Dating in a Family Way

Some men like the idea. They see the opportunity for an instant family or love the perceived taboo of dating a pregnant woman. But not all. Take the guy caught so off-guard when he got the news of his date’s pregnancy that he ruined a tablecloth:

“Somehow ‘Hi, I’m using a sperm bank’ didn’t seem like first-date conversation, and our second date was a dinner party with several of his friends,” she said. Then her suitor went away on a business trip for a few weeks. When he returned, he invited her out to a fancy French restaurant and ordered a glass of wine. “I had a seltzer and told him why I wasn’t drinking--that I’d just found out I was pregnant. He spit his merlot all over the table.” When he recovered, he gallantly wished her luck, paid for dinner and was never heard from again.

Not everyone spits up--or splits--when confronted with a pregnant date, or the idea of dating while pregnant. In fact, as more single women are making the express decision to have a child without a permanent partner, the subject is increasingly in the open, which is to say it’s a topic on Web sites and a plot point on sitcoms.

“If you’re dating while you’re pregnant, you have to have a sense of humor about it,” said Ariel Gore, single mother, creator of the zine Hip Mama and author of “Hip Mama’s Survival Guide.” “People will have interesting, intimate reactions to you as a mother. If you think it’s funny, that’s great. If you freak out, it will make things difficult.”

Dating, and all it implies--from dinner and a movie to companionship and sexual intimacy--is certainly more complex for the unattached pregnant woman. Safe sex concerns take on additional significance even as worries about getting pregnant fly out the window. Emotional attachments have deeper resonance for dater and datee, and behavioral codes haven’t yet been covered by Miss Manners.

Television recently addressed the subject on two popular shows. This season, developments with the characters of Miranda on “Sex and the City” and Rachel on “Friends” (Cynthia Nixon and Jennifer Aniston, respectively), led to both single women choosing to have babies.

Recent episodes further showed both characters overwhelmed by heightened libidos--which is a side effect of pregnancy that many women report experiencing. Miranda turned to a casual date and later to the father-to-be, whom she was no longer seeing romantically, to fulfill her sexual urges; Rachel was left to suffer it out alone.

There is an underlying dilemma: In addition to the societal pressures attending single motherhood (remember the flap 10 years ago between then-veep Dan Quayle and fictional character Murphy Brown for choosing to bear a child on her own?), there is the not-always acknowledged reality that a pregnant woman and a sexual woman can exist in the same person. In fact, those who work with pregnant women, single and otherwise, estimate that half or more report experiencing heightened libido during at least part of their pregnancy.

“There’s no question the hormones affect one’s sexual feelings,” said Jane Mattes, a psychotherapist who founded Single Mothers by Choice after the birth of her son in 1981. It has grown from a small networking organization into an international group with more than 2,000 members. (Her son, Eric, now 21, designed the Web site singlemothersbychoice.com.) The organization features e-mail lists where members can turn to each other with their concerns about pregnancy and motherhood. Mattes said that in the middle trimester, after the months of morning sickness and before the discomfort of late pregnancy, many women say they are the most sexual they’ve ever felt in their lives.

The single pregnant woman who wants to date, said Anne Semans--who is single, pregnant and dating--ends up having to be “publicly and aggressively out there about [her] singlehood, because most people assume you have a partner somewhere.” Semans, who is co-author with Cathy Winks of “The Mother’s Guide to Sex,” (Random House, 2000), said pregnant women date for all different kinds of reasons. “A lot of them just want to be held, touched, they want to have sex, they want someone to pamper them,” she said. “When you’re not partnered, it’s very hard to do that.”

Many of the women interviewed for this story have used online dating services as a way to meet men who weren’t put off by their mother-to-be status. It was easier, they said, to let potential dates know of their pregnancy via e-mail before meeting.

One New York woman who belongs to Single Mothers by Choice said she waited to tell her date about her pregnancy after they met. “It was awkward all along, but he seemed to roll with it.” As the relationship progressed, however, he made it clear he could not see himself in a long-term relationship with a woman with a child. “This started to bother me the more intimate we got sexually, and the more confident I grew about the pregnancy,” she said. They recently agreed to stop dating.

Sex without commitment can get complicated, especially for pregnant women. “Every time someone has sex, a connection is made, there’s a certain kind of intimacy even if it’s not emotionally intimate, and it’s hard for most people to keep things completely casual even if they intend to,” said Laura Berman, therapist and co-director of the Female Sexual Medicine Center at UCLA.

During pregnancy, many woman feel particularly vulnerable and want to protect themselves emotionally when looking for that kind of intimacy. Based on her experience with patients, Berman hypothesizes that if someone were to do a study, they would find the majority of pregnant women who were sexually active were doing so with someone they already knew because of those elements of safety and support. Many single pregnant women choose not to date all, but those who do often speak of reconnecting with old beaus or trusted friends for more intimate sexual involvements. “He was 100% safe physically and emotionally,” said an L.A.-based business consultant of the former boyfriend she started seeing again during her pregnancy. As a bonus, sex with him was far better than it had ever been when they had gone out years earlier. “He’d never been with a pregnant woman, and the whole thing--both my body and the idea of it--was a huge turn-on for him.”

Another Californian speaks of getting together with a good friend whenever he came into town. She notes that “it was wonderful to be with a man, particularly this very dear old friend.” She had been experiencing an extremely heightened sexual desire, but didn’t want to date anyone she didn’t already know well.

That choice coincides with some basic medical advice offered to women by doctors concerned about the mother-to-be and the child-to-be: practice safe sex, and make sure you know your partner and his sexual history--you can’t afford to risk exposure to sexually transmitted diseases.

The warnings and cautionary tales are moot for some women, who report that their interest in sex declined during pregnancy. And some who were still interested in sex said that other concerns outweighed those desires.

Randie Golkin of Orange County, a member of Single Mothers by Choice, said that she enjoyed dating a man she met while pregnant but didn’t become sexually intimate, to his dismay. She was sympathetic to his feelings but said that when choosing to become a single mother, “you go through an awful lot of trouble to get pregnant; you don’t want to blow it on one night of fun. So I didn’t.”

Vanessa Stefanelli, dating in San Francisco, also decided not to be sexually active. “The stakes were much too high at that point for me to get involved in a casual relationship.” As the first pregnant woman in her circle of friends, she found herself the object of great interest and curiosity. “Men always wanted to feed me, which was great,” she said. “At the time, I was working 60 hours a week and going to school. It was so nice to come home to some guy at my door with flowers saying, ‘Hey, can I take you out to dinner?’ I was, like, sure you can. I milked it,” she said, laughing.

Her experience isn’t universal: Some men seem oblivious to the idea of a child on the way.

Nicole, a Hip Mama zine and hipmama.com subscriber from Denver, said she dated a man for four months who kept forgetting she was pregnant. He wanted to take her out to loud, raucous parties. “We would constantly have to reroute that; I didn’t want to party and be around that stuff any more,” she said. “I wanted to do more PG-rated dates, Beaver Cleaver kinds of things, like picnics.”

Semans said it’s an odd thing to have to repeatedly remind someone that you’re pregnant. “You don’t want to be focusing on it all the time, but it invariably comes up. No 10-mile hikes!” Meeting at a bar for a few drinks isn’t a good option, nor is hanging out at a smoky club. Ditto going out for sushi--pregnant women are advised not to eat raw fish.

On the other end of the spectrum from the guys who can’t seem to remember the pregnancy, are the men looking for an “instant” family.

“In some ways your appeal as a damsel in distress goes up,” said Gore of Hip Mama. “People think they’re going to save you.”

Erica Kaplan of Portland can attest to the insta-family experience. While pregnant, she dated a man she didn’t think was that interested in her pregnancy one way or another--until he took her to his grandparents’ house at Christmastime. “I realized maybe three-quarters of the way through the visit that they thought I was carrying his baby.” Her date hadn’t told them otherwise. He acted proprietary in public as well, apparently liking the idea that he looked like a married man with a pregnant wife, she recalls.

Stefanelli noticed that she was attracting people who assumed that she wanted a partner/father for the baby. “Suddenly I had all these guys who wanted to get married and buy a cocker spaniel and a station wagon,” she said, “which was weird, because I had never necessarily attracted those types of men before.”

None of the women interviewed found permanent partners during their pregnancies, but then, that wasn’t the point. As one explains, her unborn child was the focus of her life: “Dating was certainly a nice extra, but it was never a priority to me at that time.”

Many said they found that just as the decision to have a child on their own was empowering, so was dating while pregnant. They found themselves being more straightforward with men and learning how to clearly ask for what they did and didn’t want, without the usual dating games. “I think that translates really well into other areas,” Semans said. “Once you figure out what you need and how to ask for it, you’re going to be better off in any kind of relationship.”

At some point during pregnancy, the whole idea of dating--and just about everything else save perhaps nesting--seems to lose its appeal.

Kaplan recalls having the energy to get dressed to the nines for a New Year’s Eve outing but falling asleep in her living room while waiting for her date to arrive.

“He knocked on my door for almost 20 minutes before I woke up,” she said, “and I couldn’t go anywhere, I was so exhausted. That was the last time we tried to go out.”