Post-Divorce Dating: How Men and Women Differ

Posted on | January 30, 2013 | 5 Comments

After my last post on dating, I had a text conversation with a male friend of mine about the types of men I was choosing to date.  Let’s face it, you were all wondering, right? Wondering if my taste was irreparably flawed? Wondering if maybe I was making a conscious or unconscious choice to date all the wrong sorts of men…. the ones you know you not only can’t take home to mom but they probably aren’t allowed in their own mother’s house… the ones you know will say all the right sorts of things and do all the wrong ones.

But no.  I was not making any type of choice to date that not-so-rare breed of players.  Instead, I found myself, nine times out of ten, dating divorced men; men with children; men who had been through what I went through and, like me, were coming out the other side.  So that’s why my shock was so compounded when it became clear that even THESE men were the wrong sorts of people.

That’s when my friend texted me with a nugget of wisdom I feel obligated to share with you here… men and women are different.

Did your head just explode?  Of course not… because you knew that already.  But what you might not have known, what I didn’t know or at least realize, is that ESPECIALLY after divorce… men and women are totally different.

See, for me… I had a marriage where my husband and I didn’t see eye to eye on the things outside of the bedroom.  We didn’t want the same things.  We didn’t want to nurture a relationship with each other in any way and yet he still expected the same sex life that we had when we WERE actively nurturing our relationship.  So when we got divorced, he went looking for sex and I went looking for connection.

Let’s look at that again, shall we? Post divorce, as my friend so rightly pointed out, most men are on the prowl to prove they are virile, sex-machines who can have any woman they want, ex-wife be damned.  Most women, post-divorce,  are looking for a man who will hold their hand and tell them they will wait forever if it takes that long because they just want to KNOW her in a way that her husband never did. (Now these are sweeping generalizations, of course, based primarily on the root of the divorce being similar to mine.  If the wife cheated on the husband, I’m sure the male needs are the same but the wife’s are probably totally different.)

Cosmic. Differences.

Now that I’m actually sure of what I want out of a relationship, I find that it’s almost impossible to locate in this post-divorce landscape.  Because while I understand, now, the masculine need to prove to themselves (and yes, maybe their exes) that they are straight up desirable, I don’t see the need to put myself in a position to fill that role.  And for the most part, the men I’m meeting don’t really want to fill the role I’m looking for either.  Because they already had a wife who wanted that from them, too.  She didn’t find them attractive, or sexy, or whatever reason they have in their head and now they don’t want to take the time to woo and cuddle… they want to scale the damn mountain, plant a flag, and move the hell on to the next achievement.

Or at least that’s what it seems like.

So there ya have it… men and women are different.  Pre-marriage, during marriage, and most definitely post-marriage.  The key, I think, is to find someone you can meet halfway… a man who, yes, has that carnal need to mark his territory, but one who wants to stick around for the post-game.  Or a woman who gets that there are these gaping holes left by divorce and realizes that to soothe her own wounds, she’s going to have to soothe a few of his as well.

But what do I know…. this is all new to me, too.

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