This Dating Show Made Me Think About Fertility

If you're new here, welcome to Girlhood — the group chat we should have had all along, where we talk openly about our bodies and the messy, funny, complicated parts of being a woman. This week: a book that kept me up until 11:30 on a Tuesday, the IVF cancer study I didn't know I needed, a fertility question nobody on Age of Attraction is asking, and why my dermatologist and Instagram cannot get on the same page. Let's get into it.

Hi friend,

Confession: I always need to be reading a book. Not want, need. If I have a story in my head, I can't hear my own anxiety. It doesn't have room. The spiral that would otherwise set up camp between my ears gets evicted by fictional people with fictional problems, which are somehow infinitely more manageable than my own.

Nora Ephron once wrote that reading is everything: that it makes her smarter, gives her something to talk about, and is, in her words, "the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself." That it's escape and the opposite of escape at once. That it's bliss. I've read that quote probably a hundred times, and it still feels like someone finally put words to something I'd been doing my whole life without being able to explain it.

My current read is This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum — part thriller, part slow-burn love story about best friends who host a survival podcast, one of whom disappears, with her own unpublished memoir slowly revealing why. I started it on a Tuesday night and my husband had to physically tell me it was 11:30, which, with three kids under eight, is genuinely not okay.

There's something reliable about fiction that I haven't found anywhere else. Not podcasts, not TV... those leave too much room for my brain to wander off and catastrophize. A really good novel requires just enough of me that worry can't find a foothold, and the part of my brain that would otherwise be composing worst-case scenarios gets handed something better to do with itself. 

I've been doing this since I was a kid — reading under the covers with a flashlight, long after my parents told me lights out — and if it's a coping mechanism, it's the one I'd pick every time.

🔍 Ask Clara: Can reading before bed actually help with anxiety?

💉 Reader, I Cried: The IVF Cancer Study We've Been Waiting For

If you know me IRL, you know I have the kind of health anxiety that comes from knowing too much. Not spiraling-at-2am anxiety, but the specific, well-researched kind that accumulates when you work in women's health, carry an ATM gene mutation, have a history of infertility, three IVF babies, and a best friend who died of breast cancer at 31. I'm not being dramatic. I'm simply a woman who's done the math.

For me, "preventative health" looks like annual mammograms, a breast MRI every six months in between, and a standing appointment with low-grade dread every time a result takes longer than expected to populate in the patient portal. It's manageable — it's just always there, slightly beneath the surface. So you can imagine how it felt to read this.

A new study in JAMA Network Open analyzed nearly 418,000 women who underwent fertility treatment and found that their overall invasive cancer rates were comparable to the general population. Reader, I cried a little.

To be fair, it's not a complete all-clear: uterine and ovarian cancer rates were modestly higher in some groups, and researchers believe that likely reflects underlying conditions like PCOS and endometriosis rather than the treatments themselves. Still worth a conversation with your doctor. But the headline finding — that IVF doesn't appear to raise your overall cancer risk — is going in the file I keep of things that help me sleep at night.

Because here's what nobody warns you about fertility treatment: it doesn't end when you get the baby. The what-did-we-do-to-my-body question follows you into the next chapter, asking itself whether you invited it or not. A study like this one doesn't answer everything, but for the first time in a long time, the math feels slightly more in my favor.

🔍 Ask Clara: What should IVF patients know about long-term health risks?

📺 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.

🔍 Ask Clara: How does female fertility decline with age?

💄 Somebody Please Tell Me What Products I Actually Need

Somewhere between my postpartum scalp freakout and my third Google search about whether I should be exfoliating or not, I had a realization: women's wellness doesn't have an information problem — it has the opposite problem. There's so much information, from so many directions, with so many conflicting opinions, that by the time you've read enough to feel confident, you've also read enough to feel confused again. Congratulations, you're back at square one, but now you know what "moisture-protein balance" means.

Take haircare: I never thought much about it until my hair started shedding postpartum, and suddenly I was deep in Reddit threads about scalp pH, protein overload, and whether silicones are the enemy or just misunderstood. Every answer led to three more questions. Is this shampoo non-comedogenic, because I also have acne-prone skin and apparently that's a whole separate consideration nobody mentioned? Is my stylist recommending this because it's right for my hair, or because it's what's sitting behind her desk?

Skincare is somehow worse. Should I be exfoliating? With what? How often? Is my barrier compromised or am I fine? Every influencer has an answer and also (conveniently) an affiliate link. Nearly half of Americans say social media has influenced them to spend more on beauty products than they otherwise would, with millennials averaging $2,670 a year on beauty — which makes sense, because the information is designed to make you feel like you're always one product away from having it figured out.

And yet, every time I actually make it to the dermatologist, they tell me CeraVe is fine and I'm doing great. I believe them. And then I open Instagram.

I don't think this is accidental. Women's beauty and wellness spaces have always monetized confusion. The more overwhelmed you are, the more you buy, and the more you buy, the more overwhelmed you get. It's a very elegant trap, and I say that as someone who is absolutely still in it. Godspeed, my friends. 

xo,
Kristyn

🔍 Ask Clara: What skincare ingredients should I actually be using in my 30s?