“It’s like being on Tinder but 100 times more awkward,” explains Saschan, a single 26-year-old who is attempting to find someone to have and raise a child with her. This is an understatement. Pregnant and Platonic meets a handful of people who are, for a multitude of reasons, looking to explore “co-parenting” – that is, an agreement between two parties, romantically unconnected, who want to have a baby. There are 40,000 people currently signed up to co-parenting sites in the UK, which act as a sort of matchmaking service for wannabe parents.
Like many of the people this film encounters, Desirée, 32, is gay, and has always wanted to be a mother. She found Jamie, 24, on a co-parenting site. He is also gay, and always wanted to be a father. For all of the ills of the internet, there is something sweet and simple about its ability to connect different people on the basis of their shared needs, and allow happiness to flourish. But following their relationship over the course of a year, as this film does, is a curious project, because it is far more interesting than the pregnancy itself. Here are strangers who have to get to know each other after they have decided to have a child. They are bickering over their needs like a long-married couple within months.
The approach of Miriam and Alex, two long-term friends in their 20s, also gay, is much more business-like: a series of planned meetings written into shared diaries, as apps track Miriam’s fertility and Alex treks between London and Birmingham at the appropriate time of the month, worrying about having to “aim” into a Moon Cup (it is all explained in detail). If that sounds technically complex, it’s nothing compared with the emotional entanglement between Ellen and Stephen, who had twin girls together as friends. We see them spending Christmas at Stephen’s house, along with his boyfriend, Jim, and Ellen’s boyfriend, Jason. It does, they admit, require some navigation.
So often, fertility issues are talked about in relation to women, and that is the case here, yet there is a careful and welcome balance, too. To see men showing vulnerability and expressing their disappointment that they have not become fathers feels quietly important. There may not be much beneath the surface, but this is a warm and gentle programme about the tenacity of people who have had to seek what they want from life.
