5 Things i wish i knew before dating a single mom

[GoldenRivet]

Thinking about sending this one to cracked it has been strongly edited for language:

5 THINGS I WISH I KNEW BEFORE DATING A SINGLE MOM

5. You will always be the third wheel in virtually every situation:

One thing you can always count on hearing a single mother say, repeatedly, until you even begin to hear the phrase echoing through the empty space of your home when you are completely alone: “My kids come first”. As if we all need that reminder. Yes, we know, you have a genetic obligation to adore the little obnoxious creatures which ripped their way out of your until-then-perfect un-spoilt genitals yet despite us knowing this predisposition of virtually every living thing that ever existed to put it’s offspring before all else in this world, a single mother will still feel the need to compensate for her singular condition and bombard us all with the reminder that “muh kids come first”.

This is a phrase I have grown to hate. I despise every syllable, consonant and vowel when forged together to form it. It is the constant nagging reminder that you kind sir, will henceforth always be regarded as a total afterthought so long as you remain in a relationship with a “single mother”.

It really makes no difference if it is your birthday, wedding, buddy's party – whatever. You dare not make any plans intending to spend any romantic minute with your new found lady because every action, deed, word, or plan that you make revolves around this woman constantly skipping you over because 10,002 different plans need to be made regarding her child. Who will watch the kid? Feed the kid? Put the kid to bed? Make sure they take a bath? who is going to drive them to this place of temporary housing, pick them up from school, take them to school, do their homework with them? Make sure they take their ADHD medication? (because one thing I have learned is that 100% of the children I have come into contact with these days require some form of mood altering drug)


You really don’t make it to the 50th item on her check list before you dissolve into an attitude of “eff it nevermind”. The logistics of placing the child into temporary care for a simple 2 hours so you can go out for a couple of drinks quickly become such a long winded process that your original plans aren’t even worth the trouble.

And even if you stick to your guns and insist on making plans, the fact remains that when you go to a sports bar to watch the big game for your birthday and throw back some beers or rum and cokes or whatever and spend some time with your best gal, the only thing she will go on and on about is her children anyhow. Especially if you have friends tag along and those friends have kids of their own. There is no escaping the situation. Your whole night will be dominated by a frenzy of discussing how amazing each others kids are, and it just makes you want to throw up.

Her. Kids. Come. First. Which generally means you don’t come at all? (see what I did there?)

This scenario is 1000 times worse when you take her on a romantic vacation. The trick, I have learned is to make no vacation last longer than 3-4 days. Which is difficult for childless, adventurous men like myself who find it not at all uncommon to travel for a couple of weeks at a time. For some reason the separation between mother and child is such an overwhelming force for young women that they cannot even sit on the pure white beaches of Waikiki with an unlimited supply of fruity umbrella drinks without fretting over their kiddo. And this phenomenon grows to a point after about 3 days, that nobody in your group is having fun anymore because the girls have to get up and call the sitter to check on Billy every other hour.

4. Her children don’t respect you and everyone knows it:

At best, these children will view you in a “brotherly” sort of way. They will cheat at board games right to your face, they will cuss with you or at you, steal your beer, demand that you buy them stuff and then bitch about it when you do… even the 5 year olds will know you on a first name basis. They know you aren’t “daddy” and they don’t give one solitary screaming damn about your so called authority. When dinner is finished and you say “put your plate away.” A six year old girl will not have a single problem with looking you right in the eyes with a defiant gaze and not moving a single muscle in reply to your simple request.

Worst case scenario they will resent you because you aren’t Daddy. And they will do everything in their power to drive a wedge between you and your new found love (their mommy). You try to hold hands, the kids rush in between you, you go for a kiss the kid butts in, you get frisky the kid is scared of the dark and wants to sleep in mommy’s bed tonight. I am convinced that children have a rudimentary part of the brain that detects when you are in the mood.

It won’t stop there.

This lack of respect is overwhelmingly and painfully obvious to you and the rest of the world when things goes south right in the middle of a restaurant. Your sitting at dinner with your girlfriend and her kid and the kid decides “you know what? to hell with this food, to hell with olive garden and to hell with YOU!” and throws a crap-storm tantrum of biblical proportions because the ravioli is round instead of square, or the cilantro touched their pizza or the water has an odd number of ice cubes or there isn’t a McPlayland here! Yes… Children go into full blown red alert, sky is falling, and the Russians have fired the missiles at us, imminent end of the world panic for something like their shoe coming untied.

When I was a kid, my father would have simply smashed my head in with a big rock, explained the situation to the authorities, buried me to be forgotten and immediately passed the torch to a better behaved sibling (there were originally 8 of us, only 2 remain)

Every eye in the place is cast upon you, and within seconds of your inactivity as you slump in your chair, defeated, night ruined and little beads of sweat forming on your forehead all of society has judged you to be a spineless eunuch of a father. It is because you are a pansy that your kid acts like a yelling crying blubbering jerk for no substantial reason whatsoever and you sir must sit there and accept this label and soak up the gazes from your peer group.


You can’t stand on a chair, point at your girlfriend and proclaim to everyone “We are just dating, this is not my kid, I have no control of this situation”; nor can you grab the kid by the arm and drag them kicking and screaming into the bathroom for a good old fashioned waterboarding or whatever… unless of course you want to go to jail. Because apparently the state has a problem with a person disciplining a kid when they aren't the direct parents of said kid.


3. Their Piece of crap father is viewed as a faultless God among men:

Lets face the music; single mothers who retain full custody of the children are often single for a reason… normally that reason is because they have evaded some horridly crappy situation with the father who, to this day is horridly crappy as far as people go. Alcoholic? Drug Addict? Woman Beater? Repeat offender on all counts? Yes, possibly all of those things and worse.


He misses all of the kids sporting events, awards ceremonies, birthday parties… and on the occasion that he does show up he looks like his clothes were plucked out of the unclaimed laundry bin at a coin op laundry and he is a solid 45 minutes late.



And despite all of this, you will be the wicked old step father or wicked old boyfriend and their dad will be a knightly hero who every other Friday afternoon descends out of the heavens riding his rust colored Chevy Lumina down a golden stream of angel piss right into your driveway to retrieve the kid who you have been helping to raise and financially supporting 24 days out of every month without a shred of appreciation from anyone.

You could swear the child shot you the middle finger as they drove away.
And the only thing you can really do about it is keep on doing what you have been doing… not one flippin thing. No matter how bad you want to pull Junior aside and advise him to ask mommy about those scars on her face, where she got them, who gave them to her, or to tell him about the time daddy forced a Beretta 9mm pistol down her throat while she lay crying for her life… You can’t. Socially speaking, you just can’t. Not only will the child not believe you anyhow, you will in all probability get sued for slander when news of this conversation reaches daddy and his speed ball wears off long enough for him to think about the situation during his brief moment of clarity.

2. Discipline and Child-rearing will become a war between you and her:

One thing is a fact, you were probably raised differently than the woman you are dating, and that applies just as much to her child(ren). Especially today in the Mr. Rogers World we live in where spankings are a thing of the past and grounding a kid from something usually is a form of punishment lasting a matter of hours or days and the toughest trick in the parenting book is to point a finger and slowly counting to 3 while never quite making it to 3 before surrendering.

But that’s not how it was for you and that’s why we are raising a generation of sissies; You can remember that time you were grounded from your Nintendo NES for a whole month… and they didn’t just take it away from you, no… they took the power plug and the controllers leaving the system and all its games in plain sight there in your room for you to look at and think hard upon how you effed up. Yep, you could sit there in your room and look at your NES all you wanted, but it was of no use to you without those items handy.

I was once grounded for the first half of an entire summer for having to take summer school. I could have all the visitors I wanted provided we never left my house. And when you are a kid; who the hell wants to visit you when you have no video games and can’t leave?

So during a tantrum about this or that her kid gets grounded… for a couple of hours. What? The first cardinal sin you can commit in this department is to call into question the methods of punishment and the duration of groundings or the methods of raising the kids because fool… didnt you read the beginning of this article? “muh kids come first”.

Jump into that band wagon and you will see how fast an argument between a mother and child can turn to immediate peace between them and now you are the target in both of their newly aligned sites. And you will lose, every single time.

1. Sex will become virtually non-existent:

Remember when you first started dating super milf? She was a caged animal set free from the bonds of motherhood. The kid(s) would go to Daddy’s house for the weekend, you would have a few drinks at a classy bar, enjoy dinner together, talk, joke around, she would be all over you, and then you would go home and bone up like wild animals free of inhibitions in every room of the house. You had no problem pushing Sippy cups or Elmo paper plates off the kitchen table and taking care of the passion business right there on the spot where Junior would be eating his chicken nuggets come Monday. And she didn’t have a problem with it either… because how else is she going to sell this whole situation to you? with plenty of good cooking?

They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. And yes, ugly women who can cook really well have been known to say that. The rest of the world knows that the way to a Man’s heart has less to do with his stomach and more to do with that special area right behind his trouser zipper.


She will keep up this show, for a time. The trap is set. One day you will find yourself in too deep. You live with her perhaps… for some inexplicable reason you have developed some genuine closeness to the little humans she lives with. Then the trap springs into action. Or lack of action.

The sex keg which so recently flowed over with the frothy brew of sweat and sticky naughty bits has been tapped dry. You used to not even count the number of times you enjoyed one another on that primal level because you were too busy bumping-uglys to count anything. Now the only reason you count these intimate encounters is to make sure you can still count to 3 at the end of every month.

The unfortunate thing here is that normally, men need intimacy to feel a connection to their partners; women need a connection to their partners to desire intimacy. It’s a serious catch 22. Good one God… you got us!








Needless to say the whole experience of being a childless male who has entered into a relationship with a single mother has not been all fun and games. It has been frustrating, infuriating, it has made me question my sanity and i have learned that women are born insane and fray off into different varieties of insanity as they grow older. every time i think i have this figured out i discover that im a complete idiot lost in a foggy wood who has just realized i have been walking in circles the whole time.


If you are going to take on the responsibility inherent in developing a serious relationship with a single mother... you better be a person who pays attention to the details - a person who has a major capacity for finding enjoyment in the little things... because thats where the fun and games are. it is days of frustration punctuated by scant seconds worth of kodak moments.

[TarJak]

The only thing that you needed to know before dating a single mum is don't. Ever.

All the above plus the likely reappearance of the piece of crap that fathered her sprogs in a drunken/drug crazed rage w wanting revenge/to regain his lost live etc. can be added to the list.

[nikimcbee]

Bad day at the office GR?

[GoldenRivet]

Lol no not really... just dramatizing a few of my less desirable experiences with a sprinkling of experiences from friends of mine.

All is well - as well as can be

#3 is mainly what im dealing with

[swamprat69er]

Been there, done that. After the last one and I split up I said, 'never again'.
I am happy, I am single and have been for 25 years!

[Betonov]

I'm 28 and my choices are slowly disolving into too young/single mother
I hate getting old

[swamprat69er]

Originally Posted by Betonov

I hate getting old

It surely beats the alternative!

[Dread Knot]

Originally Posted by Betonov

I'm 28 and my choices are slowly disolving into too young/single mother
I hate getting old

Keep an eye out for the rich divorcees.

As another aspect to the perils of dating single mothers, I've lost count of the horrible news stories about abused or tormented kids that start out with-- "the mother's boyfriend is suspected of, or charged with...." Sounds like this is almost always a bad combination on both sides of the equation.

[swamprat69er]

Originally Posted by Dread Knot

Keep an eye out for the rich divorcees.

With no kids. Even the adult kids come first!

[Dread Knot]

Originally Posted by swamprat69er

With no kids. Even the adult kids come first!

Yes. Important caveat.

[Wolferz]

Originally Posted by swamprat69er

With no kids. Even the adult kids come first!

I can relate to that one. OMG!

I call it single mom with a squatter.

[swamprat69er]

or they are always moaning over the kid that they gave up. If they didn't want nothing to do with it when they spit it out, why moan over it now? It is 'water under the bridge'.

[Armistead]

My wife had a daughter when we got married that was 4. I certainly went through many of those things to a level, but wasn't bad until she hit puberty.
She loved playing the daddy card, even though her dad ignored her most of her life. Course my wife and I had another child by then.

I would never advise my son to marry a single mother..

[vanjast]

The wife and I say to each other that if we divorce, or any of us kick the bucket... that's it, we're not going to put up with another one of us. We're going to party instead.

[swamprat69er]

Originally Posted by Armistead

I would never advise my son to marry a single mother..

Smart man.