Are You Open to Marrying Someone With Kids?

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Many people who come to CatholicMatch have the same basic dream.

To fall in love with that one special person, to raise a good and wholesome family and to live happily ever after.

One thing that dream often doesn’t entail is learning to be a stepparent on the fly, learning to embrace someone else’s biological children as your own and perhaps needing to do that with a difficult ex-spouse still in the mix.

Or, if you’re the one with the kids, that dream doesn’t involve introducing your kids to “someone else” who may or may not work out. As Adam Sandler told Drew Barrymore in the movie Blended “Your kids have to come first 99.9% of the time. Then there’s the 0.1% where we can get what we want.” That’s just one example of difficult situation that was never in the original dream.

Yet if you scroll the archives of a CatholicMatch’s success storiesyou’ll find more than your share of examples of people who took a broken dream and turned it into something better.  But it can be an extremely touchy point in dating relationships. If you’re the one who’s never been married, do you include people with kids in your pool of eligible people? If you’re the one with kids and are on CatholicMatch, you’ve already decided that you’re open—but how perfect does the fit have to be?

Let’s begin by saying that this is a question that can never have the same answer for every situation. Every person has their own special calling from God. Every person’s ability to be a stepparent is different and will no doubt be impacted by the precise landscape of the situation they would be stepping into.

Openness is key

Having said all that, I would like to advocate for as much openness as prudence would allow. And the primary reason is the cultural environment that we find ourselves in. Without trying to go too dark, we live in a culture where the guardrails of sanity have collapsed.

The consequences of that include...

*More people entering into marriages that shouldn’t have happened for a variety of reasons, and perhaps might have been prevented with better marriage preparation.

*More people having children outside of marriage.

*The person who entered into a marriage in good faith, but later found they had been gravely misled by the person they trusted. Whether children resulted from the union or not and even if the Church has annulled the marriage, that person now wears what Lisa Duffy eloquently called “The Scarlet D”, for divorced.

*The couple that’s perfect for each other, but are past their childbearing years. They could still live happily ever after together, but one party (presumably the man) hasn’t let go of the dream yet and is looking for someone younger to start a family with.

To reiterate—there’s no right answer.

There are good reasons for the parent of grade-school age kids to be really picky about who they bring home. There’s nothing scandalous about a man in his mid-forties seeking a woman in her early thirties. There’s nothing wrong with preferring to avoid someone with the wounds of a failed marriage. And not everyone is cut out to be Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music and embrace marrying someone with seven kids.

But I feel confident in saying this—the reality of living in a collapsed culture means a lot of us will be prompted by the Holy Spirit to alter our original expectations.

Maybe the person that we might have lived out the original dream with was among those that were never born. Maybe we—or the person we were meant for—has been badly wounded by a materialistic culture. Maybe our own chasing of false expectations kept us from a person we were meant to be with until after childbearing years.

I’ve used a couple movie clips in this article, so let me conclude with one more. It’s the recent sci-fi horror film A Quiet Place. The premise of the film is a post-apocalyptic world with very few people left in it. We might not be at that place physically, but it’s fair to say that we are in a cultural and spiritual sense. We’re in a world that has collapsed, with the Mother of Christ moving quietly among us to pick up the pieces and rebuild. In our own lives, that may play out in helping to raise someone else’s children.

Think about it this way—most people don’t follow the exact career path they outlined for themselves in college. They had a dream, but adjusted it along the way as new opportunities presented themselves and the landscape of their lives altered. Let’s bring the same flexibility into how we approach our dreams of marriage. It’s not settling—it’s just understanding that sometimes the Heavenly Father knows best.

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