My friend and parents liked him. And I’ll go even farther: I liked the attention that I got because I was “in love.” One day at a cocktail party, a family friend put her hand on my shoulder and said: “If he makes you laugh then you should marry him.” He did make me laugh, so he became the one with whom I decided I would begin the next phase. It was the route my parents had taken, and the one I thought I had to take as well to become a real adult.

The only problem was that Alex and I weren’t really in love. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was much more in love with the shiny fantasy of our future than the man himself: the way he made me feel every day. The more I got to know him, the more I realized that the differences in the way we interacted with the world were not complimentary. His once-charming social anxiety began to block us from a certain level of intimacy that I needed to feel really loved and be able to commit to our relationship.

In retrospect, I wasn’t ready to commit to building a life with anyone because I had not yet discovered the type of intimate connection I needed for such an important and sustaining relationship. I still had more growing to do on my own to understand what this connection might feel like. While I knew that this relationship was not the right one for me, I didn’t end it because I was afraid. I thought that if I let go and had to start all over again, I might fall behind. I worried I might never catch.

Still, that day at the Cloisters, tears streamed down my face because it was he who had made the first move to break up; he who had shattered my fantasy of who people were telling me I should be, and therefore who I believed I should be: a married woman on the path to becoming a mother.

After the break-up, I felt like I was caught in a whirlpool at the edge of a rushing social current. I was confused, spinning in circles, and surrounded by new questions: what kind of relationship was right if this one was wrong? If I just invested one year in a nowhere relationship, then how much time would I need to invest in a relationship that actually went somewhere? I had known all my life that I wanted to be a mother, but it wasn’t until the break-up with Alex that I felt biology toe-tapping her toes. Her patience was not inexhaustible.

The same year Alex and I broke up, a book burst onto the scene that caused young women all over the country to panic. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and founder of the liberal Center for Work-Life Policy, published Creating A Life: Professional Women and The Quest for Children. In her polemic about the problems women face in balancing career and family, Ms. Hewlett, a baby boomer, told scary stories about the pioneering feminist women of her own generation who had struggled with conception and infertility because they waited until later in their lives to have children. She wanted to warn the next generation against making the same mistakes. “All of this new status and power has not translated into better choices on the family front,” she wrote. “Indeed, when it comes to having children their options seem to be a good deal worse than before. Women can be playwrights, presidential candidates and CEOs, but increasingly they cannot be mothers.”

Hewlett argued that women simply had to start earlier. Women should be hunting for husbands in our 20s and having children earlier – long before the age of thirty-five, the dividing line between a regular pregnancy and “high risk” pregnancy. Otherwise, they were likely to end up without a family of their own.

Creating A Life provoked a media circus. Stories soon appeared in magazines and newspapers about “the new baby panic” that was infecting single women in their mid to late thirties. Hewlett recited her findings wherever she could—on 60 Minutes, The Today Show, and in a big spread in Time magazine—constantly reinforcing the message that women were waiting too long to have babies.

Although it was not Hewlett’s intention in writing the book, the publicity that ensued from it was the beginning of a backlash against the achievements of feminism. Women, of course, were creating this problem all on their own. The Time story, for instance, cited an iVillage survey of more than 12,500 women, who answered 15 questions about fertility. Only 13 percent knew their fertility began to drop at age 27; 39 percent thought their reproductive capacity was unchanged until 40; only one woman got all 15 questions right. The message was clear: Women had gotten themselves into this situation through their own ignorance. No mention was made, of course, of the wide array of socioeconomic factors that contributed to this trend—including the cost of childcare, or even the decline in the standard of living in America that had made it impossible for a single income to support the majority of households in America. No, the sisters were doing it to themselves.

The media juggernaut was unstoppable. Those hot independent career women immortalized in Sex and the City? They better trade in their Manolos and get real if they ever wanted to become mothers. A lot of women bought into the panic, and blamed themselves for their own irresponsibility. In a May, 2002, article in New York magazine, journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis wrote: “These days the independence that seems so fabulous—at least to those of us who tend to use that word a lot – doesn’t anymore.”

“Baby Panic” became the new media mantra of 2001—not unlike the phrase “Marriage Crunch,” which had taken America by storm in a similar moment of cultural backlash. In 1987, Newsweek ran an article claiming that a woman who reached forty without a wedding ring was more likely to be struck by terrorists as she was to get married. We now know that this statistic could not be further from the truth: In September, 2007 Newsweek retracted the original story, revealing that in fact a 40-year-old woman today has a better than 40 percent chance of marrying. One can’t help but wonder how many women had suffered from anxiety as a result of that article in the intervening twenty-years—or even made bad choices to stave off their putatively inevitable spinsterhood.