As we all know, dating is arguably an essential part of finding love. Therefore, it is common practice for people interested in a romantic relationship to go on dates, where they can get to spend time together and get to know each other as they build their relationship. While this is quite straight forward for singles who have no commitments, the same is quite challenging for single parents, especially
single mothers. Single parents often have spent substantial time with their children to develop a bond and love for them during the time they were out of a relationship. During the break from romance, single parents will usually focus their children's attention, dedicating their time and even affection to them. Over time, this often develops into a routine of sorts, and it makes dating someone with kids challenging. Consequently, some of the common problems associated with dating as a single mother include the ones listed below.
Dating a person who has kids, as indicated above, is completely different from dating with singles. In such relationships, the children play a major role and often impact the partners' lives for most single mothers, whether due to natural motherly instincts or the love developed with the kids after the end of the relationships that led to the children's bearing. For starters, as a single mom, one may have to endure jealousy between the new partner and the kids. Moreover, due to the jealousy that may arise, one might find it hard to establish a balance between the children and a romantic interest, which is usually manifested in the form of guilt whenever the relationship moves a level higher.
Another challenge associated with dating a single mom is that one will want to control the relationship's timing. While this may be secure for you as a single mom, it is not usually the same in reality since the best relationships happen spontaneously. Join WantMatures.com to get one.
According to Dr. Marika Lindholm, a trained sociologist and founder of Empowering Single Moms Everywhere (ESME), the number of children raised by single mothers in the USA alone is an astounding $23 million. Dr. Lindholm asserts how impressed she is with the effort of the many single mothers raising children and acknowledging the mental strain these women endure. Single women in the USA and elsewhere in the world often fail to ask for help and support, resulting in mental strain due to raising children's financial constraints. Often such women suffer from mental health issues, including depression, which often affects their social life, including reducing their chances of having romantic connections.
Depression often manifests itself in a lack of self-care or drug indulgence or abuse. All factors often negatively impact the ability of a person to develop healthy and progressive relationships. Since romance often requires a single mom to allocate time for the prospective relationship, these can sometimes be overwhelming for some individuals to develop depression further. And the more depressed the person becomes, the less the probability of them to open up in the ways pertinent to romantic and intimate connection.
The end of relationships is often hard and unforgiving for either of the people involved. It even gets messier when there are children involved and sometimes the emotional turmoil that follows, especially if the divorce was due to infidelity issues on the part of the man. The women often take custody of the children and decide to focus on them as a way to deal with the hurt due to infidelity and the divorce that followed. In other cases where the result of the divorce is not related to infidelity, often the death of the relationship resulted from either partner losing interest or falling out of love with each other.
For such single mothers, the divorce rate, especially in progressive societies, was the shift of love and attention from the ex-husband to the children. In such scenarios, the partners' intimacy often dies out gradually until finally, a divorce occurs. It is easier for such single moms to continue focusing on their children instead of searching for romance. Their lack of interest in romantic connections may not be apparent to them. Still, they fail to recognize advances from potential lovers through their actions, thus making them unsuitable for dating.
Sometimes, single moms are often successful at dating and even establish romantic connections with the people that pursue them, like at WantMatures. However, when the time comes to move a level up in the relationship when the partners are supposed to be introduced to the children, they encounter rejection. For this reason, most men in the dating scene find it hard to commit to single mothers even if the women want to. In the same way, women have the same perception of men who ask them out on dates. The resulting situation thus involves a dating pool where single moms fail to embrace romantic connections while the men only look for casual relations, leaving out those men and women in pursuit of serious intimate relationships.
Conclusively, the points above are among the men raised as reasons not to date a single mom. While these reasons may not necessarily apply for every person, in reality, most of them are factually supported by many statistics based on single parents' real-life experiences in the dating game. By considering these challenges associated with single dating parents, single moms can anticipate them and use the insight to help them in their romantic pursuits.
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