realized that my mum and dad had met at university, had both obtained degrees, and yet my mum had not had a job since she married my dad.

I held her and rocked her gently and she wept and wept and wept. And I was reminded that you should really want to have a baby if you’re going to have a baby.

I like this easy conversation about our own desires, spoken about as if it’s something different to the date we’re currently on. We talk uninhibitedly – there’s no feelings of jealousy and everything is said and received with good will. The fact of our respective attraction to other people is separate to the fact of our attraction to each other. It

likes. Why are you allowed to do that and I’m not allowed to make generalizations about women? I’d bellow. WHY? And then I would be met with a convoluted barrage about the pay gap and illegal abortions and FGM and the biological clock and childcare systems and the fact that every three days in this country a woman is killed by a man.

My family were surprisingly upset by the news. It turned out that, in my mum’s eyes, a skint comedian who she didn’t like was a better prospect for a nearly thirty-five-year-old woman than no boyfriend at all.

Andy kept telling me that no one is ever ready to have a baby and that it will always feel terrifying. The more he said this, the more resentful I became. The risk felt so much higher for me and it wasn’t something he would ever truly acknowledge.

‘Getting dumped is never really about getting dumped.’ ‘What is it about, then?’ I ask. ‘It’s about every rejection you’ve ever experienced in your entire life. It’s about the kids at school who called you names. And the parent who never came back. And the girls who wouldn’t dance with you at the disco. And the school girlfriend who wanted to be si

‘But do I ever think about what my life would have been like had I been brave enough to not become a mother? Had I been brave enough to even imagine what that life could have been like?’

‘I love my son,’ she said. ‘And I don’t say this as his mum, I say it as a woman who’s got twenty-six years on you. Everything you want to do in your life, you can do without a man, Jen.’