... in response to Women with children, posted by Bueller on Nov 20, 2005Thanks Bueller for your excellent posting about women with children. I was intending to post something similar but you beat me to it and spared me the time and trouble.
Anybody who knows me knows that I have been grappling with the issue of women with children for much of my 6 months visiting/living in Colombia. What I have discovered is that it is much more (statistically) difficult to find attractive women who are, say, over 26 years old, who don't have children. That is not to say they don't exist, but there will be much more work to find her, and when you find her you may also find she is a lot more picky, difficult, has more suitors, etc. None of this is much of a problem for the man who is looking for (or is open to meeting) women in the 18-21 age group in the first place. For various reasons I prefer women in the 26-32 age group. For me, I just don't prefer a women who is only a year or two out of high school. I realize there are others here who have no problem with that whatsoever. But (hopefully!) women in the 26-32 year age group or older have more maturity, a grounded quality, confidence, wisdom, and are less self-centered. I am not sure how to define it completely but I prefer those qualities and find it very appealing. At the same time, very often they have children as part of the package. In fact, it was the caring for a child which was largely responsible for developing those qualities in the first place. I *want* a woman who isn't self-centered and knows how to put another human being first in her life. Unfortunately, as attractive as that can be, in the background I have fear that the human being first in her life is the child and I will always be second. I fear I will always be guessing how that fact will play out in our relationship. I have not met a woman who has been able to grasp this (as far as I can tell) and communicate empathy to me about the inevitable dilemma I am faced with. Instead, it seems I am largely on my own to deal with it.
Another way to put all this is that a woman with a child very often represents 3 new relationships; the woman, the child, and the ex-husband. On the other hand, I represent only 1 new relationship. There is only me; there is no ex-wife or children that my future Colombian wife has to be concerned about. She doesn't have to worry that I will put a child first before her, or that my ex-wife will refuse to sign some piece of paper allowing a child to leave the country and that *she* may have to bribe my ex-wife with *her* money. For me there is more at stake than there is for her. So of course I will tend to go a lot slower in the relationship and be more hesitant to commit exclusively to her.
Of course, all the above will be cited by some of you as being precisely the reasons to completely avoid no-matter-what the women who have a child and focus without exception on the others. The other side of this is that with so many men taking this advice already it means that finding a really attractive, quality woman who happens to have a child is like trying to find apples on an apple tree; there is a real abundance of them. This is my experience; "your mileage may vary".
