise or cough or weight loss serious? Will he be all right?
Worries like these spill over, shadowing the parent long after she returns to her desk.