To Date or Not to Date; The Single Parent Question

To date as a single parent can be tricky as well as exhausting. There is always the fact that the parent must make choices that are right for their children as well as themselves. This of course is the best-case scenario. Often time the parents will make decisions of instant gratification and pay no attention to how the relationship may be affecting their children.

These people aren't real parents, the just happen to have kids.

Upon observation some people date single parents with the knowledge that they wont have to be attached to them for very long. A single parent finding time for something so trivial and tedious as dating becomes a joke. It is almost a "been there, done that" way of thinking. Usually one becomes a single parent after years of dealing with a relationship that doesn't work, so it is easy to see when a new relationship won't work either. It wastes time that could be better spent cleaning, organizing, and for most of us single parents just sitting alone, in the quiet evening with a glass of wine.

When the alternative is to listen to someone boast, lie, or portray an image that will later be shattered the latter seems like the right choice. Also, often times the person dating the single parent doesn't understand that the child or children come first. This creates a problem on one hand, but on the other makes it pretty easy to figure out if the person is worth continuing a relationship with. People who are jealous of children are completely useless and need to be discarded from the single parent's life as well as the children's lives. People like this are often times instigators, bullies and spoiled children themselves and have no place in the adult dating world.

In conclusion, dating as a single parent can temporarily provide escapism, but often times is a lesson in patience and laboring constant disappointment. There isn't anything wrong with wanting to be in a relationship or maybe solidify the family until further by adding someone to it. The problems that arise are those of a more sophomoric nature when it comes to having to drop the bomb on a date that in fact one is a single parent.