It is 9 on a Thursday evening, the children are finally asleep, and a friend has sent the number of someone she thinks you should meet. The last first date you went on was before any of the children were born, possibly before anyone carried a phone in their pocket. Saying yes means finding a free night and someone to watch the children, and it is easy to put the phone down and leave the decision for another day.

Readiness After a Long Marriage

A parent who separated recently is dealing with 2 losses at once, their own and the children's. Kids In The Middle, a nonprofit family counseling agency in Missouri, describes the end of a marriage as a loss that takes time to heal for everyone in the household. Dating while that loss is recent makes it hard to avoid comparisons with the former spouse, both during the date and on the drive home.

One test is how the parent talks about the ex. If every story on a first date comes back to the marriage, the other person will notice. Another test is the reason for dating at all, and companionship and adult conversation are sound reasons. Filling the evenings the children spend at the other parent's house is a weaker one, because those evenings end when the custody schedule changes.

Some parents spend a few months rebuilding a social life of their own first, with friends or a weekly class, before adding dates to it.

Telling the Children

Children should hear from the parent that dating has started before they hear it from a relative or a friend's parent. Details of individual dates can stay private, and most first dates never need to be mentioned again. Kids In The Middle notes that very young children may have an easier time meeting a parent's new partner, while older children will probably be more hesitant. A parent returning to dating in their 40s or 50s may have teenagers, and a teenager may treat the news as an embarrassment or as disloyalty to the other parent. The agency's advice is to ask children how they feel, remind them that both parents still love them and make plain that nobody new is taking the other parent's place.

The Weekly Calendar

For a parent with shared custody, balancing family commitments and dating usually starts with the custody schedule. The nights the children spend at the other parent's home are the obvious choice for a date. A parent with sole custody has fewer free evenings and depends on relatives or a paid sitter, so every night out has a cost.

A weekday lunch or a Saturday morning walk while the children are at practice takes an hour, and either person can leave politely when it ends. It also helps to mention the children and the custody schedule on the first date, so that a person who does not want to plan around them can say so early. The other person may have children too. When both people are parents, there are 2 school calendars and 2 custody schedules to fit together, and a second date can take as much arranging as the first.

Later-Life Divorce in Numbers

A parent dating after a late divorce has good reason to take a new relationship slowly, especially one that involves children. The rate of gray divorce, among Americans aged 50 and older, has doubled since the 1990s, and a 2022 study in The Journals of Gerontology found that 36% of U.S. adults going through a divorce were 50 or older. Pew Research Center data put the rate at 10 divorces per 1,000 married people aged 50 and older in 2015, up from 5 in 1990. For those 65 and older, the rate roughly tripled over the same period.

Many of these divorces end second marriages. About 48% of the people aged 50 and older who divorced in 2015 were in a second or later marriage, and remarriages at that age ended at twice the rate of first marriages, 16 per 1,000 against 8. About a third of all divorces at that age ended marriages that had lasted 30 years or more.

Attitudes Toward Remarriage

It is worth raising marriage by the 2nd or 3rd date, because many divorced and widowed adults date with no intention of marrying again. In a Pew Research Center analysis of 2013 data, 45% of currently divorced or widowed adults said they did not want to marry again, 21% said they did and 31% were unsure. Women were far more likely to rule it out, 54% against 30% of men, and previously married men were more likely than women to have remarried, 64% against 52%. Among previously married people aged 65 and older, half had remarried, up from 34% in 1960. A parent who wants a companion for weekends and a date who wants a stepfamily are looking for different things, and a disagreement about marriage is easier to handle early.

Introducing a Partner to the Children

Kids In The Middle advises waiting 9 to 12 months before introducing a new partner to children. Its reasoning is that children need time to heal from the divorce and protection from a secondary loss if the new partner comes into their lives and then leaves. When the time comes, it recommends a neutral public place such as a park, with the parent already there with the children when the partner arrives, and an activity that lets everyone interact without forced conversation. The agency warns that an introduction made too quickly can shape how the children see the new partner for a long time afterward.

The agency also recommends telling the co-parent first, so the other parent does not hear the news from the children. The National Parents Organization, another nonprofit, treats that conversation as a matter of respect for the co-parent's role in post-divorce romances, and it suggests mentioning that dating has started well before naming a specific partner. Children may worry that they will lose the parent to the new person, or that the new person is meant to replace their other parent. Some children process the change more slowly than others, and a parent who expects that will be less surprised by questions weeks after the first meeting.

The Cost of Moving Too Fast

A partner introduced after 3 months and gone after 6 is a loss the children did not choose. A 2019 Child Trends brief on children's social development found that family instability, meaning changes in a parent's residential and romantic partnerships, was associated with more aggression in children. The same brief found that a mother's move into a new partnership was linked to better social competence in some children, particularly in lower-income families. A parent who waits until a relationship has lasted most of a year before bringing it home lowers the chance that the children see a partner arrive and then leave, and by then the relationship has had time to prove itself. The children also meet someone they were told about in advance and had months to ask questions about.

‍