I’m shocked by this letter in which a mother of three pretends to be a wide-eyed innocent who doesn’t understand why her 13-year-old daughter can’t stand the mother’s new boyfriend. There are women who would ignore every sign, feed their children to every monster just to prove they can attract a dude.
The mother knows the boyfriend is fishy. This is clear from her insistent protestations about how healthy this relationship is. But she doesn’t care because it’s all about sticking it to the ex-husband.
Clarissa's Blog 
The people in the comments who think Shrier is being too harsh are baffling to me. Meanwhile, they’re saying a 13 year old should “get over it,” and when somebody mentions just the possibility of abuse, another commenter suggests the child learn tae kwon doe
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I didn’t read Shrier’s response because it’s paywalled but a guy who is interested in marrying a woman with 3 small children when one of the children already hates him is a very weird guy.
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She was much nicer than you or I would’ve been but still gave sensible advice that was (sadly) surprising to see in an advice column.
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I agree that a guy who wants to date a woman with older kids has something going on, I was twelve when our mother married her loser second husband and thirteen when our brother was born. He tried to put moves on me but I flashed a knife at him and he kept it to himself, my older brother also threatened to beat him up. And I wonder about women with older kids that desperate to date, they often attract all sorts of losers
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Oh honey. I’m so so sorry. This is terrible.
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I will never understand why it’s so crucial to date of you are a mother of three. What is the urgency?
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Thank you, this is why I don’t date and also their relationship was very volatile. Too many successful women like my mother date losers like her second husband, maybe they think they can change him but they never learn
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Truly mystifying. It doesn’t work the other direction: I know a statistically anomalous number of divorced single dads-with-custody, and this situation means that no matter how gainfully employed, responsible, and non-abusive you are, single adult women (with or without kids and exes) want nothing to do with you: tons of single moms so desperate to hook up that they will ignore any gross red flag to do it. But as soon as you’re a single dad and chicks find out it’s not just a weekends-and-holidays thing, poof, you’re roadkill.
Is it because women don’t want to be stepmom? Or because dad-with-custody scares them?
-ethyl
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Men can bond to somebody else’s children if they love their mother. But women don’t bond to children through men. That’s why there are no cases of women abandoning their children to raise some other woman’s. While men actually do that.
My Canadian uncle raised my aunt’s son. I honestly thought he had no children of his own and was stunned to find out, upon his death, that this loving, engaged stepdad hadn’t seen or spoken to his own son in 20 years. And not because anybody prevented him.
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“no cases of women abandoning their children to raise some other woman’s”
I’m pretty sure there are, but in those cases it’s about trying to hold onto the guy rather than really wanting to be around his kids.
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The part that gets me, though, is that women are willing to get involved with men who are dangerous to their kids (as long as they’ve basically abandoned any previous kids of their own)… but not willing to tolerate a man’s kids to date a good man who would love and protect their kids too. It’s so perverse.
Do they look at that situation and think “If we had kids and broke up, he’d get the kids and I’d get no child support”? Or is it just an aversion to other women’s offspring?
I mean, the evil stepmom archetype exists for a reason…
-ethyl
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