Dating As A Single Mom: Trying to Find Mr. Right

Growing up my favourite movie was Cinderella, I guess it still is but my opinion on the movie has changed as an adult. When I was younger, I liked it because I liked the idea of being magically handed beautiful clothes that made me enviable and helped me find a charming prince to sweep me off my feet and fulfil every little girl’s fantasy of living happily ever after. As an independent woman, I hate the idea of having to wait for a man to come along and make me happy, now that I’m older I realize I’d be waiting forever and we’ve already established I’m not that patient!

I may not be waiting for Prince Charming to come and save me anymore but that doesn’t mean I’m not looking for a prince. While the idea of being royalty does have a certain appeal to it, I’m really only looking for prince-like qualities and not an actual prince. That’s going to increase my odds of success, I hope.

Since I’m looking for a prince-like individual, when I was younger I always thought that I needed to be perfect and princess-like before I should start looking for a partner. I needed to be educated, skinny, have expensive clothes and a successful career, because without those things I wouldn’t be fit to be with the type of person I was looking for. Wiser me, or at least older me, thinks that’s silly now that I am saying it out loud. Older me realizes that I’ll probably never be content with myself. Now before you panic, I don’t mean that negatively. I’ve just learnt that I’m not a content person, I am very ambitious and competitive even with myself. If I lose weight then I’ll want to lose more weight, if I run a 5K which is a bucket list item of mine, then I’ll want to run 10K, etc. I’m not saying I won’t be happy with what I’ve accomplished but I’ll always want to try for more, I’m not one to settle. So, for me to wait to be educated, skinny, have expensive clothes and a successful career will mean that I’ll be perpetually single and that’s not the life I have envisioned for myself. That being said, I have accomplished some of my items, for example, I’m educated. You know that I completed my bachelor’s degree, competitive me hasn’t crossed off pursuing my master’s at some point in time but I do have a degree which was my goal. Do I still want to lose my pregnancy weight, yes, I do, and I think my self confidence will increase proportional to the weight I lose but I will probably always have issues with the number on the scale or certain features of my body, so waiting to feel 100% happy with the way I look isn’t a good idea. I do have some expensive clothes, but I’ve since realized that I don’t define my self worth by the price tag of the clothes I wear and if I can buy the same or similar outfit at Wal-Mart or a thrift store instead of a designer then I’m going to do that and pocket the difference for more important things like buying a house or more accurately buying clothes for my daughter’s because they are so much cuter than the clothes I buy for myself. In terms of a successful career, that’s another relative thing. I love my job and I feel successful in it but I always want to learn and grow in the roles I’m in. At some point I would like to be an entrepreneur, and at some point, I’d like to be a stay-at-home mom, so I have many career goals that are unmet so far.

Now that I know I’m not waiting on me to be perfect, perfect’s overrated anyway. I need to figure out what I’m looking for in a partner, so I know what Mr. Right looks like when I meet him. I think this is less of a physical thing and more of a personality thing but there are certain physical characteristics I think I’d like. I’d like someone who is taller than me, I like to wear heels and prefer I don’t tower over my partner. I’ve had enough body issues in my life that I don’t want to feel self conscious in a relationship and regardless of how good the guy is about my physical appearance, I’ll only feel good about it if he’s a little on the heavier side, he can still be fit, but I prefer a guy that’s not twig like. Blue eyes would be nice, I’ve always really liked the colour, I find it very mesmerizing. I’m sure every woman on the planet is waiting for me to make a comment about feet size since that’s hypothetically linked to… you know… but I really don’t. I haven’t had enough sexual partners in the past to know if size really does matter so I can’t miss what I’ve never had and I don’t know if what I’ve had is above, below or just average to make a request going forward.

Aside from physical characteristics, what I’m really looking for is someone that can put up with my craziness. I am a sarcastic, dramatic and over the top individual whose competitiveness and high maintenance tendencies means I have no chill. I need someone that has the same go go go personality but understands chill and can get me to sit down and relax every now and again too. I need someone who supports my ambitions but can stand there and call me out on my bullshit when I’m being dramatic and ridiculous, which is more often than I’d like to admit. I need them to be patient enough for the both of us but also have a kind heart and an optimistic attitude because I think those are important traits to have when raising children. I’d also like a guy that’s handy, someone who is willing to fix things when they are broken instead of tossing it and getting a new one. Not only does it cut down on consumerism and home repair costs, but I think it translates into relationships as well and means that when things get difficult, they will stick around and try to fix them instead of giving up and walking away.

My Checklist for Finding Mr. Right

A few other things that would be nice to have in a partner would be:

• A sense of humor (because I have none)

• Culinary skills (I like to bake but cooking is not my strong suit)

• Sees the good in people

• Likes being outdoors/camping

• Is family oriented and understands that we will always see my family more than his (sorry to my future in-laws)

• Likes dogs

• Is a home body but likes going on adventures

• Drives me crazy but in a good way

• Understands my love language is acts of service

• Non-smoker (legal or illegal), non-drinker, and non-gambler (these might actually be make or breaks for me)

• Has a family that likes me

I’m not sure a guy like this exists, as children and adults we’re always told to set high expectations and not settle for anyone other than your prince charming, but is that realistic for an adult? I want to be picky enough that I find someone that I can stay with forever, someone who will make me happy and be a good father for the girls but I don’t want to set such unrealistic expectations for guys that I push them all away and end up being single forever. Where do you draw the line? How do you know?

As I write this, the movie The Ugly Truth comes to mind. I feel like the character portrayed by Katherine Heigl which scares me. Watching the movie, I feel like she’s crazy, having a checklist of the criteria a guy has to meet before she’ll even go on a date with him but at the same time I literally just outlined my own checklist so I totally get where she’s coming from. I’m busy and I don’t want to waste my time with guys that aren’t going work for me, casual dating and casual sex are two things that don’t appeal to me.

I don’t think I’ve changed much since I wasn't single the last time, and I don’t know that my idea of ‘Mr. Right’ has changed much either, which is scary given that I had a hard time finding him the first time, and it turns out I didn’t.

Finding love is like looking for a needle in a haystack, as the old expression goes. You are one person looking for one other person amidst a sea of dating apps, each with hundreds of thousands of people. Knowing what you want gives you a little bit of an advantage, like having a magnetic while you’re looking for your needle. Even with a magnet you still have to be relatively close for the magnet to find the needle. In the dating world that would mean you need to be using the same app, have filled out your profile well enough to fit into the other person’s search parameters and have appropriate search parameters of your own. My problem? I have a magnet but I think I’m actually looking for a unicorn in a haystack. It would be easy to find, unicorns are bigger than haystacks…. Except THEY DON”T EXIST. And I feel like the guy I’m looking for doesn’t exist either.

Dating feels so hard when all I want to do is spend time with them

I recently had someone ask me if I was a dominant or submissive personality. It got me thinking that each person actually has two personalities, a forward falling personality, the one that everyone sees and your bedroom personality, aka. Your sex personality, which theoretically, not many people see. I don’t know if this is actually a thing but it is for me. My outward personality is very dominant, ask any of my friends and they’ll tell you I wear the pants in my relationships and that’s the way I like it. I want to make the decisions, manage our finances and shoulder most of the responsibilities because I’m a type A personality and I need to control things. By the time the day is done (which is usually when I had sex) I’m exhausted from making 1,001 decisions, big and small, and I don’t want to have to think about how long we should spend doing forplay, what positions we should do and when we should switch to the next one, which I feel like makes me more of a submissive in bed. Grayson was more of a submissive in both areas, which as you can imagine worked well for some things but not for others when I wanted him to step up and take action, like proposing. Our relationship ended before I got the ring even though we had talked about it and he said he was going to propose. I think the one flaw to dating apps is that they don’t account for these different personality types within a person, so on paper two people could be 100% compatible but I think sex is an important part of a relationship, and without good sex a relationship fails, so in actuality they might not be 100% compatible because the app doesn’t account for sex preferences. Maybe I should create a dating app that includes sexual preferences… It sounds creepy but it could be helpful to people, what do you think? With all this in mind, does that mean I’m looking for a submissive that’s dominant in the bedroom? I don’t know if that’s the case. How does one even talk about these things when in the initial dating phase? I’m not one to sleep with someone on the first few dates, but like I said, I don’t want to waste my time. I don’t think talking about it on an initial date is a good idea either, I think that sends the wrong impression so like actually how in the hell do you figure this out? Someone send help! And advice, are bedroom personalities even a thing? If so, do you go for the same or the opposite as you?

Dating As A Single Mom

I’m thinking of dating like a video game. When you start looking for someone and you’re young, single, pretty, and lacking responsibilities (a.k.a. kids) finding a partner is like playing on the easy setting. You can coast through the game enjoying the story line without wondering what in the world the game is going to throw at you when you get to the boss level. As you get older and take on responsibilities like houses and children, dating becomes much harder. You’re now playing on Extreme Expert mode and there’s a higher risk when you play at these levels. Now it’s harder to find someone willing to take on your now deteriorating physical appearance (let’s be real, my body will never be the same after having kids) and additional responsibilities AND you’re playing with a bad handicap because you have to protect the lives/hearts of your little humans as well, and they don’t understand how small things can have such a critical impact on your life meter.

I see the game now, I’m thinking old school, Pong or Atari. In addition to hitting the ball back to your opponent, your kids are the ghosts from Pac Man randomly floating all over the screen and you have to keep them from getting hit by the ball or the other player. You’re doomed to fail from the beginning since you can only move up and down while the ghosts float everywhere. You keep playing because you’re determined you can win but you continue to get more and more frustrated and possibly jaded every time you hit ‘try again’.

Really when I think about it, my relationship goals haven’t changed, the only thing that’s changed is the difficulty level in achieving my goals. I still want to meet someone who makes me happy, get married, buy a house, and have kids, not necessarily in that order, but now my expectations have changed. When Grayson and I started dating he was 21, younger than me, so I expected him to be less mature and responsible. I went into the relationship knowing what I wanted and assuming he would figure it out along the way. Now having to start dating again, I still know what I want, but now I don’t have the time or patience to wait for a guy to mature and figure out what he wants. I assume that the men I may go out with will have already figured all that out and I think that will set me up for disaster and disappointment because I don’t know that guys mature, or know what they want for dinner, let alone in a partner.

I’m a fan of the ‘take it for a test drive before you buy it’ philosophy and doing that as a mom is a lot harder. Especially for me since I’m living at my parents and starting to think about dating in the middle of a pandemic. It’s not like I want to or can have a revolving door of men in my parents’ house. Doing the walk of shame in front of our roommates in university is one thing, I can tell you with 100% certainty I don’t have the balls to do it in front of my parents. I didn’t even like having sex with Grayson at my parent’s house and he was my long-time boyfriend. It was quite evident to my family that I did when I announced my pregnancy with Thalia because we were living there during renovations when I conveyed her. I shutter at the thought of my parents seeing me sneaking a guy out of the house, how embarrassing is that for a 26 year old to be sneaking people in and out of a house? But what would be worse, is if the girls saw that. Thalia is too little to understand right now, but she’s incredibly smart and will start to understand soon and I don’t want her remembering mommy as the type of person to have new people over all the time.

How could I ever explain to them if I seperated from Daddy #2?

What scares me even more is, what if I find someone I like? Yup, the sounds dumb but if I want to start spending more time with someone then I have even more things to worry about. How long do I wait to introduce him to my daughters? What if they don’t like him? What if they do? It’s one thing for them to grow up understanding that Mommy and Daddy aren’t together anymore, and that they have two Daddies, but what if Mommy doesn’t stay with Daddy #2 forever either? I care less about having my heart broken as I do about breaking their hearts if they get attached to a guy that I don’t stay with. I would be shattered if they started to blame me and be upset with me because they couldn’t see someone they cared about. When I was young and single I was always hesitant to date guys with kids for this reason, what if I got really attached to the kids and then it didn’t work out with their Dad and I? What if the mom was psycho? As a mom do I look for a guy with kids? Does that make it easier or harder? Does it matter? Why do I have so many bloody questions?!?!

How do I explain to a new partner that I spend a lot of time with my ex. Like a lot, at least right now, he’s over a few times a week to see the girls and is currently my photographer while I blog and enter the world of Instagram. Finding someone new who’s okay with that sounds like a tall order. I might not see my ex several times a week forever but he’s still the girls’ father and will always be in our lives, I don’t want to cut him or his family out.

Dating as a mom is also expensive. It’s emotionally expensive in that I miss spending time with my girls every time I go out on a date, and financially expensive in that I have to hire a babysitter every time I want to go out on a date in addition to paying for the date (which I usually like to do out of principle). Single mom budgets are not overly flexible, how do women afford it? I have no problem dropping money on the girls without a second thought but I haven’t even agreed to go on a date yet and I’m already thinking about 7 other things I could spend that money on that would benefit the girls, like new shoes because Thalia outgrew the ones she’s currently wearing. Can I afford both, while living at my parents? Yes, but that might not always be the case.

I’ve written an entire article about dating as a mom and it’s making me think that I don’t want to date as a mom but I owe it to myself and the girls to try, right? Stay tuned, I’ll have an article coming up soon about my online dating experiences since it looks like Covid will be presenting in person dates for a while still.

Online Dating

I hate online dating. I really do, I never liked it when I was younger, and my perception still hasn’t changed. However, I feel like I have no other option than to get on board with the swipe dating trend because it seems unlikely that I’m going to meet someone organically when I rarely leave my parents house. Wise me has learned that ‘It’s Raining Men’ was clearly written by someone who was on drugs and hallucinating but that doesn’t make me like the song any less but it does mean that I know men aren’t going to line up at my door saying ‘let’s go on a date’. So I have to go where the men are (figuratively speaking, because we can’t leave our houses) and that’s dating sites.

Alright, you’ve made the decision to dive into the crazy world of online dating, where do you start? I was immediately overwhelmed by the number of different dating apps out there, there are a hundred or more I swear. I legitimately do not have the time or mental perseverance to create a profile on that many different apps and swipe through profiles on all of them (oftentimes it’s the same profiles too which is annoying). I understand variety is the spice of life but it’s not the spice of the dating world. Putting all of your eggs in one dating app basket is a bad idea but having too many egg baskets is mentally exhausting so what do you do?

Honestly, eenie meenie miney mo is not a bad option. I’ve used a few different apps now and I’ll share my experiences with each below but overall, I feel like they are all more or less the same so it doesn’t really matter and I can’t really say that being on multiple apps makes it any better.

• Chemistry

• Bumble

• Hinge

• The League

• eHarmony

• OKCupid

• Elite Singles

• Zoosk

I have a folder exactly like this on my phone, full of dating apps I dread using.

Regardless of the app, or apps you choose to use, you need to create a profile. how to choose pictures, what to say when we are such complex people and there are character limits (like seriously, were all these apps created by twitter?) ask a friend to write a short description about you.

One of the reasons I hate online dating is because I’m picky and I know it. I know there are so many guys out there that aren’t for me and in person it’s pretty easy to weed those guys out but sifting through poorly created dating profiles on my cell phone is only going to result in disappointment and carpal tunnel for me and going in with that expectation is not going to increase my odds of success. The picky person in me has a lot of issues with online dating. For starters, can someone explain to me why some men are incapable of filling out their dating profile? I know it sucks to do because I ACTUALLY DID IT. I hate talking about myself, it’s incredibly uncomfortable but it increases your odds of success so it’s worth the discomfort. Even for people adverse to discomfort I just want to scream get it together! Some of the questions are pretty basic. Like do you have kids, that’s a yes or no question, and if you don’t know the answer that’s a problem, for you anyway. For me it usually just means I swipe left but it still annoys me. If they did manage to fill out their profile I see a lot of accounts that include their height in the description which I know is supposed to link to dick length and might attract some girls but for the most part that just seems braggy, if you’re that full of yourself just post a pic of your dick and get it over with! Or the profiles that say “ask me anything”, okay, well I’m not going to waste my time asking you questions that you should have taken 5 mins to answer when creating your profile and since you haven’t included nay information in your profile I don’t know what to ask you to start a conversion so that’s a no from me. Along the lines of discomfort are profile pictures. I get that not everyone has their own personal photographer like me but if you don’t have at least 6 pictures of yourself from the last year (because people change looks wise and I do think physical attraction is an important part of any relationship) go take some. Hire a photographer, ask a friend, take a damn selfie or a picture of your dog but put a few pictures up so we can get a sense of who you are. I don’t want to see a picture of your car or a meme, that doesn’t tell me much about you. You have approximately 5 seconds to catch my interest and make me what to swipe right so you’ve got to give me something to go on and I couldn’t care less about what you drive. Also, group pictures drive me nuts! I don’t want to play where’s Waldo when I look at someone’s profile, I especially don’t like pictures that look like you’re with your ex. I have enough self esteem issues when I swipe right and it doesn’t come back as a match, I don’t need to be comparing myself to the girls in your pictures and wonder if I measure up. Also it’s not a great conversation starter, “hey was that your ex in your picture?”.... Like where do you go from there conversation wise, I don’t want to listen to you complain about your ex but like what else can you say? Oh and let’s not forget the profile pictures that make you look like you are an underwear model. Don’t get me wrong, I know some guys look like that but for the most part it’s not a accurate representation of who you are all the time so why are you sharing it? Doesn’t it just set you up for disappointment when you meet someone in person and they don’t actually look like their profile picture? I have a lot of pictures that make me look really good, skin, fit, you know, but like if don’t look like that normally so I try not to post those pictures, I don’t want to hear “let’s not go out again, you aren’t as pretty as your pictures”, call me crazy but that’s not good for my mental wellbeing.

Another thing I don’t like about online dating, the matching. Swiping right on someone only to not see the congratulations you’ve matching notification pop up really sucks, it’s no wonder people have mental health issues now, our only change at dating is linked to an app that makes you feel horrible over and over again every time you use to when you wipe for hours and never match with anyone. Also, us single moms don’t have time for that shit. Give us a short list of people that actually want to talk to us please, that’s the kind of app I want to use. I was on Bumble for an hour and a half one night waiting for Thalia to fall asleep, I swiped right on at least 50 different profiles and literally none of them were matches. If the other person has already viewed my profile and swiped left why in the hell am I still seeing their profile? Can’t the apps algorithm not or filter those people out of my search results rather than making me feel unworthy of love time and time again? Only slightly less worse is when you do match with someone, you have the instant feeling of yay! Maybe all this rejection really is worth it, only to message the person and never get a response from them. Why did you swipe right if you had no interest in talking to me? Is it just an ego booster for you to see how many girls swipe right? Do you know how many girls you’re emotionally damaging doing that? Your actions have consequences you know!

Yes, some apps have that feature but usually that requires a large financial investment. I’m of the opinion that love should not be expensive so paying for a dating app is thoroughly appalling to me. I get that people have to make money to run the app but why not charge people when they delete the app after meeting someone, would that not encourage more users to use your app? Wouldn’t more people find love that way and be willing to pay you more because they’re in love? That’s how buying a house works, and cars and literally everything else. You find what you want and then you pay for it. I don’t hand $400,000 over to my realtor up front and say let’s find a house and leave that money tied up for months and months while I look. That would be impractical, so why do we do that for dating apps?