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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
They're the men who ask about your family's disease history, whether you'd live on the Upper West Side and if you'd be willing to convert -- on the first date. Did their biological clocks all go off at once?
Mar 18, 2005 | Three years ago, a professional acquaintance asked me out for a drink. Cute, in his late 30s, Peter was from a privileged background, confident, with a reputation as a cad. I was not particularly attracted to him, but figured I would take him up on the drink. No sooner had I settled into the booth than his questions started: "Where are you from?" Philadelphia. "Where did you go to high school?" Quaker school. "Are you Quaker? You look Jewish." I'm not religious. "Would you raise your kids religiously?" Uh, I hadn't thought about it. "Wait, how old are you?" 26. "Oh, that's too young." Too young for what? "Too young to be looking for a serious relationship. I really thought you were older when I asked you out."
Peter hadn't walked into the bar to get to know a woman he found intriguing, or even to get laid. His business was finding a suitable bride, and had I been "old enough," his next question might well have been how many goats my father had secured for my dowry. Peter was my first wife-shopper, but not the last. Reports of these kinds of encounters -- with men who investigate your family's disease history over a get-to-know-you beer or decide after two dinners to invite you on vacation with their college roommates and their wives -- have become increasingly common among my female friends, urban women often assumed to be husband hunting themselves. In some cases, the men we're meeting are more interested in settling down than we are -- almost as though they have their own internal biological clocks.
According to a new book, they do. In "The Male Biological Clock," Dr. Harry Fisch, a urologist at Columbia University, asserts that men over 35 are twice as likely to be infertile as those under 25, and that a drop in testosterone after 30 can contribute to a psychological need to drop domestic anchor. And as the increase in fertility technologies and professional commitments for women pushes the average age of marriage back, some men are assuming a take-no-prisoners approach to shopping for a life mate.
For ages, men who have reached a certain age -- 35, perhaps, or 40 -- and found themselves single have freaked out. These days, their quests to settle down seem not to be the exception, but the rule. The cad-reformation narrative is all over the bookstores, where lad-lit authors like Nick Hornby and Rick Marin tell of how they stopped fooling around and learned to love stability. The recently published anthology "Committed" is a collection of essays dedicated almost exclusively to this story arc. On Sunday night, ABC premiered "Jake in Progress," a show about a lothario publicist whose ululating cry -- "I wanna get married! I wanna have kids!" -- has been featured on every promo for the show. And in the first episode, we learn that Jake's boss, an older woman, didn't feel the need to marry: She got pregnant by "Donor 328.6A." It's a surprising shift of the romantic idiom.
