Yet, strangely, in the last two years I started getting messages from people who turned me down back in high school and college. People who I hadn’t heard from in 20+ years. The messages are all about catching up, I was thinking about you, etc, etc. All women. All single mothers. It doesn’t take a TV detective to deduce what they’re after.

When a single mother approaches a man without children, it is only one of two possibilities:

1. He doesn’t want kids, so why are you asking?

2. He wants kids and has been told he doesn’t measure up to have any of his own.

I’m in camp 2. So when a single mother approaches me or shows interst, I feel insulted. I’ve been told loud and clear for close to 25 years of my life, that’s roughly the year of my first rude rejection, that I’m not good enough, that my DNA needs to vanish from thr gene pool.

What makes me suddenly good enough now? My money and my time. When a single mother approaches a man without kids, she’s instantly signaling she doesn’t care about what you want out of life. It’s just about always about her. How hard it is to raise kids alone. How lonely she is. How she’s struggling.

Where was this woman 20 years ago? Shooting down all the men she’s chasing now in favor of the “superior” option who is out of the picture.

What a single mother is asking of a partner is to make a tremendous sacrifice to someone who she already percieves as a lesser, safe choice. If he was her preferred choice, she wouldn’t be a single mother and the word “step” wouldn’t be affixed before “father”.

I’m not about to sacrifice my outside shot of having kids of my own to take on some glorified roommates who don’t respect me.

Are all like this? No. There are definitely unfortunate circumstances out there where a legitimately good woman finds herself a single mother. The problem is, finding one is about as reliable as placing your life savings on 00 at the roulette wheel and expecting a jackpot.

Eliminating the tranche of single mothers may eliminate a few good options. However, it also eliminates a tremendously gigantic volume of bad actors that will end poorly. Dating is already hard enough, why exacerbate it with a demographic I know is high risk, low reward?