So what does all this have to do with dating? Well, if a date- potential happens to catch me on one of those gumball-machine days, I can view him with everything from contempt – as in “You’re late! Your bad timing is why I’ll never be able to become a mom!” – to desperation – “Please share your life, and sperm, with me!” Dating, as you’ve gathered by this point in the book, is complicated enough without our whacked-out hormones or Baby Lust factoring into the equation. I don’t want my waning egg count to speed up a dating relationship. And I want to truly consider whether a guy would make a good father, not just whether or not he’s physically capable of making me a mom. I also sometimes fear that Paternal Urge-y guys will view my age as a liability and will opt for a younger woman, which just makes me want to scream.

More often than not, however, a date-potential will catch me on my more numerous Waning Maternal Urge days. And this new trend for single women can alarm or confuse guys. A friend of mine almost suffered a breakup with her boyfriend of many months when he discovered she wasn’t dying to become a mom. She, like many modern single women, had that “someday it’ll probably be nice to be somebody’s mother” feeling. In his mind, this translated into no interest in mom-hood, and that worried him, since he really wanted to be a dad. It took a good deal of conversation, as with many things when it comes to male-female communication, to help them realize they’re basically on the same track.

Used by permission of Fleming H. Revell, a division of Baker Publishing Group, copyright © 2006.  All rights to this material are reserved.  Materials are not to be distributed to other web locations for retrieval, published in other media, or mirrored at other sites without written permission from Baker Publishing Group.

Camerin Courtney is managing editor of Today's Christian Woman magazine, author of Table for One, and a columnist for ChristianSinglesToday.com.

Todd Hertz is an associate editor for Ignite Your Faith Magazine, formerly Campus Life.  He's a frequent contributor to ChristianSinglesToday.com and ChristianityTodayMovies.com.

**This excerpt first posted on February 8, 2006