I Don’t Want To Date a Man Who Has Children

And I shouldn’t be expected to change my standards

When I was twenty-four, I remember having a conversation with a coworker about the idea of dating a man who had children. I didn’t have any children and told my colleague that I couldn’t see myself dating someone who did, because I wasn’t sure that I wanted any myself.

My colleague’s response was to become angry and demand to know why I felt like that. I knew we weren’t interested in dating each other, so his strong reaction took me by surprise. I later reasoned that he’d probably gotten angry because he had a daughter and assumed many women would react the same way as I did. To this day, I’m still unsure of what caused his extreme reaction.

I wish I could say that he was the only person who’d ever had an issue with me not wanting to date a man who had kids, but about a month later another coworker approached me with the same question.

Why don’t you want to date a man with kids? Do you think you’ll have to pay for their stuff? I pay for all my son’s stuff.

I assured him that my reason for not dating men with children was not a financial one. I remember telling him that I didn’t want the responsibility of dating someone with kids, which puzzled him. I explained to him that I was only twenty-four and would prefer to be with someone who was in the same place in life as I was. My coworker claimed that there would be no responsibility and that he never asked women to help him raise his child. While that may have been true at the start of the relationship, he wasn’t thinking about the future and the possibility of his son getting a new stepmom.

As I got older, the issue arose more and more often. People would tell me I should start dating men with children because men who hadn’t had kids would be harder to find as I got older. They would also tell me I might miss out on an otherwise great man if I refused to date men with children. There was even a time when a coworker tried to set me up with someone just because he didn’t have children. They didn’t consider my other preferences in a man or even know the man as a person when they tried to force me into considering a relationship with him.

Recently, I’ve been letting YouTube videos play in the background whenever I’m writing. Usually, the videos are about movies I’ve seen or want to see or video games I play, but sometimes YouTube plays things that are not my cup of tea. One of those things was a video that featured dating advice, from a man to other men. Usually, I would skip something like this, but I was curious.

The video was about forty minutes long and featured an (unattractive, to my mind) man telling other men why they shouldn’t date women with children. He called these women “low-value women” and said that the women wanted men to provide financially for their children. He even calculated the price of raising a child, as if the child’s father would be nowhere in sight.

I thought about the man’s video for a long time. I even went to the video on my phone so that I could see the comments. There were dozens of men in his comments, praising him. Some of these men were fathers themselves, and they refused to date women with children.

I didn’t understand why the video bothered me so much. I didn’t have children, and I wouldn’t have wanted to date the man in the video regardless of that fact. Had the man’s video bothered me because of the conversation I’d had with my coworkers years earlier? Had they thought that I was viewing them as “low-value” men?

I managed to push the man’s YouTube video out of my mind until TMZ announced that Megan Fox was dating Machine Gun Kelly. I wasn’t a fan of either of them, but I noticed something about the comments section. Most of the people in the comments section were trashing Megan Fox because she had children. They called her unattractive and ‘used up’ because she had three kids. Some commenters even said that she used to be ‘hot’ before she had her children. Machine Gun Kelly also has a child, but no one mentioned that fact, which made me realize that it’s more acceptable for a man to date when he’s a father.

I later came across a woman on TikTok who shared her experiences of online dating. She posted in her profile’s bio that she was almost 40 and didn’t want to date a man with children. Many of her matches ignored that part of her bio or questioned her about it. She shared that she was often attacked by men on the website because of her preference. They labeled her picky, ugly, and many other names that she didn’t deserve. Many commenters brought up her age and told her she was going to be alone forever. While watching her videos, I realized she was being attacked for wanting the same things I did. If she had been a man, she probably wouldn’t have faced any backlash for her videos, but women are expected to have lower standards.

Despite the hate she received, she stood by her choice to only date men who didn’t have children, and that’s what I’m going to do as well. I shouldn’t have to lower my standards because other people tell me to or because I’m getting older. It’s not wrong to want a dating experience that belongs only to me and the man I decide to date. I don’t want to help a man raise his children, or be forced to become friends with his ex. I want a man who doesn’t have any prior obligations, and if I can’t find him — well, staying single doesn’t sound so bad.

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