I'm unfreezing my eggs on my own - because I can't find a suitable man to start a family with
For years, I've railed against the accepted rhetoric that a growing number of women are freezing their eggs because they're prioritising careers over having a family.
So perhaps I should feel vindicated to read that a study, led by Yale University, has concluded the 'selfish career woman' is a myth, and that it's actually a shortage of eligible men that's driving the boom in fertility preservation.
But the research just left me feeling a bit sad.
I was 36 years old when I decided to freeze my eggs. I'd reluctantly split from the man who I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with, the man who I thought was going to father my children, and I saw egg freezing as a way of buying me a bit of breathing space. A way to stop me seeing each date as a potential father; a way to press pause on the runaway panic that any single woman in her mid-30s who thinks she might want children can't help but feel.
And I know that I'm far from alone. I set up a blog to document my experience (eggedonblog.com) and as a result have been in touch with many, many women just like me, doing exactly what I did for broadly the same reasons.
But for all that I knew that we weren't stalling our fertility so we could climb the career ladder, I equally didn't think that we were being forced into freezing our eggs due to a wholesale dearth of suitable men. I thought – like many of the women I spoke to – that I'd simply been unlucky in love.
But according to the research, my story is broadly speaking, the story of almost every egg freezer: highly educated, successful, financially independent – and single.
I suppose I'd argue that, by definition, any woman in the UK who is freezing her eggs is likely to be financially independent – it's not a procedure available on the NHS (unless you're having it before cancer treatment that will leave you sterile) and my three cycles of egg-freezing, which resulted in 14 eggs, cost me £14,000 – and therefore successful and highly educated, too.
Yet somehow the conclusion of this research, suggesting that a demographic shift has led to a deficit of men who are our match, is a little bit too close to home.
I have an Oxbridge degree and yes, when dating, I'm looking for an intellectual equal. I don't care where he studied, or even whether he went to university as long as he can keep up – but in my experience, a lot of men find my education a turn-off; it intimidates them, and they make assumptions.
So the ones who didn't go are scared off (nearly six in 10 current undergraduates are female) and those who did, well, I rather wonder whether highly-educated men with challenging jobs really want a partner who is their intellectual equal.
A disappointing number of my male friends from university have settled down with women who, while lovely in many, many ways, are never going to rival their husbands in terms of ambition, earning potential and intellect. Feminism, it seems, has only taken us so far.
Still, I can't believe that my degree is solely to blame. After all, many of my female contemporaries are happily married and have children with men who can definitely keep up. I think the issue is broader than that – I think men in their 30s aren't settling down, because they don't have to.
Although recent evidence suggests male fertility does actually decline with age, men are simply not subject to the same biological time imperative to procreate as women are, and there's certainly not the societal imperative of years gone by, that meant marrying a girl you'd been dating for a couple of years was just what a chap did.
In an age of Tinder and Bumble and Happn, there's this illusion of choice, and a constant promise of something better, or at least different, around the next corner; so whether they're old-fashioned players, or hopeless romantics who are waiting for lightning bolts and fireworks, either way they're happy to keep spinning the wheel.
And that's why, four years on – still single despite various possibilities along the way – I'm now defrosting my eggs and undergoing IVF with donor sperm in a bid to become a mother on my own.
This wasn't what I wanted – for me, or my hypothetical child – but as an educated, successful and financially independent woman, I'm (reluctantly) taking matters into my own hands. Just as I did when I froze my eggs in the first place.
I'm absolutely not ruling out the prospect of a relationship in the future, but at 40, I have the rest of my life to become a girlfriend or a wife; the same is not true of becoming a mother.
Alice Mann is a pseudonym