Parenting alone is a task that can only be combined with titanic adjectives, as the emerging social group of women who decide to do it knows well because there comes a time when you either take a shortcut or forget about being a mother. Her stories speak of her tenacious collision with a society still anchored in the nuclear family, but they also point to a blind spot that she tends to tiptoe over when addressing the issue. birth rate crash. “I spent 10 years with a partner with whom I finally broke up because I didn’t want to have children. Then I had another relationship and, now at 39 years old and learning from both of us, I decided to do it alone,” explains Sara Barrera, a rights activist. single-parent families. The fact is that beyond professional careers, job insecurity, housing prices and the fiasco of conciliation – nuclear issues -, a growing number of heterosexual women They also claim that they do not have children or that they have postponed the desire to have children until it is almost impossible because have not found a “suitable partner”” to do so. The social sciences, always diligent in coining new concepts, have called this phenomenon the “mating gap.”
In the 2018 INE fertility survey, it was already indicated that 10% of women between 40 and 44 years old indicated that they did not have children due to lack of a partner. However, the few investigations that delve into this territory speak of higher figures. In fact, the anthropologist and Yale professor Marcia C. Inhorn added this new gap – that of mating – to the complex contemporary emotional relationships when he realized that “the lack of equal male partners“was one of the main reasons why women try to prolong their fertility.
Investigation
In his work, Inhorn interviewed 150 American women in their thirties that they had frozen her eggs, a group that even the academy had caricatured as little more than unsuspecting workaholics who aimed to reach the corporate summit by making a pact with the fertility industry. And although the anthropologist’s initial hypothesis was that educational and professional aspirations had led to this shift towards hacking biology – it is a fact that professional consolidation coincides with the years of female fertility – she concluded that the women of that social group They did so because they were not finding an “equal reproductive partner” to breed with.
“They [profesionales con sueldos desahogados] They had been socialized into the possibility of having a career, a family, and an equal relationship, while the couple did not occupy a prominent place among men’s priorities they had known, most of them reluctant to commit and not prepared for parenthood,” adds the author of ‘Motherhood on Ice’, who assures that “closing the gap between genders is one of the political challenges of the coming decades.”
Disagreements
This disagreement is well known to Montserrat Lacalle, psychologist and professor at the UOC’s Psychology and Education Studies: in her own consultation she sees a growing number of people – “many women, but also men” – who have not given up on having children. , but “life has taken them there.” “Us it is very difficult to find a partner and even more so to take that step forward that is having a baby: to do so, relationships require a minimum of time to stabilize and are now highly volatile,” he points out. “We can’t find each other and that difficulty is causing discomfort and dissatisfaction.”
There is a consensus that among the reasons for this disagreement are the anxious markets of desire that have promoted apps and social networks – with the recurring consumption of relationships -; the fact – positive – that parenting is no longer a mandatory mandate, and that “we are more demanding and individualistic, and it is difficult for us to make resignations,” adds the psychologist.
Responsibilities Gap
Beyond this emotional backroom, perinatal psychologist and doctoral student in sociology Vega Pérez-Chirinos relates this mating gap with “an abysmal gap” of responsibility for care between men and women. “Many of them live a prolonged adolescence and have not developed basic domestic skills,” she explains. “Before this issue was not so crucial because it was assumed that you would have children and that their care was a matter for women. But now women who want “Being a mother, they have more expectations and want to parent equally, and many times they either can’t find someone to do it with or they distrust that their partner, for example, will put a stop to work or hobbies.” Beyond raising alone, an extremely demanding exercise, the formulas for having children outside the sphere of the couple are still very minority.
Same as 20 years ago
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According to Pérez-Chirinos, asking these questions before pregnancy is positive, because often this failure between what one expects and the other gives triggers during the postpartum. “Beyond whether or not one wants to have children and that the fertile age of men is longer, which often puts stress on couples and postpones decisions that direct women to fertility techniques, the pending issue of a “The majority of them are that they don’t know how to take care of themselves or others, and that’s the problem,” says writer and workshop leader Coral Herrera, who has examined emotional relationships in books such as ‘The Sociocultural Construction of Romantic Love.’
It should be said that it is not as if the women who go to Pérez-Chirinos’ consultation or to Herrera’s workshops carry a burden of prejudices. The latest CIS survey pointed out two apparently contradictory data: that Mothers still spend twice as much time caring for children -a gap that according to international studies has barely been closed in the last 20 years, which is a great source of conflict and discomfort in couples- and that 44% of men consider themselves discriminated against by equality policies.