Co-parenting with a platonic partner . Photo / 123rf
Co-parenting with a platonic partner . Photo / 123rf
Opinion by Nicola Slawson
Nicola Slawson is a freelance journalist, public speaker, and author of the upcoming book Single: Living a Complete Life on Your Own Terms.
It hasn’t been without its challenges, but in many ways I’m getting a much better deal than women in romantic heterosexual relationships.
Sitting on a sofa at a mum-and-baby group with my tiny newborn curled up against my chest, a woman who has come to talk to us about postpartum mental health asks if my husband is helping much with the baby. I hesitate before answering. The thing is, I don’t have a husband or even a romantic partner. I’m co-parenting with my best friend, Tom.
I take a breath before explaining to the lady in front of me. You never know how people are going to react when you tell them you’re doing something unconventional. Straight away, as I probably should have guessed given her job, she reacts positively, saying how amazing it is that we decided to become parents together. She also beams when I tell her that Tom couldn’t be more helpful with the baby.
It’s a conversation I have multiple times a week since first getting pregnant. While some people will react with confusion or surprise, others just love to hear the story of how a straight, single woman and a gay single man decided to procreate so that they wouldn’t miss out on parenthood. And to be honest, we still marvel at what we’ve done ourselves. After years of longing to be parents — and feeling like it probably would never happen — we can’t believe that we are experiencing it. “She’s our daughter,” we’ll say to each other as we watch our now 10-month-old baby girl toddling around.
Although most people have been incredibly positive, there were a few naysayers when we first told people the plan. One person told me that I’d be left “holding the baby” while Tom was told to make sure he was on the birth certificate otherwise I might not allow him access. But having him on the birth certificate wasn’t even something I thought twice about. He is the dad, after all. We consider ourselves a family even though we are just friends.
As for holding the baby, we ended up deciding to live together for at least the first 18 months of her life and so have been co-parenting together in one household. We are parenting as equally as we can given I’m breastfeeding. He’s actually on shared parental leave at the moment so is her primary caregiver while I’m back at work. In many ways, I actually feel like I’m getting a much better deal than my friends in romantic heterosexual relationships who often end up doing the lion’s share of the childcare and housework.
Of course, it hasn’t been without its challenges. We moved in together two months before the baby arrived, which was stressful, especially as we both got ill with chest infections followed closely by norovirus. We had both spent years living alone and had to get used to having a housemate again, followed closely by a baby and all the associated equipment and paraphernalia.
It’s a two-bed terrace house, so it’s a squeeze. But when we do go our separate ways — we hope to find houses on the same street or very close — I know we will really miss doing it all together. We are nearly always on the same page when it comes to raising our baby. From deciding to use reusable nappies to where she’ll go to nursery, we research and make decisions together. I feel so lucky to have that sounding board, which I wouldn’t have had if I’d done it on my own.
It’s a big change from the decade I spent having to make all decisions for myself — from the small decisions such as what to eat for dinner to the biggest one I’ve ever made, which was how to have a baby. For a long time, I felt a lot of shame about being single, especially when all my friends began to get into serious relationships and settle down.
It was after a conversation with a mother I met on a yoga retreat in France that I really began to question why we are conditioned to feel like failures if we haven’t partnered up. She had asked me for advice about her daughter, who was in her 20s and was the only single one in her friendship group. It was while answering her that I realised some of the best times of my life had happened while I’d been single — and that despite my mixed feelings about my relationship status — I actually wouldn’t take those years back.
But I kept wondering why someone so young should be feeling so bad about being single. Of course, it can be painful and lonely to want something you don’t have, but if we lived in a world where being single was more acceptable and more celebrated, maybe this girl — who was in the prime of her life —wouldn’t feel so bad about being out of sync with her friends?
I was older than her, but I related to how she felt. Even though I knew I had a lot of things going for me in my life, I still had this sense that I was somehow doing everything wrong. That my life was wrong, unnatural, even. I’ve been through the full spectrum of feelings about being single, from sadness to anger to delight and empowerment — but, by and large, society makes us feel like we should only ever be feeling negatively about it.
Although it sometimes feels like everyone but me is shacked up with a romantic partner, only about 60% of the UK population reported living in a couple in 2019, according to data from the Office for National Statistics. More than 7 million Brits live alone. Meanwhile, the data shows there were also 2.9 million single-parent families recorded that same year, which represents 14.9% of families in the UK.
The fact is that all around the world things are changing. Globally, marriage is in decline while single living is on the rise, according to the 2019 report Families in a Changing World, released by UN Women. Their research found that female attitudes are changing when it comes to monogamous commitments, and are shifting towards a focus on career goals, self-love and personal growth – and this has led to there being more single women than ever before. So what is all this data telling us? In short, it demonstrates that being single is actually pretty normal. It’s certainly not some rare, freakish state, which is often how single people are made to feel.
If being single is not a problem to solve, though, why do so many of us feel like it is? One of the reasons is that, despite the data showing that being single is perfectly normal, society’s attitudes haven’t yet caught up. We still live in a coupled-up — and very heteronormative — world, where those in monogamous straight relationships are favoured and celebrated, while attitudes towards single people or anyone living outside the status quo are mostly negative, with people still expressing a mixture of pity, fear and judgement when finding out someone is unattached.
I have often been told that I’m being too picky, while also, conversely, being told I should never settle for less than I deserve. Sometimes both these phrases are even uttered in the same conversation by the same people, who don’t seem to register that they completely contradict each other.
The media can sometimes perpetuate the problem too. In 2019, I launched The Single Supplement, a newsletter on Substack dedicated to single people. I had noticed that content for single people — whether it was books, articles or TV programmes — usually focuses on dating and trying to stop being single, rather than exploring what it is really like to be unattached in this day and age. All of the articles I came across seemed to assume all single people were miserable and desperate. This just didn’t reflect my life.
All too often we single folk are simply forgotten about. A while ago, for example, I read an article that suggested tips for self-care if you were having a bad time. The first thing on the list was to cancel on your friends and “have a cosy night in with your significant other”. The writer had obviously not considered that many readers of the magazine would not be able to follow this advice. Not long after, I saw an article in a different magazine featuring tips for saving money, and the first tip was almost identical.
The Government also plays a part. In the UK, successive chancellors have spoken about “struggling families” and “hard-working families” when announcing new policies. This was particularly hammered home during the pandemic and recent cost-of-living crisis. Yet there are myriad practical concerns, from housing to personal finances, that can be considerably harder to deal with when you’re single, and it can feel that the Government simply doesn’t realise that single people exist. Despite there being millions of single people in our society, those who are not in relationships are often left on the margins. We deserve better.
I believe the shame people feel about being single and the narratives around what it means to live happily ever after mean that many of the issues that affect single people are overlooked. It stops people from living to their fullest potential, because they can have a tendency to put things they want to do on hold and feel like they are waiting for their lives to properly start. Worse still, it drives others to make terrible decisions, either to stay in toxic relationships or settle for less-than-ideal partners. The recent rise of the incel movement is also a nasty development — these disaffected young men believe that being single is the very worst thing a person can suffer through.
After I began owning my own singleness, I noticed things begin to shift. My confidence grew, and after years of shame and secretiveness, I finally felt like I was being my most authentic self. For a long time, I hadn’t acknowledged my single status and felt mortified about the idea of talking about it on social media, where ex-boyfriends and potential love interests might see it, as though it was a dark and shameful secret. But when I first began talking about my feelings about my relationship status, it quickly felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders.
Now, I’ve even written a book Single: Living a Complete Life on Your Own Terms which feels akin to getting a tattoo shouting “I’m single” on my forehead. It was actually when I had finished the first draft of the book and moved towards the more detailed part of the editing process that I was making the huge decision about how I was going to become a mum. It began in the new year, just weeks after I finished the first draft. I decided 2023 was the year I was going to do something about having a baby. After years of longing and confusion and feeling paralysed by fear about what to do, I suddenly felt compelled to take action.
A friend in a serious relationship found out her boyfriend was cheating on her. Not only was she grieving the loss of her love but also the future they’d planned together, which included becoming parents. As someone who is five years older than her, I knew I couldn’t risk this happening to me. I could not let someone masquerading as a committed boyfriend waste my final years of fertility only for it all to crash and burn.
Secondly, in a WhatsApp group I’m in for people considering solo motherhood, one of the group, who is about five years older than me, had her final failed round of IVF and accepted she may never be able to get pregnant. When she messaged us, she included a warning: “If you’re thinking about it, just do it. Don’t leave it too late like I did.”
Later that week, the Government at the time announced they were going to bring in free childcare hours for younger babies — which although not perfect, was a good signal that the issue was being taken seriously. The cost of childcare was making my head spin, so the news was incredibly welcome. That’s it, I thought, when I saw the headlines. It’s a sign. I’m going to try to have a baby. That Friday, I braved telling my mum.
At first, I said I was going to get a fertility test and then I said I was considering solo motherhood with a sperm donor. We had a heart-to-heart and she was fully on board and supportive, but also concerned about how I would manage financially and practically on my own. For the next few weeks, I told her I was going to call the fertility clinic but kept putting it off.
The reason was that I couldn’t get the idea of co-parenting out of my head. I’d been researching the idea for a while, after meeting a woman five years previously who, along with her wife, was platonically co-parenting with a single gay man. None of my other gay friends seemed to fit the bill, but then I met Tom in 2020. He says that, as soon as we met, he knew I was going to play an important role in his life and I felt the same way. We had just clicked. Two weeks after telling my mum I was thinking of going it alone, I got incredibly drunk and finally asked him. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever asked.
I’d already been subtly interviewing Tom for the role, even though I was scared to admit even to myself that it was the route I most wanted to take. I would sometimes joke about it with my best friends, but I didn’t know if I’d ever actually ask him. But in those weeks while I was avoiding calling the clinic, I realised it was what I really wanted. I also sensed he would say yes if only I could muster the courage to actually ask the question. I knew he longed to have a child and had been looking into solo fostering and adoption, as he’d given up hope of being a biological dad.
Of course, he did say yes. In fact, he says he knew what I was going to ask before I did. I clearly hadn’t been as subtle as I thought. We spent three months having intense conversations about everything, including all the ways it could go wrong, before deciding to go for it.
After the wilderness years, where I thought it might never happen, I was suddenly doing things like peeing on ovulation sticks and reading books about fertility. I couldn’t believe it. When my fertility app told me it was time, we used the at-home “turkey baster” method of conception (actually a syringe without the needle and a plastic specimen pot) and were incredibly lucky that it worked the first time. It felt like it was meant to be.
Now, when people mistake us for a romantic couple or assume I have a husband, I proudly correct them because I actually wouldn’t have it any other way.
Single: Living a Complete Life on Your Own Terms by Nicola Slawson, $39, published by Hachette, will be released in New Zealand May 13.
