Sons of Single Mothers are Ill-Equipped to Date

By:  H.T., Website:  Rogue Black Nerd

I was raised by a single mom, my father was raised by a single mom, and my mother was raised by a single mom.  In my maternal family that raised me, every woman that was responsible for raising me is or was (some died) a single mom or have no children.  And I love all of them for what they did, what they gave up to raise me and that they are undoubtedly outside of my father’s side of the family, the largest number of women who have unconditional love for me.

That all being said, I think it’s time I said something that will be painful but is the truth.

Gil in recent posts has been pointing out why single moms aren’t at the top of the dating pool.   As I’m sure he’s linked to said videos in this article, I’ll simply say there is a sadder, much more destructive part of single mothers that isn’t talked about as much.  I’m of course talking about the sons of single mothers.

The running joke about sons raised by single mothers is that our mothers from birth baby us and hide us from the world’s ills.  We are told that we are her king and grow up with a mother figure that in turn conditions us to be drawn to women who are very nurturing, very concerned with their appearance, are unflinching with criticism and honesty.  On some level, one could argue that the sons of single mothers grow up drawn to strong independent women.  But there is something to consider:  what becomes of men with this attraction for women with these traits when they happen to find themselves in dating pools where the only women with these clearly positive traits are ONLY single mothers at best and at worst are women who happen to be single moms but are also women with other bad traits?

Speaking for myself, dating is hard for me because for as much as I like all the positives about the women that raised me, I find it hard to feel confident because what noone likes to say often is that the sons of said mothers rarely come out with zero flaws.  When I say zero flaws, let me be clear and say that this does not include being gay as frankly any set of parents can have a gay child, married or otherwise.  However, single mothers on average raise sons that are first and foremost, a bit emasculated by nature.  I say emasculated because no amount of sports or recurring male presence around them can offset being raised in a matriarchal household.  For anyone who has ever heard my voice, it’s like this because I grew up around essentially nothing but women for most my life, and my father himself grew up the same.

Single mothers do a disservice to their sons by raising them to normalize not only the image of a woman having and raising a child with no father around, but if they have siblings, they grow up normalizing non-monogamous relationships.  To be fair, while my mother had just me and my brother who’s only 13 years younger than me, my father had my sister (who due to him not telling me about her existence resulted in her accidentally taking my virginity) and my brother who is about to turn 18 and refuses to talk to me.  But again, he too was raised in a single mother household as well, so cest la vie.

Being the son of a single mother prepares you for a life of being told how sweet and smart you are from years of social conditioning that by the time you’re an adult, you quickly realize how very little such things matter in the grand scheme of things.  For every one or two well adjusted sons that come from fatherless homes, there is a much larger majority of men who are inept in dating because whether by design or by unintended consequences, many men grow up really only knowing how to care only for women like their mothers, and thus aren’t cut out for dating without huge character flaws set in by our mothers.  We have shame because our mothers tried to make us nothing like our father’s in the negative sense.  We have a quixotic need to protect women, single mothers especially, from problems that tend to be of their own design.  We are raised to be detrimentally selfless in that we will hold a torch for a woman that isn’t even in a relationship but is clearly still going through the sexual motions with the father or father’s of said children.  We have no confidence in ourselves because from the time we’re born, our egos are constantly being checked and ultimately repressed in an attempt to make sure we’re nothing like all the other toxic men in our community but fail to realize that by the time we come of age, unless you completely remove said child from an environment where such behaviors are normal to his female peers (like my mom did with my brother) you really are raising a black man who by and large won’t make it in the black dating world.

People will say I’m scapegoating single mothers, but you know what?  In our community, I never really see black men raised by single mothers that aren’t:

• Self centered
• Sexually repressed or promiscuous
• A constant yes man or pandering to women who are dysfunctional
• Overly emotional

I say all this because I and many other men tend to contemplate on quitting dating, not because of women necessarily, but because we by no means are cut out to date when we have gone our whole lives seeing women who have normalized dysfunction.  Try to justify black people being raised without two parent households all you want with arguments about getting rid of “toxic masculinity”, but the reality is such behaviors are resulting in men who either are still toxic and dangerous by nature, or completely neutered and ineffective; both in their own ways justifying women making simply bad decisions.

I say all of this because for every hood wolf made by single mothers, men like me are raised around them and then on some level we’re expected to mitigate the damage said wolves cause, either by sticking around and being good role models or even being stepfather’s to said children said wolves made.  This is a problem as why is the mother who raised the son who managed to hold down a job and stay out of trouble shocked when one of her peers raises a daughter that normalizes being a single mother, and when another peer has a son of her own that has a child with the second mom’s daughter, why is that mother shocked that her daughter is left alone and why is the first mother still expected to raise a good son that gets with the daughter of the second, and no one says shit to the third mother that kept the fucking cycle going?  Furthermore, why are the sons that have act right expected to fix said problems in the community when it’s clear that the women will do nothing to stop it and the men will gladly hand over responsibility of said children over to men that caused none of these problems?  I’ve seen male teachers who were raised right and wanted to give back literally show up to school one year and an entire grade class was was fathered by 7 men.  Keep in mind, the class only had at the most 22 kids.  And then, said moms got pissed when he wouldn’t date them, but got married to an Asian woman.  Guess how many kids she had?

Exactly.