An Enthusiastic Endorsement for Dating a Divorced Man
As a noted Problematic Age-Gap Dater, I’ve gone out with my share of divorcés. If you insist on fucking the 40+ crowd, you’re basically left with three options: married men (which—well, different story), divorced men, and men nobody wanted, presumably for good reason. If this sounds bleak, then that should tell you everything you need to know about just how dire the prospect of dating men our own age has become for young women these days. But take it from me, a woman who’s tried ’em all, a divorcé is not merely the lesser of three evils, but a genre of man who tends to come with some actual benefits that make him a solid candidate—perhaps even superior to many of his single counterparts.
To the untrained eye, divorce may seem like a glaring red flag promising drama, ex-wives, and a history of romantic failure all but destined to repeat itself. But throughout my extensive if premature experience in dating other people’s divorced dads, I’ve found that many men tend to learn more about being a good partner from divorce than they do from, well, actually being a partner.
Because here’s the thing you need to know about men (*takes imaginary drag from long cigarette holder like your wise, wine-drunk aunt*): They don’t usually learn anything until and unless confronted with a consequence—either for failing to know better or failing to act like it. In case you haven’t noticed, we live in a society in which men rarely face consequences—unless you consider being reelected President of the United States a consequence, but I digress. This means that for many men, it takes a big, fat, expensive divorce to figure out that if they want a relationship to work, they have to actually do some work themselves, which starts with understanding that women are human beings with rich interior lives, not a plastic pink peg you just stuff in your car in The Game of Life when the board tells you it’s time to drop everything and get married.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure plenty of divorced men are just as if not more terrible than married and single ones. But in my experience, a man with a failed marriage under his belt tends to come with some hidden perks. First and foremost, he’s had practice. Would you want to be a heart surgeon’s first patient? Exactly, so why would you want to be a man’s first wife? You know that trope of women putting tons of time and effort into a fixer-upper boyfriend only to break up and pass him along to a successor who gets to enjoy the fruits of her labor for free? We usually talk about it from the scorned perspective of the first woman in that scenario, but let’s be real, Woman Number 2 is getting a pretty good deal. A divorced man isn’t broken, he’s broken in. He has practical, real-world experience in the field—the good, the bad, and the marriage-ending. Some call it baggage, I call it a learning opportunity—specifically, an opportunity for a man to learn from his mistakes.
Sure, in theory, men can learn things from run-of-the-mill breakups that don’t require legal dissolution, but there’s something about a capital-D divorce on your permanent relationship record that sends a particularly strong message of: “Now go sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done.”
In addition to what they’ve learned from their marriage, divorce also presents the opportunity for men to learn a thing or two about marriage—namely, what they want out of it and whether they even want it at all. In our patriarchal, relationship-escalator-driven society, marriage is often regarded as a default, a scheduled stop on the train to “normal,” functioning adulthood. Call me a cynic, but somehow I suspect this autopilot approach to a trip down the altar tends to result in a lot of failed or at least unsatisfying marriages. The good news is that once divorce has derailed that train, a man probably has a clearer understanding of what he actually wants from his romantic future than your average late-20s/early-30s dude who buys a ring because, “I don’t know, it seems like it’s time.”
While a man potentially being more cautious of marriage if not flat-out marriage-resistant may seem like a downside to anyone looking to get second-wifed-up, it actually saves everyone involved in his post-divorce dating life a lot of time, energy, and wasted youth. If he doesn’t want to get remarried, good, now you know not to sit around waiting for a ring. If he is looking to buy tickets to Marriage, the Sequel, he’s probably really hoping for a different ending this time around and will (hopefully) be more invested in making it work and therefore more intentional about picking the right partner than a college boyfriend stumbling into his starter marriage.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, if one divorce is good for a man, then two divorces must be—nope! Gonna stop ya right there. Unfortunately, all the potential benefits of dating a divorced man are not enhanced but actually reversed if he’s got more than one ex-wife on his rap sheet. Trust me, if a divorced man is one who’s had time to learn from his mistakes, a twice-divorced man is one who never will. You’re gonna want to go ahead and throw that one back.
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