Sitting across from one of my oldest friends over dinner, I found myself staring at yet another ultrasound. “That’s why you ordered a virgin mary,” I nodded, putting the pieces together. It was my friend’s third baby – and ninth in our friendship group – tidily completing the family life that also comprises a three-bedroom house, a cockapoo, and a husband. Our lives couldn’t be more different, as she pointed out when, three sips into my second Negroni, I felt her tone shift: “Do you ever think about wanting any of that?”

A part of me wanted to bite back. No, the part replied, all stink-eyed and Medusa-haired, I’m too busy trying to pay my rent and find someone to date who isn’t completely awful. I don’t have time to think about if I want “any of that” because “any of that” is a fantasy so far removed from my reality I can’t even imagine what it feels like to want it. I won’t let myself. How rude. How entitled. How smug.

There’s an entire cultural canon that has taught me to respond this way, one that is predicated on divisions between thirtysomething women: those with children and those without. It’s a perpetual conflict that, despite all societal progression, hasn’t really changed in decades – consider the Smug Marrieds in Bridget Jones’ Diary. It’s something I’m constantly reminded of, too. And not just because so many of my friends are having children; three of them are due to give birth this month.

In 2023, there was Allison P Davis’s viral article in The Cut, which documented how friendship groups were being torn apart by the arrival of tiny, crying humans, and earlier this month, another Cut article addressing the subject also went viral. Clearly, this is something people want to talk and read about, perpetuating the us versus them dynamic that is at its core and how relatable it is.

It’s the big baby divide, an idea that, I suppose, is based on the theory that someone like me – single, childless, and living in rented accommodation – is unable to find common ground with friends who have become mothers. Our lives are simply too disparate, defined by wildly different vectors with hardly any intersection. We can’t have fun together anymore because we can’t understand each other. What would we do? What would we talk about? What would we laugh and cry about? It’s a narrative that seems to be being peddled everywhere and frankly, I’m fed up with it. Not least because I don’t relate to it at all.

Of course, babies have changed the dynamics in our group. The mothers will hang out together with their kids and at a first birthday party thrown by one friend for her son, only those with children of their own were invited. There are conversations about childcare I can’t contribute to and shared experiences I know nothing about. But if any of that’s supposed to rankle me, or spark some kind of bitterness, it doesn’t.

I’ve never felt judged, sidelined, or pitied by any of my friends with kids. When we do hang out, which I’ll admit is a bit less these days though that has more to do with being in your thirties than having or not having kids, we still have the best time together. I don’t feel like my life is any less than theirs, nor do I find it in any way superior. It’s an equal playing field, the way it always has been. It just so happens that our lives look a little different to one another.

I should clarify that the friends of mine who have children have been in my life for a very long time – one of them has been my best mate for 27 years, and the rest I’ve known since I was 12. I’m aware that changes things slightly and puts me in a fairly fortunate position; when the foundation of a friendship is that strong, built on years of memories, loves, and losses, it’s pretty unshakeable. But that doesn’t make my views on the big baby divide any less stringent.

Let’s break it down a little. If women with children are supposed to resent those without, and vice versa, why is that? And what does it say about our expectations of womanhood? And our views around female friendship?

At its core, this is a division based on a set of ideologies rooted in misogynistic stereotypes that dictate who is being a “good” woman (mothers) by conforming to societal expectations and who is not (hello). The conflict comes, I think, from these two things being in opposition to one another and one side subsequently feeling compelled to consistently justify their version of womanhood to the other. Because all of us want to be doing it all and doing it right, don’t we? How dare anyone make us feel like we aren’t.

When you look at it like that, it’s hard not to see the big baby divide as just another way to pit women against each other. That’s why I begrudge it and will continue to refuse to buy into it. Sure, I might not have as much in common with my friends with kids as those without. But they also aren’t my only friends. Since leaving a long-term relationship three years ago, I’ve worked hard to build a network of single female friends. We share the same financial, romantic, and emotional struggles. We’re in the same WhatsApp groups. We go on nights out together. We support one another. Those relationships aren’t any better than those with my friends with children, they’re just different.

So when my friend asked if I wanted “any of that”, I hushed my hissing hair and didn’t bite back at all. I simply explained that it wasn’t something I was thinking about right now. Not out of fear, avoidance, or resentment; it’s just that my focus is elsewhere. And that I’m – whisper it – quite happy and fulfilled as I am without being remotely envious of my friend. That shouldn’t feel like a revolutionary, or even remotely surprising, thing to say. But it does. It really, really does.