Age of Attraction Got Me (Then My Uterus Had Questions)

Something else you should know: I am, despite my better judgment, a hopeless romantic. I have watched almost every season of The Bachelor. I have cried at the finale. I am not immune to a love story, and I never have been. So when Age of Attraction showed up on Netflix — a dating show where people build connections without knowing each other's ages — I was in, immediately and completely. What I didn't expect was to spend half the show thinking about fertility.

The premise: singles date without knowing how old anyone else is, reveal ages when they're ready to commit, then decide whether to move forward. It's hosted by Nick Viall and Natalie Joy, who have an 18-year gap themselves — which is either genius casting or a lot to unpack over cocktails (probably both).

But then the fertility warrior in me shows up, the one who spent years in waiting rooms counting follicles and learning odds, and she has a different question entirely. When a woman who's 54 is falling for someone who's 27 and they're both all in, nobody on that show is asking out loud — does he want biological kids? Does she know whether that's still possible for her? Because the science is what it is. By 40, about 1 in 10 women will conceive in any given cycle. By 54, that conversation looks very different. Has it happened in the Promise Room, or are they just hoping love will be enough when it surfaces later?

It will surface. I say that not as someone who thinks it's a deal-breaker, but as someone who knows that the gap between a romantic decision and a reproductive one is real, and that reality TV, by design, stays on the romantic side of it.

I sit on my couch knowing what they haven't asked yet, rooting for them anyway.

Photo source: People