Love Lives - How the decision to have children can define our dating lives, with Nell Frizzell

Episode Date: February 12, 2021

This week, Olivia is joined by journalist and author Nell Frizzell, whose new memoir, The Panic Years, offers an insight into how much the decision of whether or not to have children can impact the choices we make in our dating lives.They talk about how a big breakup when Nell was 28 led her to re-evaluate her love life, the politics surrounding motherhood, and why women in their 30s tend to have a higher libido than men in their 30s.Follow the show on Instagram at @millennial_loveSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/millenniallove. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. will not die hosting the Hills after show. I get thirsty for the hot wiggle. I didn't even know a thirsty man until there was all these headlines. And I get schooled by a tween. Facebook is like, and now that's what my grandma's on. Thank God phone a friend with Jesse Crookshank is not available on Facebook. It's out now wherever you get your podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com. Hello and welcome to Millennial Love, a podcast from The Independent on everything to do with love, sexuality, identity and more. This week, I'm very excited to be joined by journalist and

author Nell Frizzell, whose new memoir, Panic Years, offers an insight into how much the decision of whether or not to have children can impact the choices we make in our dating lives, particularly in our late 20s and early 30s. We talk about how a big breakup when Nell was 28 led her to re-evaluate her love life, the politics surrounding motherhood and why women in their 30s sometimes have a higher libido than men in their 30s. Enjoy the show. Hello, Nell. How are you? Hello. I'm fine. I'm actually, yeah, I'm actually fine. And I've sort of of I used to be a bit uh nervous to admit that because uh it seems like you know if you're feeling fine at the moment you're not working hard enough but actually

I've realized that it's sort of disrespect my partner's a teacher and I've got like you know people who work in the NHS and my family and if I say god I'm so stressed like that's so insulting to people who are actually genuinely life or death stressed. So, you know what? I'm fine. That is good. That is good to know. I think I am also fine. It's good to try and bring some optimism, some general acceptance to this horrible period. So for those who do not know about your wonderful new book called The Panic Years, can you start us off by telling the listeners a bit about what it is and what made you want to write it? Yeah, so thank you for

saying that it's a good book. It's basically a memoir. What I, I went into this whole process thinking I'm going to write a very funny book about motherhood and actually what it turned out I really wanted to talk about was this extremely disorienting and transformative but eventually fairly wonderful um transition that I underwent between turning 28 and coming out of a long-term relationship being made redundant having to move out of my flat and back in with my mum and feeling like I had really dropped the ball as my friends around me were getting married buying houses getting pregnant I felt like someone who'd accidentally slipped back to her sort of 21 22 year old self and I was a real failure and when that was all happening the first time around I knew that this was

something seismic and important and it frustrated me that it had no name you know I thought that when adolescence happens or when menopause happens or when empty mess syndrome happens or terrible tooth or any of those sort of major life kind of um demarcations we have a shorthand so you can say to people around you oh I you know I think I'm in this or I think she's heading towards this or I've got a headache maybe it's just that you know whatever but for me I felt like I had to go around explaining to a huge number of other people who were also in the state of flux that every sort of symptom of that so I'd have to describe my dissatisfaction with relationships my low self-worth my like confusion about my work my anxiety about the future and so what happened scroll forward from 28 just four years later

scroll forward from 28 just four years later I gave birth and I had a son and I remember looking into his sort of swimming grey raisin eyes and thinking oh this is what that was about now I get it like the reason at 28 why I ended a really lovely relationship with a beautiful man who was still my best friend and the reason why I fought like a cat in a sack to get more money and a better job and the reason why I sort of threw myself into living with a kind of gusto that normally takes people like up mountains was because I think there was something very, very deep rooted in my psyche and in my body and bones and blood that told me that I wanted to have a child. And if I was going to have a child, I needed to get my life sorted in order for that to happen. That phrase, get, get your life sorted. It's so haunting, isn't it? Isn't it?

And what the hell does it mean I feel like we tell ourselves that all the time I am I quite like that you call it the panic years I think you're right it's so good to give that a name because then it's like it's okay this is something that is a universal experience and now we know what it is we can deal with it but so I'm 26 and which I suppose means my panic years are still to come which is mildly concerning considering how much time I've spent panicking already about relationships in my early 20s you might be ahead of me though I don't think I am putting that aside what do you think it is about that stage in your life because so many people say that you know whether they call it the panic that stage in your life because so many people say

that you know whether they call it the panic heels or whether they blame it on you know not blame it on but whether they say it's to do with their Saturn return it is this kind of time. I have a mother who did my Jyotish chart when I was born so I knew all about this sort of astrology of Saturn return but I think that that you know the sort of philosophy of saturn return as i understand it is that you have these seven year cycles and so that's why you know adolescence is major it kicks in at 14 you probably enter a significant relationship or start working or something at 21 then at 28 what does that look like but there was a specificity to this experience and the way it linked in with questions about fertility self-worth purpose career security interdependence all of

those things that I think isn't understood when we just use a phrase like sudden return sudden turn always sounded like oh you just like drop kick your life down a chimney and then you sort of pick it up and see what burns and I kind of wanted to I wanted to walk back through it and plot out its corners and kind of scratch against its edges and see what it looked like and I really want to say although this is a memoir so it's a piece of very personal writing I'm talking about my life and I ended up getting pregnant and having a baby I also think the panic years and this sort of sub term that I use which is the flux which is the kind of physiological transformation that you go through absolutely applies to people who choose not to

have children or cannot have children for reasons beyond their control so this isn't I'm not saying that the panic years is all about readiness for babies because it might very well be that you do something else start a gallery change you know have change your sexuality move to a different country like change your career leave the industry that you've already you know it could be something seismic and profound and probably the thing that makes it that makes it sort of for me so characteristic is that you make a decision that is very hard to undo afterwards and I think that is what happens in the panic years and it is back to that sort of haunting phrase of getting your life sorted um that will look completely different for everybody and I I

wouldn't I wouldn't want to give the impression that I am sort of a sort of great matriarchal campaigner and I think all women in their late 20s should be getting their tubes looked at because why on earth should you have children but uh unless you really want to um it is kind of like the way though I think it's the way we're kind of conditioned to think because your your early 20s are seen as a time for kind of sexual experimentation and you know really pursuing your work and throwing yourself just basically thinking purely about yourself and what you want and dabbling around in all sorts of different things and then I suppose you kind of have like this grace period

after you're after that where you're like okay you kind of stop and think right what do I actually want for the future well it's great and I wish it had felt like grace I always the way I sort of explain it to myself and to people in conversation is that throughout my 20s, and again, this is just personally, throughout my 20s, I felt to operate, quote unquote, successfully in the heterosexual cisgendered world that I was in, I had to be magically, silently, infertile, casual, and sort of romantically disinterested and and actually probably commitment phobic if at all possible and then when I was in my 30s almost the moment I'd I'd switched over into my 30s I was expected to be magically invisibly and uncomplainingly fertile you know if I was the people around me that were having babies I was

expected to just be in that camp already um I was expected to be committed sensible loving caring all of the you know I looked around I'd been to enough weddings to understand that that was a sort of expected form and I'm thinking you can't do that in a year like you cannot you cannot spend a decade describing to a particular kind of fairly unachievable um circumstances and then completely flip them over just because that's how really a certain type of man in power has been suited to live up until now you know I think it has really suited men people who identify as men and people who are born as men to to not have to think about the reality of fertility family responsibility and commitment and then when they decide that actually you know what it would be quite nice to have cheese on toast on a Sunday and watch telly

and have some little kids who look like me. For the people around them to just fall pregnant, poof, super duper. And they can then go back to work. The children are either looked after by a partner or paid carers. It's so grossly unfair. And because I'm not a man, I can't campaign from the inside of that bandwagon. I have to just stand in my kind of silo and say, from over here, this looks and smells like bullshit. And so can we please just start talking about it in the hope that eventually change will follow? Yeah, I think people don't quite realise how much inequality between men and women does stem from the very basic fact that women are the ones that give birth. Yeah. It is that very basic thing. But there is so much within that that creates so many disparities between the ways that we experience the world and the different stigmas that we face and the different prejudice that we we have you know we've talked about we've talked about this on the show before but like even something like with contraception is a huge thing you know it's

seen as a woman's responsibility oh I I want to write in huge black letters on every plain surface I see sperm make babies, not just eggs. Because it feels like there is this sort of magical thinking that wombs, vaginas, ovums create babies and sperm can fly out over digestive biscuits and get eaten as initiation ceremony. Like sperm is just a fun play thing. It's slime.

It's slime for guys. And like, but those tricky wombs they know what they're doing there's dark magic up there if you so if you just accidentally if you show kindness to a woman she will just spark a baby up her bum you know I just it makes me so angry um the 28th thing just to go back I loved um and had a real moment of reckoning listening to your interview with Alice Vincent uh who wrote a beautiful book about sort of nature and heartbreaking what they think um and the way she sort of plotted out that you know the um end of a relationship at 28 that strange sort of hiatus of where are you living how does that you know

and you are amicable but how how how does this mess get cleared up I remember thinking it was a real I hate hearing about people going through upset but there is a bit of me that goes I knew it was a thing I knew it happened I knew it wasn't just me and that's kind of if, even if a quarter of people who read this book just find it sort of an interesting insight into my life. But the other three quarters go, yes, absolutely. She's put into words something that I know. It would make me so tremendously happy and gratified. So no pressure, but that would be lovely. I'm pleased you brought that up because so obviously

in the book you write about how that breakup kind of initiated this state of flux that you went through and the way you describe that relationship it doesn't sound as a reader like you know a particularly negative relationship towards the end and I think it was a similar experience to like what I spoke about with Alice like you mentioned but to to people listening you know how do you because we're kind of told breakups are these dramatic awful things that happen when a relationship goes really really sour but it doesn't always have to go really sour for you to know that it's over do you know what I mean absolutely and as as the child of sort of divorced parents I think I had a really sort of um quivering antenna for when things aren't right and I used to go around weddings like the kind of ancient mariner saying to people how good is good enough how do you know though and I was really fascinated the

idea of how good is a good enough relationship because I was in a good relationship that man who that man who I break up with or breaks up with me we can't quite decide um at the beginning of the book is still my best friend I organized his stag do I he is like he plays with he looks after my son for me him and my partner go watch football together like he is my best friend and I've known him for something insane now like 15 years and we were only together for six of those years five of those years so the majority of our life is not as a couple but I just sort of had this horrible it was almost like I had a physical feeling before I had anything psychic psychological or emotional I would wake up feeling sick and I had insomnia for the first time in my life and I would sort of get panicked

and I took up running and did lots of sort of things to try and shake off this. And I would be weepy. And it was like, I, of course, took a pregnancy test because I was like, Oh my God, I've got all the symptoms of being pregnant. Forgetting the fact that we were barely having sex at that point, like so many people at the end of a relationship. And I think the moment when I thought I might be pregnant was a huge reckoning and this plays into sort of the sort of rest of the discourse in the book that when I actually as someone who had

always been fairly maternal and had always hoped that I would be able to get pregnant and hope that I would one day have a family to suspect I was pregnant and think actually I don't think this is right I don't think I am ready to have a baby with this person it was like the most enormous um I was going to say gong going off but it's more profound than that it was like the scales falling from my eyes and I realized if I couldn't picture creating a baby and bringing them into this situation that must have meant that something very deep and fragile and sort of old in me knew that this was not right and he to his eternal credit said I think you maybe want to break up with me I was was like, I don't want to break up with you, you're lovely.

And then a few days later, I realised that I probably did. And it is entirely because he is the nicest man I know, that we're still friends and he took it really well. But to go back to the sort of, you're expected to break up with someone that'd be acrimonious and dramatic and one of you to treat each other incredibly badly and for there to be either infidelity or lying or misuse or abuse of whatever I I wish it didn't have to be that way I wish you could just

stand in front of someone who you know and love and say I think we both were just wrong like we tried and it's no fault of anybody's but we maybe just picked the wrong horse here yeah you can have a you know I'm really interested my parents should absolutely never have got together and they were meant to be having a two week fling. And it was just like a fantastic, like of a 18 year fire display of incompatibility. Their whole relationship held together by sort of sexual attraction and low self-worth, which I'm sure they'd be very happy for you to tell you. um I think watching that up at close quarters I realized that you can get you can get stuck in the drama of relationships and it's of benefit to nobody you your family your friends and ironically now they my parents have been separated for nearly 20 years and they have this really funny relationship where they not to make it sound like the bloody waltons but they um my mum illustrated like she did a set of illustrations for my son of animated talking vegetables and my dad collated them into a book and got them printed

and they can like email each other and be in the same physical space as each other and be polite to each other and I sort of think if only we could have got to that a bit quicker because you can be you can be civil and familiar with someone and it is a strange familiarity you know I there are probably two people in the world I can talk to about my great aunt Polly one is my sister one is my ex-boyfriend and I'm really glad that he's still in my life because it means that I can and I'm sure my mum and dad have the same feelings that they're only there's only one person who can remember their yellow flat in Stretton and it's each other so at least they can talk to each other yeah I think I actually think you can't you can't really talk enough about that kind of non-acrimonious breakup and the kind of the friendliness between the exes

because it is something that we just don't see enough and I think correct me if I'm wrong but my interpretation of this is that when you are breaking up someone or when you know that when you have that kind of like instinct that you know it's over which a lot of people have and a lot of people ignore, and then stay in the relationship for much longer than they should. I think the reason why people don't listen to that is fear, because it's like, because it's the easy, it's, it's, it's terrifying. And the thing is, yes, like, you know, there might not be something really obviously wrong with the relationship. So I think a lot of people instead of having the

courage to just say look I love you and you know we're great but it's over now they almost create the drama to then have the dramatic breakup that like they've been conditioned to think is the acceptable way to break up with someone do you know what I mean it's like that's an easier option because then you can just say oh well I hate them and you can tell your friends what they said. You can tell them what they did. And then your breakup becomes more like socially acceptable. Yeah. You make you make it sound like a kind of bottle of whole milk. You don't really like milk. So what can you do? You just keep it around outside on a warm day until it turns into actually fetid, sour cheese.

And then everyone will be like, oh, you should definitely throw that away. But maybe the more honest thing would be to say I've got this pint of milk I don't really want it does anyone else want it which is like effectively what a breakup should be like I this isn't right does anyone else want does anyone else want to go which is not how I put it but I'm very happy to say that that ex is now married to the most sent, brilliant, talented, pretty woman. So it really worked out on everybody's part that we did. And yeah, if we'd kept going for another couple of years, maybe the resentment would have turned to self-hatred probably first and then hatred of each other second, which is rubbish.

Why would you do that? Yeah, and so easy to be avoided um after you broke up with this guy you write about in the book how you kind of made some I guess you could say toxic decisions in your love life and by that I mean and I you know I say this as someone who has very much done the same you break up with someone and then you go into that immediate kind of war path of chasing after people that are wrong for you or chasing after people that are not interested in you and I might actually just read a bit that you write about this because I think it because this is something that we talk about a lot but I think you've given a really good explanation for it which kind of touches on what I was saying earlier about the breakup. Sometimes chasing after people

you can't have is a way of protecting yourself against the vulnerability of a real relationship with the people you can. And real relationships do make you feel vulnerable. For them to work, you have to show the other person your faults, your weaknesses, your desires, your private fears and your true intentions. You have to unpick the armour that surrounds your heart and trust somebody else to hold it, even if that means they might break it. All of which is extremely hard to do when, thanks to a period of upheaval involving breakups, career changes, loss of friendships or changes in your body, you've lost your sense of who you are and what you want. Thanks to a big breakup, some fairly unsuccessful dating, the professional successes

of my peers, my own financial stagnation and long ignored dysfunction of my childhood, my self-worth and self-esteem had been rendered a damp dishcloth mouldering under the sink. Unchecked, my natural inclination for self-criticism had turned into a roaring flame of self-loathing, like a Zippo lighter with the clip ripped off. As a result, unconsciously, I'd begun to feel unworthy of love. And when you feel unworthy of love, either as a result of rejection, trauma, a tricky childhood, whatever, it's amazing how forensically you can sniff out people who will not love you back. Age gaps, distance, addicts, people already in relationships, clashing sexualities, there's a cornucopia of ways to sabotage your own attempts at love and commitment

while still bearing all the hallmarks of someone genuinely looking for a relationship. It's so true. And I've never I've never heard anyone put it like that before, because, again, it is so difficult to admit. Actually, I'm just afraid of being vulnerable. And, you know, my self-worth is so low so I'm going to chase after people that aren't interested in me because I think that's what I deserve I mean in in your situation how long did that go on for until you kind of realized okay something's not right here I think it would be fair to say it went on for at least two years but over those two years and particularly the final the final eight months they were getting better and better all the time and I always say to people that if they if the

people they're dating it's getting closer to what you might if it if it feels like it's getting better but it's still frustrating that it ends at least that's a good sign that you're getting closer to someone who is kind and loving and available to you um so for the first sort of year I was no wonder people were a bit confused by the signals I was giving out because they were bizarre like I had been in a relationship with someone for six years who was five years older than me. So I could operate like a full time girlfriend. That was what I slipped into doing crosswords, cooking for you, like, you know, watching telly together, all of that stuff. But just as a side note, me and my sister used to joke about opening something called Peppermint Hippo, called peppermint hippo which was a kind of service where you like you would basically go and you'd go to a flat and just sit with a woman who'd be wearing quite sort of slumpy clothes and you'd watch telly and you'd tell her about your boring day and she'd ask about your friends at work and

then she might like she might remind you to phone your mum because it's her birthday tomorrow and then you'd go home and so you could it's like the antithesis to spearmint rhino it's none of the sex but it's all the sort of bits of having a girlfriend that people miss anyway I love that peppermint hippo would be nice anyway so I could do I could do the peppermint hippo vulnerable and sort of my self and the sort of understanding of myself, what I wanted was so frail that I would also quite aggressively kind of push people away or mock them or sort of complicate situations. And also, I've got phenomenally high libido I now realize and so that's also quite a weird prospect for men in their 30s because a huge age-old bit of gaslighting here men like to pretend that they've got a higher libido than they have because it gives them a sense of power and worth that they just don't deserve there is no there is nothing how can I put this there is no force stronger than the libido of a

woman in her early 30s you could power rockets off it and the men around them if they're if they're dating men I can't speak to uh like same-sex relationships because I've not been in one um but if you are dating and sleeping with men as a woman in your 30s like don't be don't try not to internalize the sense of rejection when they genuinely want to read a book instead or alphabetize their cds or look at aerial maps of great britain during the war like that they just don't they've lost the fire in their groin that you have it's not generalized not like hashtag not all men but that that was my experience no I would kind of be throwing myself gusset first at these men and then completely freaking out if they showed me either true affection or even the

slightest bit of doubt I couldn't bear either I was so on tent hooks to be rejected that all they had to do was say like oh like the doorbell's broken so can you knock and I'd be like right that's it he doesn't love me he doesn't like me I'm not going to embarrass myself anymore I obviously can't do that again fuck him ACAS powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. I'm Jessie Cruikshank, and on my podcast, Phone a Friend, I break down the biggest stories in pop culture. But when I have questions, I get to phone a friend.

I phone my old friend, Dan Levy. You will not die hosting The Hills after show. I get thirsty for the hot wiggle i didn't even know a thirsty man until there was all these headlines and i get schooled by a tween facebook is like a no that's what my grandma's on thank god phone a friend with jesse crookshank is not available on facebook it's out now wherever you get your podcasts a cast helps creators launch grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere acast.com I just want to pick up on something you said there because I think that is also really interesting about libidos changing because you know you kind of have this image of your head of like young men in their 20s and 30s

being like, super, super, super horny all the time. But like you said, from my experience as well, my friends and people I know in their 30s, it's often women who have a higher libido than men when you get into your 30s. So I wonder, do you like, what do you think that's about? Because my theory is that it boils down to your 20s you're ridden with insecurities about your body and the way that you look and then by the time you get into your 30s you're much more comfortable in your skin and you kind of feel like well fuck it I'm sassy bitch I'm gonna go and have sex with loads of men like not like that you know and that's obviously very heteronormative but you know what I mean like there is just that sense of like moving out of the period of angst of your

20s and kind of getting that confidence and I think that is more likely to happen to women. Women's 20s are effectively ruined by consumer capitalism that tells them that they are in every direction faulty and they should just keep spending until they're socially and sexually and physically acceptable which I absolutely hate and if I could drive it off the face of the earth I would um I used to you know I used to just feel I used to feel hideous and out of joint with the world around me because I was consuming too much advertising that tells you that you're foul um but I would also say I have to be really careful here because I don't want to sound like some kind of insane evolutionary sort of biologist but I I I wondered as I was entering into my 30s and I had suddenly had a sort of confrontation with my fertility as something finite.

I suddenly realized what it meant for an egg to bleed out of your body every month. That you're born with all the eggs you're going to have. You are, in fact, in your mother's womb and in your grandmother with all of the eggs you're ever going to have. And so every time they fall out that's one fewer in the bag and that also whether it's sort of psychosexually must have an effect where you have a kind of let's make hay while the sun shine attitude you know I did so I think I remember thinking is there a little bit of me here that knows that I maybe only have because my mum got the menopause at 40 at 32 there was a little bit it was like if I don't have a lot of sex now will the window close while I'm not looking and that

would be a real sadness for me personally that might not be true and we don't know because again no one seems to put enough money or effort into researching female health particularly female reproductive health so we don't know absolutely it's so devastatingly underfunded it's wild like you you know i remember in researching the book there was this study that came out that just took two took a giant data field and pulled out two strings which is young women who are on um hormonal contraception and young women who have uh take like sought antidepressants or attempted suicide and it's like you don't have to ask many women in their 20s what they think the result of that would be but that was the first study that had kind of drawn those two things together and it makes me it makes me weep and it makes me how

that we can have so much money going into certain areas of research because they are potentially very money-making and then we have so little going into areas that basically not defines but I would say shapes the life of over half the population but say yes why do why are men so why is there this and it is also such a stereotype the kind of the stereotype of the male Lothario who's like grinding his way around any sort of pack in his 20s I I was an open goal in my 20s let's put it that way and I was not getting a huge amount of attention you know I met this sort of myth that you could if you just stay out long enough or if you if you went up to a man and I remember people literally saying to me Nell if you just walked up to a guy in a bar and said you're really hot do you want to come home with me they definitely would and yeah I can tell you a hundred percent from quite a lot of field

work they don't if you walk up to a very good looking man in a house party in Birmingham and say you're really fit you want to come home with me they go uh and run away I um I talk to my boyfriend about this quite a lot because um I'm my 20s he's in his 30s and he will hate me for saying this but I think it's an important point he always tells me that he gets hit on when he's out right and I have never ever once been like obviously hit on by someone when I've been out obviously we're not going out now because we're in a pandemic but before that I don't I don't think it's ever happened where like someone I don't know has tried to flirt with me in a bar or something it just doesn't it doesn't happen and I'm not just saying me either my friends as well like it does

like and you know they're all they're good looking like fun people and people just don't but the men yeah I don't know what it is but then also I you know there's a disconnect because I don't think I ever go up to anyone anyone I don't maybe I do maybe I'll just like go up to the bar like to someone I think is hot and be like order a drink next to them like see if they catch my eye but they never do that's about the extent that it goes I think you are probably much better at flirting than I am my sort of my version of flirting was literally to go up to people and say like god I'm horny which you think would work a treat which you would think would work and was true um no I wasn't always that shit I know and sometimes I I don't know I think we can all tie ourselves in knots about it but I think a healthy

sexual expression that is respectful and with full understanding of consent is like a beautiful wonderful thing and maybe it doesn't happen very often because we're not that compatible with many people and that's the truth um and you can probably you know if I if all of those people that I marched up to in parks laundrettes bars funerals delete as appropriate and said do you want to come home with me if they'd all said yes I probably would have ground my self-worth even further into the abyss because here's the thing that I it took me years to realize that getting romantically or sexually involved with people who you don't particularly like or particularly respect makes you like and respect yourself less there is you know the idea that it's harming nobody I actually would take issue with and say it can eventually harm you to open yourself up

even if it's just physically to someone who is not worthy of you and they and their worth is not that's not a um criticism of them as a person they might just not be the right person for you and so to sort of keep to pardon the phrase banging away at a closed door just makes you feel rotten and as someone with a high libido I can sort of tell myself that this was basically masturbation with a another person you know and that's sort of what you could tell yourself it felt like but actually my heart was getting involved and and my sort of self-esteem was getting nibbled away at by that I think it's a it's almost like a similar feeling to on like a much lesser on a much greater scale to going out going on a night

out and getting hammered being like this is going to make me feel great this is going to make me feel fantastic waking up the next day feeling physically awful and feeling like loaded with anxiety you kind of have that same I think after you go out and like kind of think right I'm just I'm heartbroken I'm gonna go sleep with someone it's gonna be fucking great and it's gonna be fun and it's gonna be wild I'm gonna be crazy and then you wake up the next morning next to someone who you don't really remember meeting you don't really remember sleeping with and there's just this like feeling of like hollowness even when you're even when you don't think you're

heartbroken anymore like I I was sort of genuinely like running over hills and through rivers with men saying I'm ready I'm ready I'm ready I'm ready and I wasn't I wasn't ready you could tell I wasn't ready because that person was either like I say in the book of a completely different age bracket of a completely different sort of um uh intention a different sort of sexuality state that all of it was wrong but I could tell myself that I was ready for relationship because I was really trying to have one with somebody and my friend Martin he's the only person who was sort of um bald enough to say to me once if you're still trying to make assholes fall in love with you then I don't think you're ready for the nice men and I was like yeah that's that's probably true.

Have you always known that you wanted to have children? Well therein lies the rub. I think if I now can be completely open and honest, yes, I did. I used to lie in the bath as like a five year old and stick out my belly and run my tummy, my hands over my tummy and imagine there being a baby inside I used to make a beeline for like little milky hot breath infants when I was just a teenager I loved it all like I loved the idea of being pregnant I was fascinated by breastfeeding and what happened to your bones and muscles and all of it and I also probably carried a unconscious belief that making a baby with someone was like the greatest proof of love even though as like someone who is entirely here because of contraception fail I know that's not true um I think there is a sort of cultural myth that making a baby with someone is the sort of proof of commitment and so for loads of reasons

I probably always wanted a baby and I used to talk about baby names during my year eight science lessons with my friends and you know we were all conditioned in a sort of heteronormative cisgendered world to think about babies as part and parcel of adult life but and it's a huge but for quite a lot of my 20s when I was single I was probably the only person I know who was single for all of university and I know like going to university is by no means universal so was I yeah so um that felt that sort of, I think, was more formative than I realized at the time, because I, I started to wonder if I would ever be in a relationship. And if I wasn't in a relationship, I suspected that I probably wouldn't have a baby on my own. Because I think if you're a single parent, you are five or six times better a parent than I am. And I knew that I wasn't, you know, like I think single parents are heroes and they can do any job that you put in front of them.

Like I bow down to them, but I was neither emotionally, physically, logistically strong enough to do it on my own. And it's not something that I think I would have chosen to do. physically strong enough to do it on my own and it's not something that I think I would have chosen to do so I spent a lot of my 20s also in an attempt to seem more sexually attractive to immature men saying I don't know I don't know if I want to have a baby like maybe I don't know and then I when I was in that very big relationship from 22 to 28 we sort of talked about it theoretically but I didn't want to push it because I knew that if I made him have a baby before he was ready he might leave and that was like a big fear that I carried around even into the relationship with the father of my child

now I was really worried if I if I pushed having a baby too vehemently I would end up pregnant and alone which is so sad and I think a sort of real indictment of the way we talk about fathers in this country anyway and so then from 28 to 32 I really strongly felt that if I looked too eager to have a baby no one would go near me I would it would be like they'd smell it on me and they'd run for the hills by that point I was so so um what's the word sort of cynical about heterosexual men in their late 20s and 30s I thought they were all commitment phobic I thought they were all sort of um would I don't know like we're all fighting what fighting me I felt like I was in a sort of competition or in conflict with a lot of those men that I also was simultaneously

incredibly infatuated with and so I thought if I show the vulnerability of wanting a baby they've won the fight yeah it's weird it's like this ironic thing of like if I tell someone that I want a baby they will think that I am robbing them of their single years or their back or their carefree years or their bachelor years or whatever and it's just it's obviously absurd because by having a baby with someone you're giving them you know so much you're not taking anything away but it's this perception isn't it yeah I love something that Elizabeth said Elizabeth Day said that um in an interview where she said you know we sort of think if you say to man I want want to have babies with you, that they will run a mile terrified and sort of revolted.

But is there any greater honor to pay to someone than to say, I would, I want to create life with you. I want, I want a bit of you genetically inside me to turn into a person that I will love and care for, for the rest of my life. Like, my God, forget a diamond ring. Like that is enormous um it's like the highest praise I think you can give anyone um also because I was at that point 31 and my mum had got the menopause at 40 I genuinely if incorrectly became convinced that I didn't have very long to get pregnant that I might not

meet anyone and I remember doing the maths in a sort of um you know fairly bananas way as I lay in bed sort of rigid with insomnia I'm 31 and if I meet someone like I'm that might be 32 33 and then if they want to sort of just go out for a couple of years we want to sort of get to know each other and then if we start trying I'll be 35 and by that point my fertility would have decreased and then what if it takes what if you have to have fertility treatment and that takes two to three years and I'm suddenly 38 39 then I wouldn't qualify for IVF on the NHS after 40 and just thinking oh I've run out of time I was 31 and I I was terrified that I was going to run out of time and because the idea of running out of time was so sad I decided to take control of that situation and tell the world I didn't really want a baby so I remember saying to my mum and my dad separately I'm really sorry but you might not

have grandchildren I'm not sure if I'm I'm not sure if that's the life for me I'm not sure if that's what I want and that is like a classic psychological switcheroo, like take a situation where you feel out of control and implant control over it, even if that is self sabotage. And so the long and the short answer is, yes, I probably have always wanted a baby. But I couldn't bear how vulnerable that made me feel. And then I had a baby and realised that quite a lot of what I thought having a baby was, is not true. Like quite a lot of motherhood looks completely different to how I thought it would. It's not all lying around stroking your belly, feeling beatific and sort of fecund.

beatific and sort of fecund quite a lot of it is a roaring torturing fury loneliness desperation sadness worry and guilt no one talks about and all of which I'm sure is exacerbated in a pandemic when you're home at time yeah and I'm in such a privileged position I've got a partner we've got a like we can afford to rent a house we both have work if I'm finding it disorientating or disorienting how on earth is a single mother with three children on a low income who's like for you know for whatever reasons her relationship status is seen as an anomaly how on earth are they gonna cope I don't I don't know the time pressure is such an interesting thing because I think it's not only about you know like you said when you're 31 thinking I'm gonna run out of time because my fertility and everything it's also I think because

that idea of like a youthful energetic juicy couture tracksuit wearing mother is so fetishized we like how we really love this kind of like youthful sparky mum and I kind of want to say but not too young like if you Jess Phillips the MP is brilliant on this that you know she had her children in her early 20s and then had a very is having a very successful political career in her 30s and 40s when all her friends around her are getting pregnant and are sleep deprived and covered in various bodily fluids and I think I'm not her but I think if I'd got pregnant at 21 22 it would have it would have been a source of judgment from quite a lot of people it would have been seen as a sort of harming my career harming my prospects somehow giving in to like or betraying the feminist cause

giving into something sort of old-fashioned I think it like I don't know when you're meant to have a baby in this country and in this culture but I know that I felt like I was getting close to doing it at the wrong time or not doing it at all yeah it's you're so right it's like there is really no right time societally to have a baby because like you said you will either be I think we said about betraying the feminist cause is really interesting because there is that real kind of like underlying stigma if you are if you are a woman who is particularly vocal about equality and feminism if you have a baby in your early 20s then it's like oh but what about your job what about financial autonomy and it's like well this is what I want to do therefore it is a feminist act if it's my choice yeah and here is where I get like super radical isn't it interesting

that we value the making and spending of money as more inherently feminist than the utterly removed from profit act of making a life because no one makes money from you giving birth breastfeeding if that's what you choose to do playing with your baby loving your baby there's no money involved in that you can do it all without the exchange of goods services or money it's it's sort of treated by a lot of western culture as low status unimportant and a bit lame whereas if you can buy incredibly expensive clothes made by a woman on the other side of the world or you can fly around the world in you know in a like very polluting way or if you can um earn a huge amount of money through a business then good on you like yeah you're really straight you're just like one of the boys

and that makes me I think that like when I get to my very edge of my kind of political firebrandism that's when I think oh yeah like feminism has been commodified to the point where we think making money is more important than making babies. I want to end on an uplifting note. Yeah. Because I'm aware that we're going to, we'll go into our lessons in love segment. But I want to ask you one more question. Great.

I'll be a cheerier. So, no, it's okay. It's good to be critical. I'm very critical too. I guess, given that you've thought so much about motherhood, as every woman does, but you've written a whole book on it. Now that you are a mother, what are some of your favorite things about being a mum well I think at the moment my son is three and if you are a writer or someone who's interested in communication and stories the acquisition of language in a child is the most heavenly fulfilling thing you know he

one of the first sent the first time he said and and when I say sentence like that is a very charitable use of the term but we were walking along the river and he was in his buggy and I had bought like a roll and he reached his arm out without even looking me in the face reached his arm out behind him and said put some put more bread in my big soft hand and it's like that is put more bread in my big soft hand is just personally for me is adorable because it's my son who said it but if I read that if I read that in a poem I'd be like what a lovely what a lovely use of language it's so there's something so comforting and familiar and surprising and funny about that I love that that is so honestly I mean

for someone who doesn't have a baby that's lovely yeah and there are sort of I found giving birth was like the most sort of it was the most incredible physical accomplishment of my life and that's not a judgment on how anyone else gives birth in any circumstances but just for me personally, I remember afterwards thinking, I am greater than a warrior. I'm greater than a king. I am formidable. And I loved it. I loved it. So that was also amazing.

And finally, and this is the sort of, this is the Sashi stuff that I think we're all so encouraged to talk about the whining and the loneliness and the pain that we occasionally're all so encouraged to talk about the the whining and the loneliness and the pain that we occasionally are sort of shy to talk about there is a point every day every evening where I say goodbye I say good night to my son and I kiss his little sweaty face and he lies down I say I love you he says I love you mum and, whether you want to have children or not, the uncomplicated love of somebody else, whoever it is, is just a joyful thing. And I'm very lucky that I get it from my child. And it's, it's beautiful. And I wouldn't say it makes it all worthwhile,

because that's a fatuous, stupid thing to say. But it certainly keeps you going. I love that. You can see I was beaming the entire time you were saying that I'm like and I've I've never thought of myself it's so weird when someone asks me do I want kids I would have you know five years ago I would automatically always be like yeah because that's what I've been told to say but when you start it's actually really hard for me to even think about if I can answer that question at this moment in time you know it's actually really hard for me to even think about if I can answer that question at this moment in time you know it's like I'm 26 I'm just I'm just not thinking about it and I don't want to think about it I think the more the harder it is to answer that question the more realistically

you're thinking about it and therefore a better position you are in to make it in either direction like the people who very blindly say yes or no haven't thought about it properly. It is time for our lessons in love segment. This is the part of the show where I ask every guest to share something they've learned from their relationships. Now Nell has got a brilliant bit about this in her book so she's going to kindly read a passage for us. In my case the panic years were provoked, propelled and eventually placated by three extremely unremarkable realisations. They're the kind of thing you can find printed on a tea towel at a seaside town. They're the kind of

wisdom you can find for £2.99 in a gift shop besides the moustache mugs and novelty toilet paper. And yet, once worked through, once unpicturing hours of interrogation, experience and thought, they quite literally changed my life. They might not change yours, of course, they quite literally changed my life. They might not change yours, of course, but here they are. Firstly, that I have innate worth. I'm allowed to want what I want. I deserve love. I can ask for help and expect to be treated as more than just a bit part in the lives of the people around me. Just by dint of being a living person with an interior life, a past, feelings and thoughts, I have as much worth as anyone else. Secondly that wanting a baby is valid and acceptable and maybe even commonplace but admitting how much you want a baby will make you

feel extremely vulnerable and I should cut in here that that doesn't have to apply to baby. Whatever you want is valid and acceptable and maybe even common but admitting that you want it will open you up to a vulnerability that is terrifying so true finally that all humans are interdependent that we need interdependence in order to survive and so interdependence is not a dirty word it's how society functions how we exist what keeps us going showing someone you love that you also depend on them will not drive scare or push them away it will simply encourage them to depend on you in return whether that's a partner a baby or a friend this is how bonds are made and this is how we live

I love that and it's always so eloquently put did you um did you kind of come to those lessons as you were writing the book or are they things that you kind of learned in the years in the lead up to writing the book I think I wouldn't have been able to write the book if I hadn't also gone to therapy and I'm sure that comes a lot up a lot um but I'm in a very privileged position where I could afford to go to therapy for quite a few years and the sort of giant totemic themes that came up in there. I think if you're interested in writing and communication and the narratives that we tell ourselves about the world, then therapy is such a beautiful and important way to unpick the way you're telling the story of your life.

And so, of course, by the time I came to tell the story of my life, I'd done a huge amount of legwork in unpicking that narrative and sort of analyzing it and making it something comprehensible to me and other people and so I think the the idea that I have self-worth was I'd honestly been told that over and over and over and over and over again for years and then one day I just understood what it meant and I felt it and it was life-changing there was a moment when I was going through some things under my kitchen sink and I opened a tin of boot polish and I remembered the smell of my granny's hallway and I just thought I had a granny I had a childhood I have I've had a life I have run through the hose pipe in the summer and I have existed in the world.

I am not an adjunct to somebody else's life story. I've got my own life story and that gives me worth. And it was seismic and I can't pour that into anybody else's brain. But when just be open to those realizations that you have worth, that wanting what you want will make you feel frightened, but you should want it and you're right to want it. And that interdependence is what makes us stronger. It doesn't make us weak. Have you ever looked at a keystone bridge? you know where you build a bridge by building up the banks on either side and either side and they get it gets larger and larger but also shakier and shakier and then you slot a keystone in the middle and that holds the whole thing together and up until that final block is put in place what you don't have is a bridge you have two piles of rubble but you can put the keystone in and it holds and people can walk over and it can bear a weight and I think with self-worth it's a bit like that you can build it up and build it up

on either side and then one day the keystone will slip into place and you will finally be able to sort of psychologically bridge the gap and realize that you have self-worth and that's why someone else can't do it for you you have to do it yourself that's such a lovely image to end on thank you so much this has been so nice thank you it's been my pleasure that's it for today thank you so much for listening if you're a new listener to this show you can subscribe to us on apple podcasts spotify acast or anywhere else you can comment and leave us a rating too so that more people can find us keep up with everything to do with the show on Instagram. Just search Millennial Love. See you soon. I'm Jessie Crookshank, and on my podcast, Phone a Friend, I break down the biggest stories in pop culture. But when I have questions, I get to phone a friend.

I phone my old friend, Dan Levy. You will not die hosting the Hills after show. I get thirsty for the hot wiggle. I didn't even know what thirsty meant until there was all these headlines. And I get schooled by a tween. Facebook is like a no. That's what my grandma's on. Thank God Phone a Friend with Jessie Crookshank is not available on Facebook.

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