Dating as a single mom

These pages are addressed to you — a mother who is dating. No pep talk, no pity, and nothing that puts a child in front of a stranger. The working assumption is that your problem is not confidence, it is time: evenings are produced by arrangements, not moods, and advice that ignores the arrangements is not advice.

The section covers the four questions that actually come up: what to write in a profile and what to keep off a public page permanently; when to start, without a made-up number of months; how and when your child meets someone, in an order that protects the child rather than tests the relationship; and what to do with the evenings that feel like a cost.

One boundary runs through all of it: the first stage of dating happens entirely without your child. Photos, names, schedules and introductions all wait. Every page here returns to that line, because it is the one mistake that cannot be walked back.

Everything here is also readable by the person you are dating, and it is written on that assumption.