Getting back into the dating world can be exciting, terrifying, hopeful, depressing, or all of the above. You may be anxious to find a companion or think that’s the last thing you need right now. After the pain of relationship loss, a new relationship can feel comforting and maybe a little scary.  How can you trust your motives or your readiness? If you have children, the whole thing just got way more complicated and you now have other people’s readiness to consider. Timing and pacing become even more important.

Here are five things to consider before dipping your toe into the dating pool:

  1. First things first–Handle your emotional divorce. This means, address your emotional fallout and “baggage” from the divorce before jumping into a new relationship. If you haven’t managed the depth and breadth of your feelings , you likely do not have the emotional space to be fully available to a new relationship. If you still have a lot of anger, resentment, sadness, grief and/or find yourself talking about your former spouse and still nursing wounds and grievances, you still have some “unpacking” to do of your baggage. Signs that you have begun to move forward and out of the cloud of grief might include that you focus more on your current life and building your future than you do on the divorce and the past. Also, you are able to have a “balanced view” of your prior marriage, your former spouse, and each of your contributions to what didn’t work in the marriage. You are able to accurately assess the prior marriage and have some “take aways” that you learned from it and can talk about ways you have grown through the healing process.
  2. Slow and Steady–Wade into the dating process slowly, get to know a new romantic partner slowly, and don’t involve the children yet! Take time to get to know each other across time, seasons, and situations. Introduce them to friends or other family first as part of that process. Examine your own and their relationship dynamics. Allow enough time to have had opportunities for conflicts to arise and note how you each handle them. Keep a look out and don’t ignore any red flags. If you note any flags, pump the brakes. If you have been dating three months or less, proceed slowly and with caution!  Your brain is still under the influence of chemical changes associated with the excitement of a new relationship that create blind spots and rose colored glasses toward your new dating partner. Give yourself time for this to wear off and for you to see more clearly. Look for mutual connection, care, and concern and similar values across time. All of this takes time.
  3. Build Security with your Children–Remember that your children are on a different divorce adjustment time line than you are and their experiences are different than yours. In general, most children are spending the first year post divorce adjusting to the losses and changes to their family configuration. Kids’ adjustment process will vary depending on how many adjustments they need to make, their temperament or other personal vulnerabilities, how much parental and other support they have and how much conflict they experience between their parents. Any and all of these factors can cause adjustment to take longer. Kids benefit in all kinds of ways from having a strong and secure connection to their parent. Make sure you have taken time to build this connection and security with your child or children. Spend time with them and just them. Have consistent routines and expectations. Be attuned to their emotional lives. Don’t plan to introduce your children to someone you’re dating when they are still deep in the adjustment phase to losing their intact family. Take the time to help them adjust and feel secure in the knowledge that you are there for them and they are your top priority before anyone else is introduced to them. They will likely respond better if you do this.
  4. Build Security with your Coparent–While your new relationship is none of your coparent’s business, it will become their business as soon as you decide to introduce and involve your shared children. If you want your new relationship to be successful, it will help to not have your children and/or your coparent working against it. Building a positive and effective coparenting relationship will help. Make sure that your interactions with your coparent are low conflict and emphasize respect. If your coparent feels respected by you in their parental role, they will likely feel less threatened by the impact of a potential future step-parent. Once you feel ready to introduce children to a new romantic partner, let your coparent know that you plan to do this. Give them some basic information that reassures them that you have known this person for quiet awhile, have given the introduction careful consideration, deem the children ready, and expect the new person to be a long term person in your life. Provide your coparent with basic information about the new person. Let your coparent know when and how you plan to have a first meeting with the children. Offer a low-key, brief way for your coparent to meet this person, if they would like. This courtesy and respect can go a long way toward acceptance of the new relationship by your coparent.
  5. Continue to Proceed Slowly–Continue to get to know your romantic partner slowly over time, without the children. Inform your coparent about the plan to introduce. Then let your children know about this dating partner and the plan for children to meet them. Keep any initial meeting brief, light, casual, and pleasant. Keep things low pressure for all. Design the meeting to begin and end positively so that it feels like a success. Help your children feel that they are your priority. Allow your children to have their own unique experiences of this person and check in with them on how it felt for them. Keep your eye out for children’s reactions such as competition for your attention, jealousy, and loyalty conflicts. Pump the brakes on how quickly you are proceeding if you notice these. Realize that a new person in your life is a reminder of loss for your children and another sign the fantasy of having parents back together is not reality. Approach this with compassion and make sure to continue to devote time just with your children so your actions with them reassure them that they continue to be your top priority. Give your children time to get to know this person and develop their own relationships to this new person. Resist the urge to integrate your new partner too quickly.

All of this takes time. While that might be frustrating, you are making an investment in the long-term success of integrating a new partner into your family. The first big steps involve making sure you are ready emotionally to add a relationship to your own life and then, to give yourself plenty of time to get to know this person and get a sense of the dynamics of this relationship. Only then, consider informing a coparent and children introductions. Before doing that, there is work to do to make sure those relationships are functioning well and are secure. Remember that you are investing in successful long-term outcomes. Post-divorce relationships can be more complicated. Keep expectations realistic and low and take your time. Give the new relationship the best chance of growing in healthy ways by giving everyone time to build those connections as they are ready.