“Just take the shirt. I’m telling you it will get you laid and by someone you’ll actually want to date.” I was sitting next to a fellow single mom at a PTA fundraiser in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill. She had been on Match.com for a whole year with little success and confessed to spending $1,200 on a consultant to write her online dating profile. In fact, she was the second single mom that week who had admitted to laying out serious cash for an online dating consultant. I scrolled through her profile photos. “Forget these!” I told her. “All you need is my Star Wars shirt.” My friend looked at me as though I was trying to sell her a time-share. The truth was, the shirt had magic powers—a force, if you will. My insistence came from a deep need to pay it forward as only one single mom can do for another. Just a month before, I had been on the receiving end of this special kind of assistance myself.

The first year after I filed for divorce, I was living an ode to Marianne Moore’s quote, “The cure for loneliness is solitude.” I was in my how-to-be-single phase, using power tools, and I wasn’t completely alone. I was a mom to three kids. All too soon, though, one year turned into two and it was patently clear I no longer knew how to meet men in real life. Out of practice, my flirting was awkward. One friend gently suggested that perhaps I was making things weird. A college friend began to check in on me the way people call on their elderly relatives. The first thing she would say was, “My main concern is getting you laid.”

That, as it happens, was also the main concern of another well-meaning single mom at another PTA fundraiser (who knew the PTA was a gold mine of dating advice?). She had been single 11 months, she told me, until she met someone on Tinder. Okay, I thought, maybe it was time.

Earlier that year, I had, in fact, tried Bumble, but after it netted a single three-hour, no-escape dinner date, I instantly deleted it from my phone. But I heeded her advice and downloaded Tinder. Would it really be any better? My first clumsy swipes resulted in a bunch of blue “super like” stars whether I liked the guy or not. There were the cliché shirtless and headless bathroom shots, guys surfing on remarkably tiny waves, and, of course, lots of men posing while holding dead fish. Within seconds, though, I got plenty of matches myself. Twenty-five minutes after I first logged on, a message came up: “You used to live across the hall from me freshman year at NYU.” And so my first date was set up.