Why Single Moms Find It Almost Impossible To Date In India
Huffington Post | “It’s not you, it’s your child”.
We’ve all heard the dating cop-out “It’s not you, it’s me”, but single mothers are often left dealing with the heartbreak of “It’s not you, it’s your child”. Add to that restrictive cultural norms for moms, and their prospects for a second chance at love are often doomed.
When recently divorced Priya (name changed) shared with her friends and family that she was ready to date again, she was greeted with sheer horror. “How can you even think of dating now that you have a child to take care of?” was the general consensus. “Every time they asked me to put my child’s interest first, I wanted to scream that I already was,” she says.
Janki Mehta, consulting psychotherapist and co-founder of Mind Mandala, Mumbai, says single moms often shy away from dating to avoid social stigma.
“We find faults with single women alone. Imagine the amount of scrutiny a single mother has to face in our society,” she says. Social pressures, she says, make it nearly impossible for single women to date in India.
To unpack exactly how these “social pressures” manifest, we spoke to a bunch of single moms and experts.
