There are roughly 15.18 million families in the United States headed by a woman with no spouse present, according to 2023 census data. That is a lot of mothers running households alone. And for a good portion of them, the idea of fitting a date into a week that already has no room left in it feels like trying to park in a full lot. You circle and circle, and eventually you go home.
But people do it. Single mothers date, fall in love, build relationships, and manage to keep the rest of their lives from falling apart in the process. The question was never about permission. A Pew Research Center survey found that 78% of Americans consider single parenting acceptable, so the social pressure has loosened considerably. The real question is logistics. When every hour of the day already has a name on it, how do you carve out something for yourself without shortchanging your kids or losing your mind?
This article answers that with specifics.
Scheduling a Date When Your Calendar Already Belongs to Someone Else
Around 27 percent of single parents say coordinating schedules is the main thing that keeps them from going on dates, according to data from the Stir dating app. That number makes sense when you consider that 80 percent of one-parent family groups are maintained by a mother, and most of those mothers are managing school pickups, bedtimes, and custody handoffs on a weekly loop. The time exists, but it is buried inside routines that serve someone else first.
The practical fix starts with filtering. Using dating sites like Hinge or apps built for single parents lets you sort for people who already understand that Tuesday at 9 p.m. might be the only open window this week. Among adults aged 30 to 49, about 53 percent have used online dating platforms, per Pew Research Center data, so the pool is there.
Your Custody Schedule Is Your Dating Schedule
If you have a co-parenting setup, the nights your kids are with their other parent are the most obvious openings. Write those nights down somewhere you can see them. Block them off as available, even if you end up spending them watching TV. The point is to mentally register those windows as yours before the week fills them in with errands and obligations.
Some mothers split custody evenly, others see their kids go to the other parent every other weekend, and some have no custody arrangement at all. Each situation produces a different set of openings. The Stir dating app, for example, lets members note if their kids live with them all, part, or none of the time, which helps potential matches understand what your schedule actually looks like before anyone sends a message.
If your kids are with you full time and there is no co-parent in the picture, the openings are harder to find, but they still exist. Grandparents, siblings, close friends, trusted babysitters. You probably already have a short list of people you would call in an emergency. A date is not an emergency, but it deserves the same level of planning.
Stop Waiting for a Free Saturday Night
Saturday night dates are a convention, not a requirement. Lunch dates work. Coffee at 10 a.m. on a weekday works. A 45-minute walk while your kid is at soccer practice works, if the other person is willing to meet you near the field. The format of a date matters far less than the fact that 2 people showed up and paid attention to each other.
Rigid ideas about what a date should look like tend to eliminate options before you even start looking. If you need the date to be dinner at a restaurant from 7 to 10, you will rarely find the time. If you allow a date to be 40 minutes at a coffee shop while your toddler naps at your mom’s house, suddenly your calendar opens up.
Online Dating Removes Half the Problem
Meeting someone in person requires being in a place where single people gather, at a time when you are free, looking approachable, and feeling energetic enough to hold a conversation with a stranger. That is 4 conditions at once, and for a busy mother, hitting all 4 on the same evening is rare.
Online dating removes at least 2 of those conditions. You can message people from your couch at 9:30 p.m. after the kids are asleep. You can take your time responding. You can screen for compatibility before spending a single minute away from home. Among adults aged 30 to 49, more than half have already tried this, so there is nothing unusual about it.
Apps built specifically for single parents, like Stir, go a step further. Stir has a feature called “Stir Time” that helps parents find a mutually convenient time to meet, which addresses the scheduling problem directly. They have also partnered with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to provide safety tips tailored to single mothers and fathers, which is worth knowing about.
Let Go of the Guilt
A lot of single mothers skip dating entirely because they feel guilty about taking time away from their children. That guilt is real and it is common, but it does not hold up under scrutiny. Children benefit from having a parent who maintains adult relationships and a sense of identity outside of caregiving. You do not become a worse mother by spending 90 minutes at dinner with someone you like.
The 23% of children in the U.S. who live with a single mother are not harmed by their mother going on a date. They are harmed by instability, neglect, and chaos. A planned evening out, with a trusted person watching the kids, is none of those things.
Small, Consistent Effort Beats Grand Plans
You do not need to date 3 times a week. You do not need to be on 5 apps at once. You need 1 opening per week or every 2 weeks, and the willingness to use it. That could mean 1 date a month for 6 months until you find someone worth seeing again. It could mean texting with 3 people for 2 weeks before meeting any of them.
The mothers who find time to date are not the ones with the most free time. They are the ones who stopped treating their own needs as optional and started treating a small pocket of time each week as non-negotiable. Put it on the calendar the same way you put a dentist appointment or a parent-teacher conference. It belongs there.
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