My Hard Biological Truth
I want a baby, not a boyfriend.
This morning I had four half-written articles, but instead I’ve decided to share something I’m feeling some shame about.
It started with Andrzej from Sexico City. I met up with him and his friends at dinner. We walked back to his house. He gave me his coat. I knew I wasn’t supposed to have sex with him on the first “date”. Still, I found myself trailing behind him down the corridor of his building, some 15 minutes’ walk away from my place. I found myself climbing a wrapping stone staircase to greet the lapping faces of his two wide-eyed dogs.
Feigning sanctity, we played with each other in his TV room. He had wavy black hair and glasses, and an uneven mustache. Did I mention his living room was bigger than my apartment?
I went to the bathroom, sometime between us getting naked and then falling asleep in front of our favorite NPR Tiny Desk Concert videos. I sat down on the toilet. I looked at the bamboo shelves and the lined wooden furnishings of his bathroom sink. I look at the black stone cabinetry and the single, perfectly aligned electric toothbrush on the counter. And I thought to myself,
“I want to have children with this man.”
I don’t know when this first came over me. Maybe it’s the fact that I turned 29 yesterday. It’s something in the water. It’s something in the wind. It’s something about my body. I didn’t want to sleep with Andrzej for the fun of it. Instead, a murkier cloud lingered over me. I wanted to sleep with this man for the sheer chance that he could impregnate me.
Part of me, on a very visceral level, wanted to use this human male’s sperm for my benefit. For the benefit of my offspring. And something about this feeling riddles me with guilt and shame. It would be better if I just wanted to use him for sex. I am a woman of means. I have my own money. But biology was telling me something different.
“You know what would get this guy to stick around? Trapping his ass by making him the father of your child.”
Maybe it wasn’t as crude as that. Maybe I just wanted someone I can be comfortable with. But it was overwhelming, physically. I didn’t care what this man had to say when we woke up together in the morning. I was in love with him. Or I was in love with the idea of the hypothetical child he could give me. And this was my new reality as a woman dipping out of my 20s and soon into my 30s. I had to admit it to myself. I wanted a baby more than I wanted a boyfriend. This type of attraction wasn’t fun. It was like a siren blaring in my ears.
“You’re not getting any younger. This guy will do. It’s now or never.”
Long story short, things didn’t go so well after that with Andrzej (spoiler alert!). I became clingy and desperate and anxious and felt abandoned and I ended up in ACA, a 12-step program for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families. I went to London for a month. I blocked him on Instagram. And then today, on a gorgeous, warm Thursday afternoon in Mexico City, I sat down for brunch with a group of acquaintances. And Luís was sitting across the table.
He had clear, green-framed glasses and a silly but cute necklace with white beads and small yellow smiley faces on it. He had a baseball cap on. He’s an architect living in Pedregal, a very nice neighbourhood. And he has a house in Tepotzlan, my favorite town outside of the city. And he had black ink tattoos dotted along his arms.
Fuck. Here I was again, getting struck by lightning. Was I a damsel in distress? Or was I a hard-working millennial woman trying to get a good education for my children and a country house in my favourite town?
Well, I’ve rushed home to write this. Post-boozy brunch, Luís and my friends are waiting for me at a bar nearby. As much as I know I need to masturbate before I head back to the bar so that I can behave like a normal person around him, I’m feeling oddly at peace.
I find some solace in all this because, firstly, I am on my period. Perhaps neither Andrzej nor Luís have magic powers. Perhaps I’ve been dowsed in the stuff that survival is made of, the strongest drugs that money can’t buy: hormones.
So yes, that’s the hard biological truth of it all. The truth is that casual sex, if I’m being honest right now, isn’t casual to me in the slightest. It has far deeper, grittier physical complexities for me and for him. And secondly, as amazing as Luís may be, I went around this same block with Andrzej a month before. With every eligible bachelor, I may do the same. I do the baby calculation in my head. I transfer all my eggs into the basket.
Perhaps this is what my 30s will be about: my sexuality getting entangled with sperm. And the acquisition of the right sperm. When what turns me on is not just the fantasy of someone fucking me but the vision of them coming inside of me. And multiple potential males all competing. May the best sperm win. Why that, you know? And why do I feel ashamed of that? I understand that some women have never wanted to have children. But as my fantasies have met this new physical feeling that weighs me down like a ton of bricks, it seems that babies are all that this is about.
As I sit in my shame, I’m grateful for the words of the comedian Ali Wong. She joked about her Harvard Business School-educated (now-ex) husband:
“I could do The Tonight Show…or I could go to my boyfriend’s graduation from Harvard and poke a hole in the condom. What is gonna guarantee me the most steady income? What is gonna get me a house?’”
I’ll take Ali’s light-heartedness on that one. At the end of the day, a girl got to eat. So, I’m going to get ready now and go out. And yes, I will avoid telling Luís that he could potentially be the father of my future children. I’m pretty sure that would freak him out.
💌
I laughed out loud at least 3x.
This too shall pass, lovey.