These days, I notice babies everywhere — at cinemas, in restaurants and on the high street. I even notice the paraphernalia that comes with them — the fancy pushchairs, baby outfits and such. I was recently spellbound by a dad on a bicycle towing what I can only describe as a “baby box”, a luxuriously upholstered cube on wheels, containing his cute and helmeted toddler. I have a keener eye for children than for attractive women. Aged 35, my urge for sex is giving way to the urge for the products of sex. I’m feeling broody, but broodiness is an issue men rarely discuss and have no language for.

Women always talk openly about their desire for babies, their “womb ache”, as some call it. There is no equivalent term for men. What anatomical description can we use for our longing? Referring to our “throbbing balls” doesn’t have the same ring, though balls and wombs exist for the same reason: procreation. Women have monopolised the higher ground of the reproductive discussion. Babies grow inside them; they feel every pulse and rhythm of their development and so claim an instinctive bond with their creation. By comparison, men are mere bystanders. While women talk about the desire for children in terms of nature, men talk sociologically about the “role” and “purpose” that fatherhood gives them, as if babies just provide something to do when you’re too old and fat to play five-a-side or get plastered and go on the pull.

Whenever I broach the topic of broodiness, other men patronise me, saying I’ve “gone soft”. Fathers treat me as if I’m a wet, wide-eyed pup with little idea of what I’m letting myself in for. Childless thirtysomething male friends regard the idea with contempt. “I can’t be bothered,” is a common reply when asked if they want to be fathers. There is much denial in this. One friend claimed he was glad to be childless because kids are “noisy, messy, irritating and a pain in the arse”. He said this despite the fact that he and his wife have tried, unsuccessfully, to conceive. While his wife can freely admit her pain and sadness, convention dictates that men cannot do the same. In the male lexicon, to be without children is to be free of the responsibilities and work that comes with them, which can only be a good thing. Men rarely admit their vulnerability, and broodiness is precisely that, a sense of deep personal incompletion.

I realised how bereft I am of children while spending the second half of last year in India — a country that is teeming with them. I’d watch young Indian families sitting on railway platforms, the fathers beaming as they cradled their perfectly formed, serenely quiet babies. Seeing people who earn a pittance, whose daily lives are a grinding struggle, take such genuine, uncomplicated delight in their children made me appreciate what a real and uniquely powerful experience parenthood is. It made me want to be a father.

This realisation initially made me go on a dating frenzy. In typically male fashion, I interpreted it as a sign that the good times were coming to an end and set about chasing as much tail as possible. But that wore off quickly and I’ve found myself becoming curiously indifferent to sex. When a woman comes on to me now, I wonder whether I can be bothered to wake up in another part of town without my own toothbrush rather than of how good she might be in bed. Indeed, sexy women aren’t so sexy any more: the sort of intense, imperious personality that often makes a woman a wildcat in the sack no longer excites me as I contemplate the hard work she entails. While my friends still leer at these divas as they strut through a bar, I now regard them as merely headaches in heels.

Tall, strapping women have become strangely enticing, as I imagine the athletic children they could bear, the powerfully built son who might one day play centre-forward for England. But what attracts me most to a woman is her ability to communicate and interest me. And now that I’m actually listening to women in an effort to know rather than seduce them, I’m amazed at how few can actually do this. Women, sadly, are largely as boring and self-obsessed as men.

My broodiness has made me extremely picky. The bedpost has been adequately notched; there is nothing left to prove other than that I would make a loving and committed parent. All I can do now is wait for a woman who feels the same way about herself, with whom I can begin the mundane and magical adventure of raising a family. Fingers crossed, she’s making her way to me already.

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