You feel like you’re fairly disadvantaged with an advert over your head saying, "in final years of reproduction”': Social egg freezing, dating and the (unequal) sexual politics of reproductive ageing.

Recent decades have seen an increasing gap occurring between the ‘desired’ and ‘actual’ family size of middle-class and professional women, this ‘unrealised fertility’ and ‘incomplete families’ have implications at a population, but also at the couple and individual level. This paper explores the way in which contemporary middle-class professional women make decisions about partnering and parenthood which are shaped by a contemporary neoliberal feminist discourse which articulates the possibility of ‘having it all’ by engaging in careful life planning, appropriate self-investment and through drawing on new technologies of reproductive biomedicine. Drawing on semi structured interviews with women at two different time points during their (non)reproductive journeys, it explores how these women approach and experience the process of relationship formation both as young professionals but also in the face of age-related fertility decline and examines how their use of social egg freezing shape their romantic and family building expectations but also their interactions with (potential) partners. In doing so it explores how gendered cultural dating scripts and unequal gender power relations shape the formation and progression of intimate relationships which sometimes work to disempower women as they age. It therefore questions whether egg freezing may be the ‘great equaliser’ that some may otherwise have hoped.