You can, as I have seen friends do, jump at the first sign of romance, moving from New York to St Louis or the West Coast or Bali to be with a man. (“I win!” said the one who went to Bali.) No man I know has, in the early stages of a relationship, ever moved to where his girlfriend was living.

Or you can pull the emergency cord and have a baby alone.

It was easier for me, because I had recently embarked on a same-sex relationship. I didn’t know if it would last, but I knew that whatever happened, I would probably be needing a sperm donor and could at least shelve the anxiety that having a baby alone would “put off” a man down the line.

And yet while I very much liked the person I was seeing, neither of us wanted to have a baby together. I’ve found that this decision — to be sort of with someone, but neither to live together nor to be a co-parent — is more baffling and annoying to people than the decision to have a baby alone. It is perverse. It is “selfish.”

“Why don’t you move in together?” asked a male friend, and when I replied, “We don’t want to,” he said glumly, “Nobody wants to. You just have to.”

Make no mistake: Choosing to conceive a baby alone via fertility treatment is a luxury afforded the few. Single parenthood is, for the most part, not a matter of choice. Of the 10 million single parents in the United States, most of whom are women, more than 40 percent have children who live below the poverty line.

There is still something thrilling about the fact that single women now outnumber married women in the United States. I have a fantasy that, 10 years from now, it’ll be the men who will be scrambling to lock down a woman to have kids with before she ups and has kids on her own. The increased availability, affordability and social acceptability of elective single motherhood should radically change the dating landscape for women in their mid- to late childbearing years, evening out the balance of power with men.

This is probably optimistic. Early studies suggest that the children of single mothers by choice are just as well-adjusted as children of two-parent households. And yet having kids alone is hard, and expensive, and still too marginal a choice to be considered by a vast majority of women.