“I wanna take you home, I want to give you children, and you might be my girlfriend…” -Pulp, “Babies”

This is how women get taken in. Even a woman who does not sit dreaming about babies or children or family life or any of that.

A woman falls in love with a man, and that man wants, dreams of and discusses children. He tells little stories about these imaginary souls, giving them names and personalities and attributes he cleverly culls from both him and her. It triggers something. The womb, the ovaries, even the rational brain that says, “But my life is comfortable here at the doorstep of 40.”

He may joke, turning the tables on the ever-melting-marshmallow-goo that he is softening her up to be, that she is using him to get a baby before the twilight of her childbearing years is over. And laughs, casually stating that the using is mutual – he wants a Green Card he knows he will never actually get.

But in reality, he talks the talk of wanting these imaginary babies, and her resistance, her doubts – all of that melts away, even in light of all the gigantic obstacles to this.

And what fresh hell is the aftermath?