Dating after divorce: how to know you're not just running away

You created the profile on a Sunday at eleven at night. The children were with their other parent that week and the flat was too quiet. You picked three photographs, wrote two sentences about yourself, deleted them and wrote them again. On Monday morning you removed the app. On Wednesday you downloaded it again.

Underneath that swinging back and forth is a question few people say out loud: am I doing this because I would like to meet someone, or because I cannot bear the silence? The people around you have two answers ready, and both are loud. Some say it is high time you “moved on”. Others say it is too soon and you must first spend some time alone. Neither group knows what is going on inside you on a Sunday at eleven.

I have already written about when a new relationship comes too early in A new relationship after divorce: when is it too soon and how do you know you’re ready. Here I am interested in the step before that, quite concretely: the first dates. The fear of them, what you say about your divorce, where the children fit into all this, and how you can tell running away from taking a step — without anyone prescribing whether you ought to be single or in a couple.

What research says about “rebound” relationships

The folk rule is clear: whoever enters a new relationship too quickly is running away, and will pay for it. Research does not confirm the rule as neatly as you might expect.

The American psychologist E. Mavis Hetherington followed almost 1,400 families over three decades after divorce (Hetherington & Kelly, 2002). Her main message was not that there is a right time for a new beginning, but that the paths after divorce are very varied and that most adults and children recover in time. A more recent study tested the “rebound relationship” myth directly: people who started a new relationship sooner after a break-up were not worse off. They reported more confidence in their own desirability and less attachment to their ex-partner than those who stayed single (Brumbaugh & Fraley, 2015).

Before you turn this into permission or advice, three limitations. The participants were mostly younger adults, not divorced parents with two children and a joint mortgage. The study showed an association, not a cause: perhaps dating helps, or perhaps those who already feel better go out among people sooner. And it measured the well-being of the person dating — not how well they chose, and not how the children fared.

So the honest summary is modest. The date on the calendar does not tell you much. What matters more than when is what you are moving away from and what you are moving towards.

Running away or taking a step: the question is not when, but from what

The same app, the same café and the same person across the table can be an escape or a step. From the outside there is no difference. From the inside you recognise it by what you need from the date.

When you are running away, you are moving away from something: the silence, the feeling of having been rejected, the sadness that arrives in the evening. The date then has a job to do. It has to work, it has to tell you that you are still wanted, it has to fill Friday night. If it does not work, you feel worse than before. If it does, the relief lasts an hour or so, then the emptiness returns and you need the next one.

When you take a step, you are moving towards something. You are curious about who this person is. A bad date is a bad evening, not a verdict on you. And above all: you could have spent the evening at home alone and it would have been all right. Not wonderful, but all right.

Another sign is your ex-partner. If they are the third person at the table throughout the date — you compare, you prove a point, you tell them in your head how well you are doing — the date is not about the person in front of you. That is no disgrace; it is information that the grieving is still under way. Why the end of a relationship hurts like a loss is the subject of Divorce as grief: why the end of a relationship hurts like losing someone you love.

The division into escape and step is, of course, too clean. For most people it is both at once, in different proportions on different days. So the question is not whether you are “pure”, but whether you know which one is in charge tonight.

Why a first date after many years is so frightening

If you were in a relationship for fifteen years, you sat at your last first date as a different person, in a different body and in a world without apps. The rules have changed and you have had no practice. It is normal for your hands to shake outside the café door.

Fear has a good reason here. Divorce taught your nervous system that closeness can hurt a great deal, so it rates every new approach as a risk. More everyday worries join in: am I still attractive, what shall I say when they ask about my ex-wife, what if someone sees me. Many people also carry a quiet shame about being “a divorcee”, as if it were a stain on their record.

The body settles with small, predictable steps, not with persuasion. A few things help almost every time:

• A short first date. Coffee or a walk, an hour, and an ending known in advance. A three-course dinner is too much for a first meeting.
• In daylight and in a public place. Arrive and leave on your own, and tell someone where you will be. This is ordinary caution, not distrust.
• One date, not three a week. Leave a day or two after each one to see what it has left in you.
• Two minutes for the body before you walk in. A slow, longer out-breath tells the nervous system there is no danger; breathing with a longer out-breath helps.

And allow yourself to be a beginner. The person across the table is often just as nervous, only more practised at hiding it.

What to say about your divorce on a first date

The question will come, usually in the first twenty minutes. A good test is simple: can you say two calm sentences about your divorce and then change the subject? Not because you ought to hide it, but because a first date is not the place to work through it.

The conversation below is a composite, not a real person.

“So you’re divorced. Has it been long?”
“A year and a half. I have two children; they’re with me every other week.”
“Was it hard?”
“It was. I’m still learning from it. Tonight, though, I’d rather hear what brings you out for coffee on a Tuesday at six.”
“Fair change of subject.”

Those few lines contain everything a first date needs. The facts are stated without gloss: divorced, two children, how the weeks are arranged. The weight is acknowledged, not unpacked. The ex-partner is neither accused nor defended. And the attention returns to the person sitting opposite.

Do not hide your children. Mentioning them only on the fifth date takes away the other person’s chance to decide fairly, and burdens you with a secret. Equally, the first date need not become a conversation about parenting; the fact is enough.

If you notice that you have been talking about your ex-partner for half an hour, that your voice is shaking or that anger carries you away, nothing is wrong with you. You have learnt something useful: this story still needs a listener who is not a date — a friend, a group or a therapist.

Children: what you tell them and when they meet someone

Here caution is well founded. Research on family transitions shows fairly consistently that what harms children is not a parent having a new relationship but the number of changes: the more adults arrive in and leave a child’s life, the more common the difficulties (Fomby & Cherlin, 2007). These, too, are associations rather than proven causes. But the lesson is useful: you are not protecting your child from your dates; you are protecting them from becoming attached to people who vanish three months later.

A simple division follows. Dates are your adult life and happen when the child is not with you. You need not report on them to your children, but you should not lie either: if a ten-year-old asks where you are going, “for coffee with someone I’m getting to know” is enough. They should meet the new person only once the relationship is stable and both adults have agreed on it.

Two researchers who followed divorced parents through new relationships described how greatly parents differ in how far their decisions about a new partner are guided by the child and how far by their own needs (Anderson & Greene, 2011). Neither extreme is good. A parent who subordinates everything to the child tells the child that they are responsible for the parent’s loneliness. A parent who asks the child nothing presents them with a done deal.

Expect that your child’s reaction will not be an assessment of the new person. Many children go on quietly hoping for a long time that their parents will get back together, and every new person extinguishes that hope. Some feel that being friendly to the new person would betray their other parent. A teenager may respond with eye-rolling or silence; what they need is described in When parents divorce: what a teenager really needs. What protects children after divorce in general is in Children and divorce: what the research really says about what protects them.

Two things I advise against without reservation. Your child should not be your confidant about dating; they do not need to know how it went or whether the person will call. And do not ask them to keep anything from their other parent. A secret carried between two homes is too heavy for a child. When a new relationship becomes a shared life, another chapter begins, and it has its own post: Stepfamilies: why “mine, yours and ours” takes time.

Your ex-partner: what you owe them and what you don’t

You do not owe your ex-partner a report on your dates. You divorced partly so that your private life would no longer be their business, and vice versa.

It is different once the children come into it. Before they meet someone, it is good for the other parent to hear it from you and not from a seven-year-old at dinner. Not because you need their permission, but because the child then does not have to carry the news and watch how it is received. A short, matter-of-fact message is enough. There is more on this kind of arrangement in Co-parenting after separation: how to stay a team when you are no longer a couple.

Be prepared for the reverse as well. The news that your ex-partner is seeing someone can hurt, even if the divorce was your wish. That pain is not proof that you decided wrongly; it is usually the last piece of the goodbye. What is unhelpful is if it sends you out dating as if into a race. That is running away in its purest form.

After the date: a bad evening is not a verdict

After a divorce your skin is thinner. A message that gets no reply, or a date after which nobody gets in touch, easily merges with the bigger story: once again I was not enough. The nervous system does not distinguish well between a stranger who did not write back and a person who left after fifteen years.

It helps to measure the outcome of a date not by the question “did they like me” but by “how did I feel around them”. The first puts you in an exam. The second puts you back in your own life, where you are choosing too.

Expect one more thing: after a pleasant evening, sadness may arrive. It seems illogical, but it is common. New closeness is a reminder of the old one and of what was lost. It does not mean you have made a mistake, nor that this person is not right. But if the evenings after dates are harder than the evenings without them, slow down. The silence that follows divorce is the subject of Loneliness after divorce: the silence you did not expect, and who you are without your former role is explored in Who am I without you? Rebuilding your identity after divorce.

An exercise: three questions before a date and two after

The exercise takes five minutes before the date and five after it. Write the answers down rather than just thinking them; on paper it is harder to talk yourself into something prettier.

1. Before the date: “What would I be doing tonight if I didn’t go?” If the honest answer is “sitting at home, and it would be unbearable”, the date is carrying too great a load. You can still go, but you know what you are bringing with you.
2. “What do I need from this evening?” Write down one word: reassurance, company, curiosity, touch, proof. None is forbidden. What matters is that you know which it is.
3. “What will I say about my divorce?” Write your two calm sentences. If you cannot write them without anger or tears, you have found out where you are.
4. After the date: “How did I feel around this person?” Not whether they liked you. Were you relaxed, tense, seen, unseen? Were you yourself or were you performing?
5. “How much of the time was my mind on my ex-partner?” Estimate it as a percentage. The number is not a grade; it is a signpost: if it is large, the next step is not a second date but a conversation about what is not yet finished.

After three or four dates, read your notes together. A pattern shows up sooner than you would expect.

Where this does not apply

Everything above assumes that you want to date. You do not have to. Nowhere is it written that a divorce ends with a new relationship, and a person who decides on a life without a partner after divorce has not “processed” it any less than one who remarries. There is no deadline.

Nor is running away always bad. In one study, for people who are quick to fear abandonment in relationships, the mere thought that they would be able to meet someone new helped loosen their attachment to an ex-partner (Spielmann et al., 2009). Sometimes a date you go on for the wrong reasons is the first evening in a long while when you laugh. The trouble starts when it becomes the only way you can bear your own company.

Particular caution applies after a relationship in which there was violence or control. There the question is not escape or step but safety — yours and the children’s — and whether you can recognise early warning signs when they reappear in a friendlier form. Specialised help exists for this, which I do not provide myself; in Slovenia there is the SOS helpline for women and children who are victims of violence on 080 11 55, and in immediate danger the police on 113.

And if the grief after divorce is so heavy that you are not sleeping, not eating, or having thoughts that there is no point any more, dating is not the answer. Talk to your GP. In Slovenia, the Klic v duševni stiski helpline is available at night on 01 520 99 00 (7 pm to 7 am), and the Samarijan confidential helpline on 116 123 around the clock.

When talking to a therapist makes sense

You do not need therapy in order to date. It does help when something keeps repeating: every new person resembles your ex-partner after three weeks, every approach ends in retreat, or you keep returning to a relationship that has already ended. The last of these is the subject of Why we go back to exes, and when going back is a pattern rather than love.

In relational family therapy we are interested in where a choice comes from: what you learnt about closeness at home, long before your marriage, and what of that you are unconsciously looking for today. How early experiences are imprinted on adult relationships is described under attachment. If you would like to see the patterns of several generations on one sheet of paper, you can do so in a longer session with a genogram, A Look into the Past. Sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking clients.

What to remember

• Research does not confirm the rule that a quick new relationship is necessarily an escape. What you are moving from and towards matters more than timing.
• You recognise running away by the fact that the date has to do something on your behalf. A step, by the fact that the evening would have been all right without it.
• On a first date, two calm sentences about your divorce are enough. Do not hide your children, and do not unpack the whole story.
• You protect children from attaching too soon to people who may leave, not from the fact that you have a life of your own.
• Not dating is an equally valid decision. There is no deadline.