You know you've grown up when...

It's kicked in.

That whole maternal, clucky, ooh-ing and ahh-ing at every child under the age of three thing.

I don't recall it happening gradually. No. It hit me like a bullet train and left me mangled on the tracks of life.

Now, normally such revelations wouldn't really worry me. It's more that I'm single, and now I have a primal, biological urge I can do absolutely nothing about.

I have a great career. I'm in a fabulous place right now. But if you'd told me six months ago that by the start of 2010 I'd be quite happy to get married, buy a house, have kids, get a dog, and live a life of domestic bliss - I'd have either laughed at you until I peed my pants, or gotten a migraine at the very mention of it.

The question that has got me thinking is a simple one: is this whole change of focus going to make me an even pickier woman on the dating market? Am I now automatically sizing up men to whether or not they would be father material? Am I now even less likely to find the man I want to spend the rest of my days with, because I am now looking for "The One" as opposed to "The One for Now"?

When all is said and done, it's not the thought of finding the man I want to grow old with that scares me.

It's that I know exactly who he is. And he can't find it within himself to be that man. That's what scares me.