One guy compared my child to a disease: what it’s like online dating as a single mother Amy Nickell was enjoying solo parenting, but wanted to meet someone. How hard could navigating dating sites be…? In many […]

Amy Nickell was enjoying solo parenting, but wanted to meet someone. How hard could navigating dating sites be…?

In many ways, I was chuffed to be doing the whole mum thing solo. I could give my wartorn vagina as much of a rest as I wanted, I could starfish in my own bed during the 0.00008 hours’ sleep I was getting, etc. But the tim e came when I was ready to get back on the horse, so to speak, and start dating again. Like Carrie Bradshaw, if Carrie got knocked up, abandoned and moved back in with her parents in the home counties. Sequel, anyone?

I surmised that Tinder was for the hot and childless of which I considered myself neither, so decided to sign up to Match.com – which is basically where your divorced auntie would go to pull. A landscape of men in their fifties with usernames like “NICEGUYHANK” or “DALE1956” and lots of :-).

Match.com gives you a more thorough dating CV than any app ever did and includes a section on children. Now I was in the “already have” bracket rather than “never” or “someday”. I quickly discovered that life isn’t fruitful on Match.com for the “already have” bracket and, messages dwindling, I naïvely decided to leave it blank. Not lying as such, just careful truth editing.

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I finally received a message from a man who was under 50 and looked sort of acceptable. I definitely wouldn’t have thought so pre-baby, but I’d decided that I was different now and standards had to be lowered accordingly. Don’t worry, I definitely don’t think this now – this was likely more of that temporary post-baby insanity.

I asked my hairdresser to make me look more like a mum

Around this time, I also grew my hair and dyed it a more “natural” blonde colour, which was probably the first request in hairdressing history to look “more like a mum”. So with my self-esteem hitting an all-time low, I decided to go on a date with a primary school teacher who looked a bit like Duncan from Blue.

We’d been messaging for about a week, with no mention of significant tiny others, when he asked if I’d like to meet for a drink. First dates with people you’ve met on the internet serve as a formality to ensure the person isn’t actually a nymphomaniac/pervert/megalomaniac/narcissist/married man/catfish. Then, all being well, you can go for dinner for date two.

To prepare myself I had a WKD in the bath at home getting ready, just to take the edge off.

First dates unhinge everyone

Well, it is, of course, a truth universally acknowledged that first dates unhinge even the most together of people who didn’t give birth four months previous. I felt the most nervous I think I’ve ever felt about anything, including childbirth.

So with my going-out frock on and tiny clutch bag filled with, er, nothing in my hand, I hit the pavement and walked into town for my first date in a LONG time. Since one became two.

First things first, he looked a lot less like Duncan from Blue in real life. Maybe Duncan from Blue if you saw him through a window smeared with Vaseline. He was definitely shorter than his profile had led me to believe (WHY IS THIS ALWAYS A THING?) and had styled his hair into a spiky quiff. But there I was, doing my very best to charm him: excelling in all the necessary eyelash fluttering, laughing at his average jokes, saying “wow” to his stories about life in the primary school fast lane.

“Tell me something crazy about you…” he asked

“Oh, I don’t know! Sometimes when I’m hungover, I watch old Newsnight episodes to see what haircuts politicians had in the 1980s.” Great.

I just wanted to feel like I was fanciable

Looking back, I think I just wanted him to like me to validate that I still was datable, still fanciable and that I could still “do” the whole men thing. In any case, I think my inane answer must have temporarily lowered my guard, because that, my friends, is when the s*** bomb went off. He asked me who I was living with to which I said: “Well, I’m back with my parents at the moment because I had my little boy not so long ago–”

“As in a baby?” he said.

“Yes, I suppose you could call him one of those. He’s four months old.” The silence felt like it was pushing against me.

I’d been pregnant a LONG time so my time off the dating scene felt way longer than it probably seemed to this guy. I decided to just grin and hope he wanted to have sex with me enough to just brush over it for now.

“Do you not think you should have mentioned that on your profile?” he finally responded.

To which the “me” of now says, “Sorry hun, I don’t really, no”.

Is it a problem?

The “me” of then said, “I suppose you are right. Sorry, I should have mentioned it. Is it a problem?”

It seemed it was a problem. He took a sharp intake of breath, actually clicked his knuckles, let out a sad sigh and said: “I suppose not. It’s not so much of a problem. I mean, we’ve all got skeletons in our closet. Take me for example; I’ve got Crohn’s disease.”

Right there in the middle of the almost nice gastro pub, he compared my son to living with a chronic illness. Now only I, and I alone, am allowed to take such a reductive viewpoint of parenting. I wish I could say now that I see where he was coming from but I never will.

Unbelievably, thinking I would now be rendered permanently hideous to all men, I was still keen to go out with sort-of Duncan from Blue again, and being so remarkably better looking than him, I expected him to feel the same. Although we only had one drink, he promised to give me a text. Did he say goodbye or see you later? I was too drunk to care.

The morning after

The next day I was excited to receive a text. Until I read it. “Hi Amy, thanks for a good evening. You are obviously a great girl but I think we are looking for different things. Sorry.”

Ideally, “sorry” shouldn’t be included in a postdate text message. “Sorry” suggests you haven’t exactly aced that round. I wished I’d drunk his on-the-house Limoncello. I had another WKD in the bath that night to drown my sorrows.

Being rejected by a man with funny ears after he’d compared my child to a debilitating illness wasn’t ideal for my already rock-bottom self-confidence. But it taught me one thing: paying for Match.com didn’t necessarily produce a match worth paying for, and so I went back to what I knew. I cut and bleached my hair and re-activated Tinder.

This is an edited excerpt from ‘Confessions of a Single Mum: What it’s like when you’re expecting the unexpected‘ by Amy Nickell (£16.99, Headline) out now