About six months after my son was born, he and I were sitting on a blanket in the park with a close friend and her daughter. It was a sunny summer weekend, and other parents and their children picnicked nearby. My friend and I, who, in fits of self-empowerment, had conceived our babies with donor sperm because we hadn’t met Mr Right, surveyed the idyllic scene.

“Ah, this is the dream,” I said, and we nodded in silence for a minute, then burst out laughing. In some ways, I meant it: we had both dreamt of motherhood, and here we were. But it was also decidedly not the dream. The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married and live happily ever after. Of course, we’d be loath to admit it, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career, a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she will say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).

To the outside world, we still call ourselves feminists, and insist that we are independent, self-sufficient and don’t believe that damsel-in-distress stuff. In reality, however, we are women who want a traditional family. And, despite growing up in an era when the centuries-old mantra of getting married young was finally replaced by pursuit of high ideals (education, career, but also true love), every woman I know – no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure – feels panic if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried.

Oh, I know. I’m guessing there are single, 30-year-old women reading this right now who will write letters to the editor to say that I have no idea what I’m talking about. All I can say is, if you say you’re not worried, you’re either in denial or lying.

Whether you acknowledge it or not, there is good reason to worry. By the time 35th-birthday brunch celebrations roll around for still-single women, serious, irreversible life issues masquerading as “jokes” creep into public conversation: “Well, I don’t feel old, but my eggs sure do”; “I’m not getting any younger”. The birthday girl smiles a bit too widely as she delivers these lines, and everyone laughs a little too hard for a little too long because, at their core, they pose one of the most complicated, painful and pervasive dilemmas with which many single women are forced to grapple nowadays: is it better to be alone or to settle?

My advice is this: settle. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t rule out a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in the cinema. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. If you want the infrastructure in place for a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, because many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year.

Obviously, I wasn’t always an advocate of settling. In fact, it took not settling to make me realise that settling is the better option. Whenever I make the case for settling, people look at me with creased brows of disapproval or frowns of disappointment. Not only is it politically incorrect to get behind settling, it is downright unacceptable. Our culture tells us to keep our eyes on the prize (while our mothers, who know better, tell us not to be so picky), and the theme of holding out for true love (whatever that is – look at the divorce rate) permeates our collective mentality. When we’re holding out for deep, romantic love, we have the fantasy that this level of passionate intensity will make us happier – but marrying Mr Good Enough might be an equally viable option, especially if you’re looking for a stable, reliable, life companion.

What I didn’t realise, when I decided, in my thirties, to break up with boyfriends I might otherwise have ended up marrying, is that while settling seems like an enormous act of resignation when you’re looking at it from the vantage point of a single person, once you take the plunge, you will probably be relatively content. It sounds obvious now, but I didn’t fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you’re married, it’s not about who you want to go on holiday with, it’s about who you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a small, mundane and often boring not-for-profit business. And I mean this in a good way.

I don’t mean that settling is ideal. As the only single woman in my son’s mummy-and-me group, I listen each week to unrelenting complaints about people’s husbands and feel pretty good about my decision to hold out for the right guy, only to realise that these women wouldn’t trade places with me for a second, no matter how dull their marriages. They, like me, would rather feel alone in a marriage than actually be alone, because they, like me, realise that ultimately, marriage isn’t about cosmic connection – it’s about how having a teammate, even if he’s not the love of your life, is better than not having one at all.

It’s not that I’ve become so jaded that I don’t believe in, or even crave, romantic connection. It’s that my understanding of it has changed. In my formative years, romance was John Cusack and Ione Skye in Say Anything. When I think about marriage nowadays, however, my role models are the television characters Will and Grace – who, though Will was gay, and his relationship with Grace was platonic, are one of the most romantic couples I can think of. What I long for is that sense of having a partner in crime. Someone who knows your day-to-day trivia. Someone who both calls you to task on your bulls*** and puts up with your quirks. So what if Will and Grace weren’t having sex? How many long-standing married couples are having much sex?

“I just want someone who is willing to be in the trenches with me,” my single friend Jennifer told me, “and I never thought of marriage that way before.” Two of her friends have married men she believes aren’t even straight; and, while she wouldn’t have made that choice a few years ago, she wonders whether she might be capable of it in the future. “Maybe they understood something that I didn’t,” she said.

What they understood is this: as your priorities change from romance to family, the so-called deal-breakers change. Some guys aren’t worldly, but they would make great dads. You walk into a room and start talking to somebody who is 5ft 4in, with an unfortunate nose, but he “gets” you. My long-married friend Renée offered this advice: “Even if he’s not the love of your life, make sure he is someone you respect intellectually, who makes you laugh and appreciates you . . . I bet there are plenty of these men in the older, overweight and bald category.” (Which, in any case, they all eventually become.)

She wasn’t joking. All marriages, of course, involve compromise, but where is the cutoff? Take the date I went on last night. The guy was substantially older. He had a long history of depression and said, in reference to the movies he was writing, “I’m fascinated by comas” and “I have a strong interest in terrorists”. He had never been married. He was rude to the waiter. But he very much wanted a family, and he was successful, handsome and smart. I thought: “Yes, I’ll see him again. Maybe I can settle for that.” But my next thought was: “Maybe I can settle for better.” It’s like musical chairs – when do you take a seat, any seat, so you’re not left standing alone?

Back when I was still convinced I’d find my soul mate, many of the guys I dated lived up to my requirements – but, if one of them lacked kindness, another didn’t seem emotionally stable enough, and another’s values clashed with mine. Others were sweet, but so boring that I preferred to read during dinner.

Now I realise that, if I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my life, I’m at the age where I will probably need to settle for someone who is settling for me. What we forget is that we won’t always have the same appeal that we may have had in our twenties and early thirties. Having turned 40, I now have wrinkles, bags under my eyes and hair in places I didn’t know hair could grow on women. With my nonworking life consumed by thoughts of potty training and play dates, I have become a far less interesting person than the one who went on hiking adventures and performed at comedy clubs. Once you have a baby, you age about 10 years in the first 10 months, and if you don’t have time to shower, eat, go to the loo in a timely manner or even leave the house except for work, there is little chance that a man – much less The One – is going to knock on your door and join the party.

Then there is the cost of dating as a single mum: online dating, the baby-sitter and, most frustrating, hours spent away from your beloved child. Even women who settle but end up divorced might be in a better position, because many ex-wives get both child-support payments and a free night off when the kids go to their dad’s house. Mums in my position don’t get the night off. At the end of the evening, we rush home to pay the baby-sitter, make any house guest tiptoe around and speak in a hushed voice, then wake up at 6am at the first cries of “Mummy”. Try bringing a guy home to that.

Settling is mostly a women’s game. Men don’t seem the least bit bothered: my friend Chris, a single, 35-year-old marketing consultant, dated a kind and beautiful surgeon, whom he calls “the perfect woman”, for three years. She broke off the relationship several times because, she told him with regret, she didn’t think she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. Each time, Chris would persuade her to reconsider, until, finally, she called it off for good, saying that she couldn’t marry somebody she wasn’t in love with.

At the time, he was devastated, but now his former girlfriend has reached 35, Chris is hopeful about their future. “By the time she turns 37, she’ll come back,” he said confidently. “And I’ll bet she’ll marry me then. I know she wants to have kids.” I asked him why he would want to be with a woman who wasn’t in love with him. He didn’t see it that way at all. “She’ll be settling,” he said, “but not me. I get to marry the woman of my dreams. That’s not settling. That’s the fantasy.”

Chris believes that women are far too picky: everyone knows that a single, middle-aged man still has appealing prospects, he says, whereas a single, middle-aged woman doesn’t. And he is right. Single women are painfully aware of this. I hear far more women than men talk about getting married as a deadline. My friend Gabe points out that this allows men to be true romantics; when a man breaks up with a perfectly acceptable woman because he’s “just not feeling it”, there is none of the ambivalence that a woman with a deadline feels.

The paradox is that the more it behoves a woman to settle, the less willing she is to do it; a woman in her mid- to late thirties is more discriminating than one in her twenties. Her tastes and sense of self are more solidly formed. She says things like “He wants me to move into town, but I love my home by the beach”, or “Can I really spend my life with someone who’s allergic to dogs?”. And, no matter what women decide, there is always going to be regret. Unless you meet the man of your dreams (who, by the way, doesn’t exist, precisely because you dreamt him up), there is going to be a downside to getting married, but a possibly more profound downside if you hold out for someone better.

Jennifer summed it up this way: “When I used to hear women complaining bitterly about their husbands, I’d think, ‘How sad, they settled.’ Now it’s, like, ‘God, that would be nice.’ ” That’s why mothers tell their daughters to “keep an open mind” about the guy who spends his weekends playing online poker or touches your back for two minutes while watching Sky Sports and calls it a massage. As my own mother once advised me, when I was dating a musician: “Everyone settles to some degree. You might as well settle pragmatically.”

I know all this now, yet here’s the problem: much as I’d like to settle, I can’t seem to do it. The very nature of dating leaves women my age to wrestle with a completely different level of settling. Consider the men older women I know have married in varying degrees of desperation over the past few years: a recovering alcoholic who doesn’t always go to his meetings; an actor still trying to make it in his forties; a widower with three nightmare kids who is still actively grieving for his dead wife; and a socially awkward engineer, so socially awkward that he declined to attend his wife’s book party.

It’s not that these women are crazy, it’s that the dating pool has dwindled dramatically and that, due to gender politics, the few available men tend to require far more of a concession than those who were single when I was younger. And, while I have a much higher tolerance for settling than I did back then, I now have a baby to consider. So while there’s more incentive to settle, there’s less willingness to settle too much, because that would be a disservice to my son.

This doesn’t undermine my case for settling. Instead, it supports my argument to do it young, when settling involves constructing a family environment with a perfectly acceptable man who may not pull your romantic trigger, as opposed to doing it later, when settling involves selling your very soul in exchange for damaged goods. Admittedly, it’s a dicey case to make. Like the divorced women I know who claim they wouldn’t have done anything differently, because then they wouldn’t have Biff and Buffy, I, too, can’t imagine life without my magical son. I also acknowledge the power of the idea that the grass is always greener and allow for the possibility that my life alone is better (if far more difficult) than the one I would have in a comfortable but tepid marriage.

Then my married friends say things like: “Oh, you’re so lucky, you don’t have to negotiate with your husband about the cost of piano lessons”. Or: “You’re so lucky, you don’t have anybody putting the kids in front of the TV, and you can raise your son the way you want.” I even hear things like: “You’re so lucky, you don’t have to have sex with someone you don’t want to.”

The lists go on, and, each time, I say: “Okay, if you’re so unhappy, and if I’m so lucky, leave your husband. In fact, send him over here.” Not one person has taken me up on this offer.