Dating Disasters·
REBOUND OR REMEMBER
After seven brutal dates reveal deep misogyny, a divorced mother weighs whether clinging to memories of her previously respectful ex-husband is safer than restarting love.
Is bad dating making her miss her ex?
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Seven dates in, a divorced 35-year-old woman was already wondering if modern dating had driven her straight back toward her ex-husband.
She had only just started dating again, after time away, and the experience had been brutal from the start. Every man she had seen so far, seven in total, had turned up with some kind of red flag. So she began doing what many exhausted daters do: getting straight to the point early, asking about values and beliefs before wasting any more time.
That approach did not help.
One man cut her off with a complaint. He said he "just wanted fun conversation" and not "all this serious talk." That was only the beginning. On later dates, multiple men made "I hate women" jokes, the kind of thing she says immediately set off alarms. By then, the pattern was clear enough that she was no longer just disappointed, she was baffled.
"I'm not sure why some of these men are even dating women if they seem to dislike us so much," she said.
Then came the worst date of all.
This man told her outright, "There's no value in dating a single mom." He said "men hold more value than women," and claimed he would be "high value" because he made more money. According to him, women lose value as they get older and have kids. The poster pushed back with the facts of her own life: she makes good money, takes care of herself, and raises her child.
The exchange left her disgusted. "He's 37 and talking like a podcast comment section," she said.
And that is when her mind drifted somewhere she did not expect: back to her ex-husband.
The marriage had ended for a reason. She said he cheated and lied during the last year they were together, and that was why they divorced. But outside that final stretch, she remembers something else: "outside of that, he always respected women and treated me with kindness and respect."
Now she is stuck between two ugly options, keep wading through dates full of misogyny and red flags, or let the worst parts of her ex fade into the background and remember the good ones too. She did not say she was ready to make a move. She only asked the question hanging over the whole post: "is bad dating making me romanticize my ex?" and "should I actually consider going back?"