Nine years ago I moved from New York City to start a new job in Washington, DC. As excited as I was about my career, I was also curious about jumping into a new dating pool. I was in my early 30s and had just broken up with an older, divorced man – I wanted a child and he didn’t want any more. A friend told me that men in Washington tended to be more interested in settling down than men in New York (though she added that many of them thought they might one day become president).

I threw myself into work and spent my savings on the down-payment for a sunny, one-bedroom apartment. I painted the walls, threw dinner parties for new friends and, in time, started to date. Things had changed since the last time I was single. I’d met my previous boyfriend on a website where people had tried hard to sound intelligent and appealing. Now dating involved swiping left or right and deciphering strings of emoji: what did he mean by that avocado?

Some dates I went on were so bad they were funny. Most were simply boring. There was one brief moment of hope when I met an interesting man the old-fashioned way, through a friend. I invited him to a dinner party at my apartment during which he was glued to his phone. Afterwards, a friend sitting next to him confirmed my suspicions: my date had been browsing Tinder.

What made these bad dates harder was knowing that I wanted children. I was open to the possibility of raising kids without a partner. My father died when I was seven, and my mother has been an inspirational single parent (though she never fails to remind me that bringing up kids alone is “really hard”). But I’m also a romantic. My parents had fallen for each other on their first date. I didn’t want to give up on the idea of companionship with someone terrific.

Sitting in the clinic, I felt like I was in a dystopian rom-com

I don’t remember when I first heard that you could freeze your eggs. But as the months and years ticked by, the idea became increasingly appealing. It seemed like a way to buy time while looking for a partner. Amid the relentless, disappointing swiping, I wanted to feel as though I had some control over my future.

Back then, the only book I could find on the topic, “Motherhood, Rescheduled” by Sarah Elizabeth Richards, had minimal information on the science or success rates (the procedure was so new that there wasn’t enough data to draw on). After doing as much research as I could, including chatting to a friend who had frozen her eggs, I scheduled a consultation.

The waiting room of the fertility clinic in Washington was packed with women around my age, all with tote bags, sensible flats and blow-dried hair. When the receptionist called out “Amanda” and several women looked up, I felt like I was in a dystopian rom-com in which we were all competing to defrost our eggs with Adam Sandler.

I had an ultrasound and a blood test, then a doctor scribbled a series of extremely large numbers on a sheet of paper, indicating the price of each stage of the procedure. It was going to cost at least $10,000 a cycle, possibly more.

With its brisk pace, the clinic felt like an assembly line for humans. I never went back.

For thousands of years people had little power over when to have children. In the 20th century, as social mores changed and science advanced, when and if to have kids became a choice, at least in richer countries. Both sexes typically began to exercise that choice later, often using the extra time to build up their earning potential.

The high cost of housing and child care means that even if you are a pair of high earners, having children rarely seems like an economically rational thing to do. So it’s not surprising that many people put it off until the last minute.

But that last minute comes at a different point for men and women. Though male fertility falls with age – a fact which is still relatively little discussed – a woman’s fertility does so earlier and, after her mid-30s, more precipitously. Although the optimal age to conceive remains unchanged – your early 20s – the age at which most people get married is advancing all the time. From the 1940s to the 1970s the average American woman got married at 20; now the average is nearly 29. The age at which an American woman starts a family has also increased, from 21 in the early 1970s to 27 today. The trend for older motherhood is mirrored in other rich countries: in Britain, the number of births to women over 35 tripled between 1980 and 2017.

Over the past decade, egg-freezing has emerged as the market’s solution to the combination of social, biological and economic pressures that make it hard for women to conceive when they finally reckon they’re ready to try. The procedure has been performed since the 1980s, but for a long time it was used mainly to preserve the fertility of women having cancer treatment. In 2012 the American Society for Reproductive Medicine deemed egg-freezing “no longer experimental”, making it suitable for general take-up.

Though only a small fraction of women of reproductive age have taken up the service, the growth in demand for “social” (as opposed to medical) egg-freezing is significant. In 2019, over 16,000 women in America froze their own eggs to preserve their fertility, a 24% increase on the previous year, according to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. (In 2014 only 6,000 sought this treatment.) The number of egg-freezing cycles in Britain increased six-fold between 2010 and 2016.

These days, fertility services find you even if you aren’t looking for them

As social egg-freezing took off, the media tended to portray it as a life hack for ambitious women. “Freeze Your Eggs, Free Your Career” was a strapline on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek in 2014. That year, Facebook and Apple started paying for employees to have their eggs frozen (either a supportive acknowledgment of the sacrifices they were making, or a cynical attempt to keep women chained to their desks, depending on your perspective).

Though I took my career seriously, I still made time to date. The problem was, I just couldn’t find a man I liked enough to have a child with. And I’m not alone. Economists at Morgan Stanley, a bank, predict that 45% of American women aged 25-44 will be single by 2030. Michaela (not her real name) is an Ivy League-educated entrepreneur in her late 30s living in New York. She’s always wanted children and, since her last long-term relationship ended, has applied the same pragmatism to searching for a partner that she does to running her business.

Tall and voluptuous, with Betty Boop eyelashes, Michaela reckons she’s dated at least 150 men in the past seven years. She’s tried OKCupid (“my favourite”), Jdate (“crappy interface”), Hinge (“fantastic when it only showed Facebook friends of friends”), Tinder (“has killed romance”), Bumble (“great”), Happ’n (“a little bit creepy”) and The League, which initially recruited from Ivy League universities (“really elitist”).

She would happily have put less time into her job if she’d found the right man, yet sadly nothing stuck. When Michaela first heard about egg-freezing it seemed like an absurd extravagance: she had tens of thousands of dollars in credit-card and student debt. But as her 40s approached, she decided to go for it, saving and borrowing until she had enough for one round. Her eggs will be on ice until she meets someone worth unthawing them for.

Most women who freeze their eggs do so for want of a partner. In one study conducted between 2014 and 2016, 150 egg-freezing clients were asked why they were preserving their eggs: 85% said it was because they hadn’t met the right person; only two were freezing eggs to concentrate on their careers. In the same period, studies of thousands of women in America, the Netherlands and Singapore who were considering freezing their eggs all cited a lack of partner as a significant reason to do so.

In 2018 Marcia Inhorn, a medical anthropologist at Yale University, was part of a team that interviewed 150 American and Israeli women who had frozen their eggs: 85% said they’d done so because they couldn’t find a partner. Inhorn, who is in her 60s, had assumed that dating would be easier for educated women today than it had been for her generation, who had to contend with the myth of the ideal housewife. She was perturbed to find it seemed to be getting harder. “As a generation-older feminist scholar, it was shocking to me.”

Why are women finding it so hard to pair off? One theory is that there’s a shortage of eligible men – that is, men with degrees. In our grandparents’ generation, men outnumbered women at university: in 1960 there were 1.6 men graduating for every woman in America. Then came the second wave of feminism. Today there are three men for every four women with degrees. Put simply, there aren’t enough highly educated men to go around.

It shouldn’t matter if your date has a degree certificate, but it does if you want kids. According to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, workers with a bachelor’s degree earned $1,305 a week in 2020, compared with $781 for those with a high-school diploma. If you want to start a family somewhere like New York, it helps to be rich. The Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank, estimates that child care for an infant in New York costs just over $15,000 a year, on average (the day-care providers in my neighbourhood charge double that). And that’s on top of whatever astronomical rent you’re paying. One salary, even a high one, isn’t going to cut it. Women looking for a wealthy husband to procreate with may look calculating but feel they have no choice.

It makes me uncomfortable to admit it, especially as a feminist, but money has probably shaped my own approach to dating. One lesson I absorbed from losing my father when I was young is that relying on a man’s income is unwise. I’ve always supported myself (and now a small dog with incongruously large dental expenses), and haven’t consciously sought out rich men. In fact, I generally avoid finance types – not easy in New York.

The media tends to portray egg-freezing as a life hack for ambitious women

But I wonder if the dating apps, with their illusion of endless possibility, subtly encourage us to keep shooting for the best of all worlds: someone you feel a connection with, who also earns a decent wage. Has this made me too quick to dismiss dating profiles that indicate financial precarity? I’d like to say no, but I can’t rule it out.

What effect does the surplus of educated women have on men? Jon Birger, author of “Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game”, reckons that college-educated men, knowing they have plenty of options, feel less pressure to commit to a serious relationship in their 20s and 30s. And if women really do have a preference for high-earners, that puts more pressure on men to spend those years developing their careers too. Case in point: the 50-something male executives who write on their dating profiles that they’re finally “ready” to build a life with someone.

In a TV ad for Extend Fertility, the most popular egg-freezing clinic in America, two pink cartoon eggs with heavy eye make-up chat to each other. “You shouldn’t have to settle for the wrong guy just to start a family,” says one to her friend. In another scene an egg lounges in a hammock, musing: “If you freeze your eggs all your fertility worries are over...easy.” There is a disconnect between this ad and what it’s selling: an expensive, intrusive medical procedure with a surprisingly small chance of success.

The marketing of egg-freezing has stepped up several gears since I first investigated the procedure for myself. Venture-capital and private-equity firms have bought into the sector, encouraging providers to be more ambitious. They now peddle hope directly to the consumer. As soon as women enter their mid-to-late 20s they begin to see ads for egg-freezing on social media (clinics market the procedure as an act of empowerment rather than a last resort). One clinic sent a van to the streets of New York to offer free fertility check-ups for passers-by.

Before the pandemic, American millennials were encouraged to attend “egg-freezing parties” at fertility clinics: events with drinks and snacks where women watch a presentation then get to ask questions. I went to a few of these as a reporter in 2018. The presentations, usually delivered by a clinic’s lead doctor, ranged from slick, monotonously narrated PowerPoints to high-octane spiels that wouldn’t have sounded out of place at a used-car salesroom.

Most questions from the audience were about success rates. It was hard for the clinics to give clear, reassuring answers. A decade into “social” egg-freezing, so few women have reclaimed their genetic material that there isn’t enough data to draw clear conclusions. The existing evidence is not encouraging, however. A Spanish study from 2016 suggests that women aged 35-39 when they freeze their eggs have almost a 30% chance of carrying a baby to term. Some experts are more pessimistic: in 2020, Robert Winston, a professor of fertility at Imperial College London, put the probability of getting a baby out of a frozen egg at about 2%.

The odds depend on how old a woman is when she freezes her eggs, with women under 35 having the best chance. Sometimes women are advised to think about fertilising some of their eggs with donor sperm: embryos freeze better than eggs, which are extremely fragile. The success rates of IVF depend on a multitude of factors, including the quality of the sperm. Whichever way you slice the numbers, getting a baby at the end is a long way from “over easy”.

A year after that first consultation about egg-freezing, I was 34 and still single. I’d also discovered that European clinics typically charge less than half as much as American ones. Even with flights and accommodation factored in, I still wouldn’t be spending as much.

The clinic in Bologna, Italy, was emptier than the one in Washington. For the first two weeks the doctors and I worked on getting my ovaries to up their game. In a normal cycle a woman produces two eggs a month, but fertility clinics reckon they need about 15-20 to offer a decent chance of a baby, so they give you hormones to stimulate your ovaries in the hope of producing a bumper crop.

There simply aren’t enough college-educated men to go around

I went into the clinic every other morning for an ultrasound to see how the eggs were responding to treatment. Then I had the rest of the day free to roam the city, sample tortellini and treat myself to gelato. The evening hormone injections, which I administered myself, were less enjoyable: I would snap open a small glass vial, terrified that spilling a drop or leaving a millilitre of the precious fluid in the syringe would cost me my chance of a baby.

When the eggs had matured to the point where my ovaries were about to release them, I went for a retrieval operation, which happened under general anaesthetic. I woke up about half an hour later slightly woozy, changed but unchanged. Then I settled the bill.

My mother had come to Italy to help me recover but I felt so normal after the operation that we defied the doctors’ advice for me to rest and caught a train to Verona, where we had delicious pizza. The next day, we joined my godmother in Rome. The trip was a surreal mix of gastronomic decadence, mother-daughter bonding and follicle-stimulating hormone injections.

The harvest was not, it turned out, an abundant one. There were 13 viable eggs: not bad, but fewer than ideal. I toyed with the idea of another round, but a friend suggested I wait a bit before spending more of my savings – to allow time for positive developments in my personal life.

Two years later, aged 36, I was back in another European fertility clinic for my second round, this time in Madrid. At that point, my love life was so bleak that it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that online-dating companies had shares in egg-freezing clinics.

By the time the procedure was complete I’d invested at least $10,000 in freezing eggs that I fervently hoped never to need to use. I still wanted to meet someone wonderful, have a meaningful and fulfilling partnership and get pregnant the old-fashioned way (a method fertility specialists jokingly describe as IBF, or “in-bed fertilisation”).

Four years on, the mere existence of the eggs, preserved in liquid nitrogen across the Atlantic, poses a new set of questions. Could I do it on my own? How much money would I need?

I find myself doing sums all the time, mapping my unpredictable freelancer’s salary into the future, and imagine my future self justifying every big-ticket purchase to my putative child (“I’m sorry we don’t have money for your college tuition, sweetie, but I really needed that MacBook Air for work”). Two years after freezing her eggs, Michaela faces a similar quandary: “It opens this whole reality that I hadn’t thought of before, of maybe having to use them or not, on my own, which was a very difficult outcome for me to consider.”

Research suggests that a large share of women who return to use their eggs are still single when they attempt to conceive. One study from 2018 looked at evidence from an egg-freezing clinic in Belgium over an eight-year period. Of 563 women tracked, only 43 returned to use their frozen eggs. They were aged 36.5 when they froze, on average, and 42 when they returned: nearly half used donor sperm, suggesting that they did not have a partner.

I’d invested at least $10,000 in freezing eggs that I fervently hoped never to need to use

I don’t regret my decision to freeze my eggs. Egg-freezing made me feel like I had agency in areas of life where luck matters more than effort. But since the pandemic rendered the concept of planning futile, I have been wondering whether the control I was looking for was always illusory. Life is full of curveballs. My parents planned to grow old together, but death got in the way.

Twice a year I receive storage bills from the European fertility clinics (nothing feels as lame as paying for child care before the child has even materialised). Companies continue to rely on our urge to plan: clinics reported a surge in women “panic-freezing” their eggs in the pandemic as dating opportunities dried up. One study in America showed an almost 40% increase in egg-freezing cycles from June 2020 to February 2021, compared with the equivalent period a year before the pandemic. During that time, one chain of clinics, Shady Grove Fertility, reported a 53% increase in egg-freezing patients at its 36 branches (before the pandemic, patient numbers were growing by around 20% each year).

Michaela is still furiously playing the dating game. Her expensively preserved eggs, she says, are a scrap of protection against a childless future, but not much more than that: “It’s like having a shitty insurance policy.” ■

Anna Louie Sussman is a journalist in New York

ILLUSTRATIONS: NOMA BAR

This article was produced in partnership with the McGraw Centre for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York