Single Mom and Dating
100. Single Mom and Dating
You’re a single mom and you wonder how to meet someone when you struggle to manage daily life and to have time for yourself.
Your divorce or separation hit you hard and you no longer feel like, or you’re afraid of, getting back into a relationship.
You want to be in a couple again but you feel that your status as a single mom penalizes you.
In this episode, I share my specific keys for single moms (and dads) that will help you open up to love again.
Grieve Your Former Relationship
A separation that involves children is a long process where conflicts can be numerous: custody of the children, child support, division of property, blackmail… which must be managed alongside the mourning of a relationship, the children getting used to the separation/shared custody, and are added to the mental load that falls on parents.
So my first piece of advice is to lower your expectations of having to manage everything perfectly and to dare to ask for help: an hour of break here and there can work miracles and help you have the strength to get through this difficult phase.
The quote “Happy mom, happy child” takes on its full meaning here, especially in the nervous system sense (where the child regulates thanks to co-regulation with their parents).
You are the solid base for your children and so taking care of your mental and emotional health is your first priority, and that means welcoming each phase of mourning without trying to shorten them. I describe these phases to you in episode 42 How to grieve a relationship? and in episode 41 you can assess whether you have finished your mourning or not.
Take the Time to Learn the Lessons From Your Breakup
To envision the future serenely and dare to risk love again, I advise you to really understand why this relationship didn’t work and what you would do differently in your next relationship:
- What wasn’t working in your relationship?
- What is their share of the blame?
- What is your share of the blame (what you did or let happen)?
- Which love patterns from your past are you repeating? Here deep work on your love patterns is essential to stop repeating the same failures (I tell you more about it in Episode 3)
❤️ Watch my webinar on how to finally be happy in love!
Also be attentive if you feel that your romantic relationships after breakups are “worse”, it’s often an indicator that this relationship was a shock relationship and that it needs to be worked on specifically (I’m going to talk about it in episode 105)
In the program Opening up to love, the first step, the assessment, gives you exactly a clear view of what you’re repeating from the past, whether this relationship was a shock relationship and what needs to change to avoid repeating the same mistakes in your next relationship.
This step is for me key to wanting to open up to love again. It’s often at this step that the desire comes back naturally because you are in control of changing the situation.
Clearly Define What You Want to Invest in Dating
For a single parent, planning your time is a key element to decide what time you want/can invest in dating:
- Do you have a balance between your life as a single mom and the time available for yourself? There’s no point starting to date if you feel exhausted and can’t manage to have time for yourself.
- Look at your schedule with and without your children and decide realistically how much time you want/can invest in dating without losing this balance, and put it in your calendar.
Here several factors can make this planning complicated: your really available time, what you think you have to do (your vision of your obligations) and the level of quality with which you want to do them, the mental load that what you have to do takes up, and that is why in the program Opening up to love I have a module dedicated to time management to help participants have time for what is essential.
To give you an idea, a good start would be to make yourself available 3*30 minutes per week to go on the dating apps and/or video calls and manage to free up time for 1-2 dates per week.
An Essential Key in Dating as a Single Parent: the Video Call
In episode 9 “Managing the dating phase well”, I give you more of my basic dating advice. For single parents, optimizing your time in dating is essential. Instead of chatting on the apps for a long time and meeting in person for the first date, doing a video call will save you a lot of time and you will be more motivated to go to your dates afterwards because you will have done a pre-selection. Most apps have this feature now.
Be Clear About What You're Looking for in a Partner or Relationship
Take the time to ask yourself which partner suits you and what you’re looking for in your new relationship to do the right casting from the start and avoid wasting your time with someone who doesn’t suit you. Here are the more specific questions for single moms:
- Do you want a partner who also has children? If so the distance between your places of residence will play an important role because you will not be very flexible to move.
- Do you want a partner who wants children?
- Do you want to live with your partner?
- What role do you want him to play with your child? If you want him to play an educational role it means he must share your views on education.
- What type of relationship do you want? I was able to observe among the single moms I’ve accompanied a lot of guilt about no longer wanting to live with their partners or no longer wanting to remarry when it’s their lives and therefore their rules.
For you
FREE Webinar "HOW TO FREE OURSELVES FROM THE PATTERNS THAT PREVENT US FROM BEING HAPPY IN LOVE?"
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Remember That You're Writing Your New Story
When you start a relationship again as a single parent, remember that you are writing your story: the moments as a twosome, the seduction phase, the little attentions are the cement of your couple. Moving too fast to the Netflix and chill phase when the children are in bed risks giving your couple a fragile base when the first difficulties or crises arrive. (Remember your former relationship that didn’t work even though you met without children).
Ask yourself how you can manage to free up time for this phase: babysitter, other single-mom friends, changing custody weekends to match the days without children….
Rebuilding a Blended Family Means Accepting to Make Many Mistakes Before Succeeding
Matching 2 schedules, 2 custody constraints, children with different upbringings, 2 different pasts, it’s normal to have hiccups.
Letting go of the pressure of immediate success and solving one problem at a time while keeping enough time to spend good moments together is what will help you build for the long term.
And It Works
I’ve been lucky to accompany many single moms and it’s a joy to see how much their results change by doing deep work.
You can listen to EP 44 The love story of Carine EP 55 The love story of Elena and EP 80 The love story of Virginie who has now met someone.
This deep work is what we do in the program Opening up to love .
This deep work is what we do in the program Opening up to love. You can take the Day of the Past option, a day of Somatic Deprogramming: psycho-corporeal work to deprogram nervous system automatisms and reprogram new relational reflexes.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “S’ouvrir à l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
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