As an aside before this essay- today (August 30) is both the one year anniversary of my divorce (very very fucking weird to me) and my 14th anniversary of moving to New York City (also extremely surreal). I am not particularly sentimental and so I will not write a metaphor but it seemed strange not to mention the duel anniversary. Anyway!
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CW: abortion, women’s reproductive health, unplanned pregnancy, infertility
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Recently (but not so recently that the situation hasn’t resolved) a friend of mine was almost sure she was pregnant. She, like me, is vaguely 30, dating largely casually (happy to take the long road to the destination), and on a reliable long term form of birth control that has served her well for the better part of a decade. In other words, a basically average woman in my cohort. Her period was late (I am aware that, technically, periods are not late. Ovulation is late and periods happen or do not at some biologically set time after ovulation. But that is a pedantic correction, not how anyone I’ve ever met in real life speaks colloquially about reproductive health, and annoying to me, personally. So her period was late.) bordering on very late and she asked The Group Chat whether to tell the would be father that she suspected she might be pregnant.
The consensus- and I agreed!- was that she should wait until a positive pregnancy test and perhaps even medical confirmation before informing the man she had been casually dating for a few months. This was so much the consensus that the only detractor said she might tell him if it would make her feel better to make someone else spiral but that it was otherwise pointless and might only end in him annoying her with his reaction. We were discussing man in his late 30s! Upwardly mobile! Gainfully employed! A property owner! Someone’s boss! And no one thought it was at all his responsibility to take on any of the stress of the “pregnant or something else” week or so of destabilizing uncertainty. In fact, everyone felt that bringing it up too early would only derail the relationship. Pregnancy scare girl (non-girlfriend) is likely to be ghosted even after months, men just aren’t expected to have emotional maturity about women’s bodies even if there is something likely growing in one of those bodies because a man put it there. How can you treat a man like an adult when he is so used to being babied?
And I understand why we felt she should delay speaking to him- why I felt she should delay- because men tend to tell women they are melodramatic (if it ended up being nothing, no matter how much every sign indicated it was something, she would always be the Woman Who Made Something Out of Nothing, a modern scarlet letter), because what would he do other than buy pregnancy tests and insist she take them every few hours until a second line or a period showed up, because men aren’t used to this kind of stress and creating an issue when there might not be one would only complicate their relationship dynamic, because it didn’t seem like his business, really.