Ruth Wishart and her husband, Rod, decided not to have children. Decades on, she looks back on a decision that affected her future in ways she couldn't have imagined in her youth

We were in Greece at the time, on one of the small islands that specialises in wonderful night skies and somewhat less wonderful wine. As we sat in the tiny taverna, I raised a subject with my husband of two years that, bizarre as it may now seem, we never got around to discussing prior to our marriage.

If we're starting a family, I'd really like to have at least the first before I'm 30, I offered. I was just short of my 28th birthday, he was some seven years older. He looked startled. I hadn't ever mentioned I wanted a family, he said after a very long pause. And I hadn't. It was just part of the package for women of my generation. You got married; you had a couple of kids.

My husband, it has to be said, was a kind and thoughtful man. No shortage of what today's jargon labels emotional intelligence. But it turned out he didn't want to be a dad.

If he had, he said, he'd have wanted to have them when he was younger. It wasn't a hostile conversation, just a slightly startling one from my perspective.

Startling, though not, at the time, particularly troubling. It's not as if I was broody or bitter. Small puppies had tended to engage more interest than small babies during my adolescence. I had a job I loved in newspapers, and shared my life with a funny, affectionate partner who was something of a pioneer in the new man department. Since he worked from home as a cartoonist and graphic designer, he thought the consequent sharing of domestic duties no more than common sense given my unpredictable hours.

Ruth and Rod on their wedding day in 1971.

None of that changed very much in the years that followed. Our friends had children and I was happy for them. But by the time I was in my 30s, I took stock. It seemed unlikely that my husband would suddenly locate a paternal gene. The fact of his being illegitimate, though raised in a secure family environment, might have had some bearing.

Curious as to whether we might have step nephews and nieces of whom we knew nothing, I wondered aloud whether he might like to try to trace his birth father, who had made a brief guest appearance at the time his birth was registered and hadn't been heard of since.

But my partner had no interest in finding a man who, as he noted with undeniable logic, had shown no interest in him.

There were now other factors in the equation. My elder brother, my only sibling, had died from cancer in his 30s without any children. It was a crushing blow to my widowed mother, and I knew she now looked to me to provide the much wanted, and elusive grandchildren. Yet it seemed to me then that it would be a poor deal to bring into the world a child with a profoundly unenthusiastic father, and a mother not exactly overburdened with maternal instincts either. When you're thirtysomething, you still live in the present; you don't spend much time examining the consequences of even quite profound decisions.

And, in retrospect, getting sterilised at that stage was the most profound decision I ever made. We'd talked about it for a while as a couple. I had been on the pill for a long time, and there were endless, if often contradictory, reports about the attendant health risks. We talked about who would do the deed. My husband was not keen, yet I felt I had done my fair share of taking contraceptive responsibility. But – perversity, thy name is woman – when he finally volunteered, I felt honour had been satisfied and signed up for the operation myself.

And, for the succeeding few years, I gave it all very little thought. I was aware, of course, that my friends were operating for part of their lives on a different planet. That they were building new networks at the school gates, and in the organisations to which their children were attached. But in my job there was never a shortage of places to go, stuff to do, people to meet. And, still in the world of couples, no shortage of social invitations to parties, and other people's family celebrations.

So what nagged at me in my 40s, and subsequently my 50s, was not the sharp ache that so devastates those women who longed for children and couldn't conceive; more a sort of sadness that I hadn't experienced one of the most extraordinary experiences a woman can have. A sadness born more of unsatisfied curiosity than unfulfilled womanhood.

Ruth and Rod on holiday in France in 1998.

When my husband died, very suddenly, I was still in my 50s. And the cosy, interdependent, loving, domestic bubble vanished in his absence. What shocked me more than anything was the abrupt sense of insecurity. Not just in the obvious ways; I knew enough from my sister-in-law's observations and what I read and heard elsewhere that to become a widow is to be involuntarily set down on an unfamiliar planet for which you have no appetite and very few bearings.

And, of course, nothing can really prepare you for the journey through grief. Certainly not the raft of Americanised self-help books that you devour in the hope of locating pain-relief. But as you fashion a different kind of life with the priceless help and affection of good friends, a set of unfamiliar fears and longings assail you.

The confidence born of years of working in sometimes tough, competitive environments fails to stop you wondering about how you would deal as a single dweller with illness or infirmity. Not in a crippling way, but these are not thoughts idly dismissed at three in the morning as you also embrace the advent of insomnia.

But here's another odd thing. Those thoughts about motherhood, so airily dismissed 30 years ago, flood back in a different and unsettling guise. You listen to your friends talking with love and pride about the accomplishments of their children in general, or the special times they are able to spend enjoying the company of the fascinating young woman to whom they gave birth.

You watch them enjoying – for the most part! – being involved as part of the care schedule for their grandchildren.

Because you are blessed with thoughtful friends, you are not excluded from many of new facets of their lives. You are invited to their children's weddings. In fact many of their "children" are now your friends too. Interesting adults who keep you across the popular culture with which you might have lost touch. And fix your computer!

And yet.

And yet despite the good company to which you have fortunate access, despite becoming involved in the local community's activities, assorted committees and all the other interests you genuinely enjoy, there persists a certain brand of loneliness.

When you find yourself inexplicably in your 60s, you have a heightened awareness of many things. Intimations of your own mortality, of course. That comes with the territory. But there grows too an envy of friends with sisters as well as daughters; of the fact that they can share their innermost thoughts and fears with blood relations. On a more mundane level, that they have readymade solutions to Christmas and holiday plans if they need them.

Of course I know too that families can also offer worry and heartache, and that trying to play happy families with warring relations can throw up its own nightmares.

But when you're looking in from the outside, you tend to assume that families, with all their problems and rivalries, still have these largely unbreakable ties of comforting intimacy.

It is a very strange feeling to reach this age and stage and find yourself without parents or children, or nephews and nieces, or siblings or a partner. A sort of accidental orphan.

I make these observations not in any "poor me" sort of way, because I live a full life for which I am daily and duly grateful. I share my home with a particularly agreeable dog.

Yet I cast my mind back to the cavalier decision we made all those years ago to turn our backs on possible parenthood. And I look at toddlers in the street with an interest I never displayed as a young woman, and wonder how it might have been to have grandchildren.

Fruitless meanderings of the mind, of course. Sanity lies, as we all know, in getting on with the life you have; not frittering away increasingly precious time pondering the life you might have had.

But there is one irony I can never quite dismiss. There's no telling what kind of mother I might have made. Hopefully not malign, if not quite instinctively maternal. Yet of one thing I have always been certain.

That reluctant husband of mine would have made an absolutely cracking dad.