Dating a Single Parent

More and more often, that perfect someone comes with a person or persons included. Single moms and dads make up a large part of the online dating community today. Maybe it’s easier to hook a date with your stellar personality if your child isn’t climbing up the restaurant table or sitting still, even, buzzing like children do.

The dream goes: boy meets girl, boy marries girl, and boy and girl have children. But it’s a dream. And it doesn’t have to be your dream. Your dream can be to find that perfect fit for you. That person with a personality that suits your own. Who lives life like you want to live it. Who loves how you want to be loved.

Do not rule out a parent in your search for love. Children shape us quicker than any life challenge. They force us to see ourselves and to reflect on how we live. They teach us love.

Dating a single parent requires seriousness on your part. Because a child or children are involved, their emotions will also become involved. Dating a single parent requires you to date at your best. Here a few helpful points to remember:

Timing

Time is a luxury in the single parent’s life, so, in dating a single parent, your timing, too, becomes crucial. Because a single parent is obligated to his or her child, a last minute invitation seldom leads to a date.

Plan on planning ahead. On the first few dates, you will want to meet the single parent sans child. This will help both of you make a clearer decision about a possible commitment. Yes. Commitment. Before meeting the child, some level of commitment should be foreseeable to both involved.

Parenting

After you have decided you want to be with this person for some time, after more and more of your dates are play dates, your role may begin to look a lot more like a parent’s role. Negotiating boundaries may prove difficult here. How much should you parent the child? Should you administer punishment?

The best rule here is to treat the child like any adult would. With kindness and respect. With duty to his or her wellbeing. And with authority but not rule of law. Leave the discipline to the parent.

Though your place in the child’s life may grow in time, at first, play the role of supporting adult. Support your partner in his or her parenting decisions and support the child to grow by your example.

Sex

Although never virginal, the sexual activity of single parents runs the spectrum from re-virginal to promiscuous. Sex in a dating relationship with a single parent, therefore, is hard to predict.

If the child is young—a baby still—sex may not be a priority for the mother. A father may feel uncomfortable rounding third if his daughter is doing her math homework in the next room.

Children complicate sex. They remind us of what may come. You may even be thrown for a loop by the coos and sighs off of baby monitor.

Don’t let sex rule the relationship. Though dating a single parent is, indeed, a more modern relationship to have, it needn’t be modern with its expectation for sex. Intimacy goes further in building love and good people than sex. The fact is proven in the flourishing of the children.