I am a single dad with custody of my two amazing kids, a 4 year old adorable little girl and the sweetest 6 year old boy I could have ever wished for. I have a very good job that I will retire from one day and I am in all aspects of life, a good person. This feels like a Hail Mary of desperation but I am a wishful thinker who wears my heart on my sleeve and I hope that somehow this reaches the right person.

I’m not really sure where to start so I guess I’ll try my best to explain where I am at in life by starting with what has brought me to this point. I spent 10 unmarried years with my children’s mother, neither of us ever wanted kids but 7 years into our relationship we found out that we had a baby on the way. In one moment I changed my mind on being a parent and fell in love with the idea of having a child to raise and teach my love of the outdoors as my father did for me and my siblings. Parenthood was difficult, his mother left most of the responsibility to me but I was so awe struck at how amazing our little boy was that I was blinded and didn’t see it as an issue. She then became pregnant for a second time, giving us our beautiful, sassy and clever little girl. Our relationship was rocky at best after our son was born, she never wanted to give up partying and eventually it lead to me finding out that she had been cheating on me for the entire 10 years with pretty much every male in our lives as well as using hard drugs that somehow I never knew about as I just assumed she strictly had a drinking problem for a few years and tried to help her through it. When I found out that she had been cheating, I contacted a lawyer and researched the legality of me taking our children and leaving the home, eventually was awarded custody and she was given supervised visitation every other week due to the drug use. She now has to submit to drug tests consistently until our children are adults and has grown up immensely over the last couple of years, passing all tests, getting a good job and becoming a genuinely good mother so I asked the courts to allow her visitation every other weekend as our kids deserve a good mother. Her and I get a long very well now and everything between her, the children and I worked out better than I ever hoped it would.

My family talked me into using the dating apps to find someone after I had left their mother and felt enough time had passed, I downloaded tinder and started using Facebook dating. After only a couple of days, I matched with a woman who I was infatuated with. We hit it off really well, things were amazing for about a year, she had three kids all around the same ages as my two and they got along really well. I bought a place for all of us to live together and my family loved her and her children, things were perfect. She eventually quit her job and left all of the bills up to me, telling me that it would be okay because I make plenty of money and she could be a stay at home mom that would keep the home clean and be there when the kids needed to stay home from school or on summer break. This situation went well for about a week then it turned into her never doing anything around the house and not helping with the kids at all. I would come home from work, make dinner for a family of seven, check five backpacks and help with homework, do chores around the house and pack five lunches for school the next day. By the time I would be finished, it was time for bed and she would spend the whole time playing on her phone on the couch. After two years total, I made the decision to come home from work while all five kids were at their other parents for visitation and inform her that without some type of change or a promise of ambition to want to work together for the future we always spoke of, I would have to leave. She informed me that she had cheated on me in the past and wasn’t willing to do more than she currently was so I left and never looked back.

It’s been 6 months since I left her, my kids are happy to have the quality time that just wasn’t possible with me being the only active parent in a family of seven but something is missing. I want someone to share my life with, someone genuine who wants to be with their best friend every day and help me show my children how two people in a faithful relationship should treat each other while also being a good role model for my children.

I have a lot more to say but I’ll leave it at that and hope this somehow reaches someone that it resonates with. I am scared to get hurt again but I’m even more scared of never finding true love.