Five minutes after my first date with Alex, my phone lit up. He was a tall Massachusetts transplant with blue-green eyes and a mop of brown Lyle Lovett curls, and he wanted a second date. Our IRL date banter had lived up to our hilarious texting courtship.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to respond to this obvious green flag for several hours because my 18-month-old son woke up and vomited his entire pasta dinner — plus a few meals from the future — across the floor of his room.
It wasn’t exactly an auspicious sign.
Three pajama changes later, I was able to resume our post-date chat. However, I cautioned, I wouldn’t be able to see him again for a while due to a long-planned London vacation. He wished me well for the trip and we continued to text.
The morning of the trip turned out to be one of the worst days of my life: my toddler woke up with COVID, I had to cancel the trip, and I had to convince the city of Austin to fix a water main gushing in my front lawn, which had left me without running water. Later, I rushed my son to the hospital as he struggled to breathe.
When I texted Alex about all of this, he didn’t ghost me or offer platitudes.
He asked if there was anything he could bring me and made a couple of cautious, tactful jokes, which it turns out is my love language. Since the trip was canceled, I said I hoped I could see him sooner. As with the first date, he organized the time and place (the hottest thing a man can do).
For the first time in a long time, I let myself feel a twang of hope.
In my pre-baby life, finding dates was easy. But I had limited success with what came after that. I would get bored or they would get bored, or we wanted different things in life.
Tired of waiting on men, I decided to have a child on my own when I turned 35. But I wasn’t giving up on finding a partner. I dated people after I started fertility treatments and even went on a few dates in early pregnancy. I told myself that miracles happen.
But if turning 35 made my Tinder dating pool become shallow, being a single mom vaporized it. I conducted an informal poll of single mothers by choice, and out of over 800 responses, only 4% were in relationships. Leaving aside the people saying they didn’t want to raise another man’s child, who fetishized moms, or who clearly had no idea how children and/or women work, the logistics of babies and sitters often scared guys away. Since leaving my house after 5:30 p.m. meant I had to find and financially invest in a sitter, I required the guy to make concrete plans — a rarity in today’s dating world. It didn’t help that my child took up 80% of my brain, and it was hard to talk about normal date topics as opposed to nap schedules or the finer points of children’s YouTube (Ms. Rachel or GTFO).
That’s how, 18 months after giving birth, I still hadn’t even kissed anyone. I was starting to live in yoga pants and not even bother with my hair. I felt deeply unsexy and undesirable, and romance felt like something gone from my life in favor of getting through each day.
Unfortunately, more bad luck was in store with Alex. On our second date, someone I’d met on Tinder walked in to pick up his pho takeout. I sweated in the corner praying he wouldn’t see me with Alex. At a brewery, we ran into friends of Alex’s ex. Finally, as we stood on my porch making smalltalk after a dinner date, I couldn’t take it anymore and I pushed my lips onto his. They were gloriously soft.
But after that brief kiss, he told me he couldn’t see me again for three weeks.
During this time I comforted myself with reruns of him. I forced my friends to admire his witty Tinder profile and re-read our texts, swooning. On our dates, we had covered big topics — death, depression, addiction, fertility — but mostly we laughed together.
Finally, after our next date, we kicked the babysitter out early and made out like teenagers on my couch.
Alex wanted to hear about my son’s adventures in a way that was sweet without seeming weird. But, even though I didn’t think my son would remember this, I was nervous about them meeting. I felt like it wasn’t appropriate until we were serious — I didn’t want to be parading a string of different men in front of my child.
When they did meet, much sooner than the magic number of months in my head, I quickly realized I didn’t have anything to worry about. Alex began meeting us at the playground, dashing over to keep my son from bumping his head or throwing him up onto his shoulders and dancing around. When my toddler fell at the playground and reached for Alex to comfort him, I didn’t know whether to feel in love or indignant.
As the months went on, Alex drew me out of my survival mentality. We opened presents together on Christmas morning; entertained endless toddler chatter about trucks; and we reserved date nights just for us for non-truck adult conversations. He’s handled countless more disasters with understanding and support. On election night, I called him crying at 11 p.m. because I couldn’t sleep, and he came right over. His enthusiastic relationship with my son is more than I could have hoped for and revealed other bonuses that I hadn’t even dared to dream of, like his family being excited to meet my son, too.
Alex is a mid-30s guy with a thriving social life and a flexible work schedule. He doesn’t have to be woken up at 7 a.m., spend his weekends dealing with tantrums, or have his brain infected by the horrible musical toys my son adores. But he chooses to because he loves us, and he tells me he feels lucky as we fall asleep together. He even learned how to change diapers.
I have someone to marvel with as my son develops new skills, and who laughs with me at the “brainworms” we have both developed from caring for a toddler, a constellation of jokes only we can understand. The love I have for him is multiplied tenfold by the ways he is there for my family.
I’m not sure what the future holds. There’s a significant chance he will have to move for work, but I’m a native Austinite with much-needed support here, and long distance is not an option with a child. There could be some other, relationship-ending disaster looming on the horizon. But it’s hard to imagine — the universe has thrown so much at us already, and we’re still here. And I’m thankful for every day, every hour, we all have together.
