Thanks for your comments – I have tried dating men with kids who are in their  teens/early 20s and I thought that might be ok – as you say. they’re grown now – but it seems that the concept of “grown” has changed a lot since I was 20! These guys would frequently arrive at dates announcing they had to leave by 10pm to collect their (20 year old) son from a class or event and drive him back home, or would still treat their weekends with the kids as sacrosanct and automatically expect me to arrange my schedule around this. One of the reasons I don’t have kids is so as not to have to arrange my schedule around them! Kids don’t seem to be grown and gone till about 30 these days.

As far as spending a couple of years with someone because I can “afford” to as my biological clock’s not ticking, I’d have to disagree on that one – my “baby” clock is not ticking but my “ageing” one is! I would like my next relationship to be my last. I would like to know I am with someone I can grow old with. I do NOT want to be back on dating websites when I’m 50, back to square one after spending a couple of years with some other non-committed guy, and now with an ever smaller number of interested and interesting men available. That’s why I had to split up with him – that and the fact that being with someone who’s basically saying “I’m going to leave you at some point, when it suits me” is unspeakably depressing.

As a guy who doesn’t want kids, I’ve faced similar situations as you. Here’s a few things you might want to keep in mind:

1. By the time people are in their mid-40s, their kids may be grown and gone. If the child is 20, I don’t really need to be a parent to him/her.

2. Women are more likely to have sole custody than men. For some of those men, they may have their kids 1 or 2 weekends per month (especially if they live in another state). Is the child going to greatly impact your life if he/she is an occasional visitor?

3. As men (and women) get older, the odds of their children being grown and gone increases. If you shift your target dating range up by 5 years, the situation with children improves noticeably.

helene said: (#31)
“I spent 2 years hoping he would change his mind and decide I was enough for him without the kids as really, there was little chance of me having them, and even less if we waited till he was ‘ready’. He never did change his mind, woundn’t commit to me and I had to split up with him.”

Since you don’t want kids, you didn’t have to split up with him. As soon as you pitch the biological clock out the window, you get a lot more time to find a relationship.

If you’re enjoying someone’s company, you can afford to waste a couple years in a relationship that ultimately ends … as long as the relationship itself is time well spent.

Your clock isn’t ticking. Take advantage of that difference.

Keep your options open. You can meet and date other men while maintaining a friendship with someone you like, and I can’t see a compelling reason to bail on a friendship with someone you like.

But you probably don’t want to get serious unless he changes his mind … or unless you’re okay with spending years in a relationship with someone who ultimately intends to move on. (And if you’re having fun with the relationship, you may want to be exclusive for a while even if it will ultimately end. Since you aren’t trying to have kids, you’re not under the time constraint he is.)

I think if someone tells you they don’t want a serious relationship with you- for any reason- you need to believe them.