One can respect the woman for her honesty, but it’s hard to have a whole lot of pity for those who simply refuse to prioritize pursuing marriage and children:
I never envisaged life without a family. I had three significant relationships in my 20s and 30s, each of which I assumed would lead to marriage and children. My first relationship, with a fellow university student, ended after five years. We were 25, and he wasn’t ready to settle down, so we parted.
At 27, I started seeing the man who was to become my second major boyfriend. We had been together for 18 months when I found out he had been seeing someone else, so I was left with no choice but to end it.
I became involved with a man I was sure would be The One when I was 30. Right partner, right life-stage; what could go wrong? Three years down the line, he announced that he had fallen in love with someone else, and that it was over between us. And so, at the age of 33, I suddenly became single. The years that followed were some of the most difficult of my life, as close friends married and started families….
My regrets will always linger. My life is a poorer place for not having children, and I am less of a woman for not being a mother.
Needless to say, there are far many parents blithely encouraging their daughters to pursue worthless college degrees and dead-end “careers”, and far too few encouraging them to place a priority on meeting and marrying the right kind of man. It’s bizarre how young women are taught to apply to the right colleges, while at the same time waiting for the right man to drop unannounced out of the sky. Does anyone tell high school girls to simply wait and be patient for a university admission office to eventually ask them to show up on campus at the moment they least expect it?