Hey! This issue covers Chapter 6 of the Ruby Warrington Winter Slow Read—a 10 week journey through the book Women Without Kids. New episodes drop every Sunday from February to early April. If you want to start at the beginning or read more about what we’re doing here, head on over to the Introduction. The first 15(ish) minutes of each episode are free to listen to!
Welcome back! 👯♀️ In Chapter 6: Found Family, we’re discussing how important it is to find your people and create community outside of marriage and children. We’re also talking about friendship and some really interesting (and surprising) statistics that may be at the core of why everyone feels like making friends in your 30s is so damn hard. My guest for today is Melinda, who is an American living in Vienna! (Take us with you!!)
✨ Introducing today’s guest—
Melinda (37, pathologically punctual, and often found at her neighborhood wine & cheese shop) is a writer and marketing consultant based in Vienna, Austria, living her best expat life after leaving her corporate career in the U.S. She’s the voice behind Le March Mondaine, a project about taste, travel, and what happens when you stop organizing your life around expectations you never agreed to—shaped by her travel to wine regions, beauty rituals, and a strong sense of place. While many people grow up assuming parenthood is inevitable, Melinda never did, and writes from the perspective of someone intentionally building a full life outside that framework.
So how do you make a family when making babies is not on the agenda? (pg. 128)
“And the fact that “starting a family” is synonymous with having children is inherent to the notion that you will never have a real family of your own until you become a parent.
So how do you make a family when making babies is not on the agenda? The question is central to the experience of women without kids, for whom the concept of Found Family—that is, the ones besides our blood relatives who just feel like home—is front and center in our lives. Regardless of a person’s relationship status or their connection to their family of origin, not having children of one’s own can create what feels like a kin-shaped hole in a person’s life. So let’s take a closer look at why this is, along with the ways in which we can begin to close the kinship gap.”—Ruby Warrington
Timestamps:
0:18 — Introducing Melinda, and why she moved to Vienna in 2025
4:40 — Reading today’s excerpt (pg. 128) and the origins of the concept of “found family", which has queer roots
8:20 — The loneliness epidemic, how many people are estranged from a parent, and other topics we don’t often talk about, even with our friends
11:40 — Individualism and the three necessary components to building a village (pg. 133)
18:00 — How moms get inducted into a club automatically, and how women without kids have to work a little harder to build a village once we aren’t in school anymore
22:50 — Friendship, and how long it takes to actually make a friend. Plus, how friendship is impacted when some women have kids and others don’t, and a surprising silver lining of divorce
31:00 — How wanting family isn’t the same as wanting to be a parent
35:00 — I asked Melissa about being single in her 30s, and how being childfree affects her dating life
38:45 — The pressure we place on our partners/children, how and where we get our needs met, and how many hours we have available for “village building”
46:40 — A parting note on how packed this book is with such good shit—you can get completely different things out of each chapter every time you read it
P.S. As always, if you are extremely passionate about all of this and want to chat 1:1, check out my PHONE A FRIEND sessions :) Use code “RUBY” for 20% off from now until April 30th.
