50+ Singles and Mature Dating

We speak to four women who open up about the differences in their date nights. I was 25, finishing uni and had just come out of a three- year relationship. It took me 18 months to make sense of it.

Warnings of the so-called “biological clock” first appeared in the s and quickly gained traction as a major source of anxiety for women in the workforce and an impediment to career advancement.

Take this scene from the film Bridget Jones’s Diary: Bridget’s Uncle Geoffrey reminds her that as a career girl she “can’t put it off forever,” alluding to her declining fertility. His wife Una chimes in: The biological clock, although just a metaphor, refers to a real phenomenon: Women over 35 years of age are only half as likely to become pregnant in the most fertile part of their menstrual cycle than women younger than So do men suffer from the same thing?

Such a feat would be impossible for a woman, even in an age when Carmela Bousada, 67, gave birth to twins in January after lying about her age to the doctors who gave her in vitro fertilization. Whereas fertility declines along with testosterone levels as men age, it doesn’t drop to zero. Still, Jogi is definitely the exception rather than the rule. One study found that the odds of fatherhood for those under the age of 30 was One study examined 97 men between the ages of 22 and 80 and found that as they aged their semen volume decreased by 0.

Fisch and his colleagues have also found that the children of women over 35 whose babies’ fathers were also of that age were more likely to have Down’s syndrome than offspring whose fathers were younger. In other studies, older men were more likely to father children with mental illness or other deficits. Roughly 11 children out of a thousand conceived by men over age 50 developed schizophrenia compared with under three children out of a thousand for fathers under 20 in one study from the Archives of General Psychiatry.