My mom dating a girl

I’m on the phone to my mum. “So, how was the date? Was it everything you hoped it would be?”

“It was fine. He was a lovely guy. There just wasn’t any… spark. I just didn’t fancy him. There was no sexual chemistry.”

“Well, you know… that sort of thing can grow over time. Maybe you should give him another chance? Perhaps you’re being too picky?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Please? For me?”

“No.”

I know what you’re thinking: another eager Mrs Bennet trying to encourage one of her daughters to snap up an eligible man of good fortune, but in fact, it’s the opposite: it’s me – I’m the Mrs Bennet. And the person I’m nagging to settle down in a steady, loving relationship is my 58-year-old mother.

Since persuading her to sign up for internet dating a couple of years ago, and paying for her subscription, my mum and I have had numerous conversations like this, with me acting as coach and cheerleader while my mum, Anna, retreats to the kitchen table to read the paper.

You might wonder why I’m involving myself in my mother’s love life. The truth is, while I didn’t make any resolutions this year, I did make a wish: that, 15 years after my parents split up, 2015 might be the year my mum finds long and lasting love. I’ve been proactive – giving her advice on what to put in her dating profile, helping her take the photographs (one that she took of herself in a red jumper led, she believes, to a number of men on Match.com “thinking I would sleep with anybody”, when in fact the selfie was part of the Wear Red campaign against Margaret Thatcher having a state funeral), filling her in on the modern dating scene, and vetting potential candidates.

Whenever she goes on a date, she texts to let me know. This usually contains the name of the man she is meeting, his telephone number and the location, in case the stranger turns out to be a “weirdo”. Afterwards, she calls for a post-mortem. Though the stigma of internet dating has diminished, especially among those who have grown up with an entire virtual universe at their fingertips, there still remains the slight concern that you might end up murdered. “Is that where you hide the bodies?” my mum joked, when a man she had been chatting to whispered that he was sneaking out to the garden shed to take her call. She suspected he was looking for an affair. Welcome to dating in your 50s.

I wasn’t always so keen on finding a new man for my mother. My parents split up when I was 12, a bad age at which to witness the rupturing of your family, and it affected me badly. I wasn’t exactly enamoured of my mum’s first, post-divorce boyfriend, partly because he told me that he thought The Simpsons was a stupid television show, and partly because he wasn’t my dad.

My feelings started to soften when I was 18 and left home. Mum was by herself, miles away in rural Wales, and I worried that she was lonely. I wanted someone to love and support her. I cast myself as her dating guru.

For some parents, the idea of their child meddling in their love life is at best mildly annoying and, more likely, patronising – intrusive, even. But while my mum’s baby boomer generation seem to regard their own parents and their wartime stoicism with a level of deference, few of my friends see their parents as authority figures. There’s a closeness and an openness that comes, I think, from the fact that there is less of a gulf in terms of lived experience. Our relationships with our parents are less formal: they resemble close friendships, especially in single-parent families. A tight bond springs up when you’ve spent years feeling as though it’s you two against the world, and as mum and I were both caring for my severely autistic brother, this was often the case.

There are 2 million single parents in the UK. I’m not the only one desperately seeking love on a parent’s behalf

But it’s not just that. As offspring, we feel we know our parents better than anyone. Why wouldn’t we talk about our parent’s dating lives, when we talk about everything else?

There are 2 million single parents in the UK, and it turns out I’m not the only one desperately seeking love on a parent’s behalf. When I started telling other people about my quest to find my mum a match, I found many others doing the same. “Baggage” was a word that often came up in these conversations. When you’re entering the dating pool later in life, it’s rare to meet someone who has emerged from previous relationships unscathed. After my brother finally went into full-time care at the age of 15, and my mother moved to London, it took several years for her to dust herself off and climb out of the rubble.

Caring for someone has certainly affected my mum’s attitude to relationships. She’s had a couple of longish-term ones since she and my dad divorced: a hippy doctor, a chef, and a few flings. But, she says, “The problem is, a lot of men in my age group are looking for someone who will look after them. I’m fully prepared to love and care for a man in an equal relationship, but no way am I going to be the sole domestic.”

Surely an intelligent, sensitive male feminist with whom my mother feels an undeniable sexual chemistry can’t be so hard to find? I’m determined to crack this.

Jo Robbins, 48, lives in Pembrokeshire and doesn’t feel there are many local men who are a romantic option. She’s been single on and off since her partner died in a motorbike accident 15 years ago. “I’ve kind of exhausted everyone round here,” Jo tells me. “Everybody here knows each other. When they grow up, people either work in the family business, get a good job on the refinery, or go to uni, move away and don’t come back until they retire. So the bulk of the ones left are the druggies and the doleys.” She broke up with one stoner because he took too long to decide whether he wanted a tea or a coffee. “I could feel my life slipping away,” she laughs.

Her daughter, Sally Roberts, is 28 and lives in Guildford. Sally has set herself the task of finding her mum a man who likes the outdoors and is happy to swim in the sea all year round. “Everyone thinks my mum’s nuts because she’s quite eccentric, very creative and quite spiritual as well,” Sally says. “We were best friends growing up and we still are now, even though we live miles apart.”

Sally has no qualms about getting involved with her mum’s love life. “She loves my meddling,” Sally says, “she’s always ringing me with gossip.” Jo says she finds it useful for Sally to vet potential partners. “I trust her. She’s very savvy. I’d met somebody on Tinder and dated him for a little while. He’s an actor. She didn’t like him. She got him a drink and he didn’t say thank you. ‘He’s rude,’ she said. Later we were talking and it didn’t feel like he was listening to what I’d been saying, and I thought, ‘Yeah, you’re right, Sally.’ She picks up on the little things that would cause you to dump somebody in the end.”

Sally finds it natural to talk to her mum about her love life: “It’s only weird if she starts talking details, but I just say ‘Enough!’, and my brother puts his hands over his ears.”

Jo’s ideal man looks like Zakk Wylde, the former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist

They go to Download festival together every year. Jo’s ideal man looks like Zakk Wylde, the former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist and member of the band Black Label Society, so Sally signed her up for Kerrang! Dating, a website she assumed would attract metal fans. “I’m always encouraging her to broaden her horizons,” Sally says. “She found the website and I said: ‘I’ll pay for it, so you can meet someone like you.’” Things didn’t exactly go to plan, however. “None of them were metalheads. They were all on different dating sites that had been pooled together. One guy was from 6footlover.co.uk… he thought that I’d specifically gone looking for a really, really tall boyfriend. How shallow is that?”

Despite this inauspicious start, they have plans to meet up when he gets back from his holiday, and Sally is hopeful, telling me approvingly that he looks like Steven Tyler from Aerosmith. Jo is more reserved. “I haven’t found out what the baggage is yet.” There’s that word again: baggage. Perhaps my generation, with Twitter, Tinder and a disposable hookup culture, assume that this is easier for our parents than it really is.

Many of the people I speak to feel a responsibility for their parents’ happiness. Dr Terri Apter, a psychologist and academic focusing on family relationships, tells me this is common for children whose parents have divorced, and particularly girls, who often devote themselves to bucking up their mothers in times of crisis.

“There’s a primitive fear, an old, ancient panic when your family unit breaks apart,” Apter says. “It’s great for the child of a single parent to be relieved of this worry and concern and anxious empathy, [this feeling of] ‘my parent is alone’. Finding someone for a parent means you can go back to your own life without underlying anxiety.”

But, Apter warns, it’s important that children don’t shoulder too much of the burden. “It is not your role to fix your parent’s life for them,” she says. “Your parent has to find his or her own way of navigating this. Being there for them from time to time, without giving up your own life, is the best support you can offer.”

Children may have grand ideas about what is best for their parents, but these can be wide of the mark. “Just as parents who meddle in their sons’ and daughters’ love lives can get it absolutely wrong in terms of what the son or daughter needs in a partner, so the child can do that, too. They can also believe that getting a boyfriend or girlfriend will be a complete fix of everything that has gone wrong, and of course it’s not.”

In fact, she adds, raising the idea of dating with a parent might worry them. “They may be rattled to see the child upset on their behalf. They might worry: ‘Oh, I’m not containing my unhappiness and my personal difficulties – this is messing my child up.’” There’s a lot written about how teenagers and young adults pull away from their parents, she says. “What is less acknowledged is how emotionally invested in them they remain.”

Laura Stageman, a 29-year-old TV producer from London, tells me she worries that her mum is lonely. “I have to ring her every day. I hate knowing she’s sitting in her flat by herself,” she says. “Recently I lived with her for six weeks during an illness, and leaving her was so hard. Her parents have passed away, so I’m one of her main pillars of support. And I’m an only child.”

Laura has been trying to set up her mum Gilly, 53, a receptionist from Fareham in Hampshire, since her parents divorced when she was four. “I’d go round to my friends’ houses and see how they were and just think that I wanted that, a normal family. A nuclear family,” she says. “I was always asking friends’ mums and dads if they had someone for her, but she was completely single until about five years ago, when I signed her up for Friends Reunited.

“I had control of the account and was sending all the messages: not pretending to be her, except in the initial, casual messages. Then I’d tell her that there was some interest there and that’s when she’d get involved. I ‘poked’ her first love and they ended up dating for six months.”

Really, she wants David Essex. The house used to be full of pictures of him. I saw him as my invisible live-in father

Laura has tried to get Gilly to internet date, but she’s “quite a shy person” and not very interested (despite Laura bombarding her email with screenshots of eligible bachelors). “Really, she wants a David Essex,” says Laura. “The house was full of pictures of him when I was growing up, and because there weren’t any pictures of my dad, I saw David Essex as my invisible live-in father. I really want her to find a kind, lovely man who will look after her.”

Gilly is bemused by Laura’s efforts. “She’s naughty. Bless her, I know she’s trying desperately, but her concept of finding love is so different from mine. I come from a different generation. For me, it’s like a variation on Sleepless In Seattle: she’s like the little boy who’s looking out for his dad to find love.”

All the families I speak to have been through battles of some kind – death, disability, divorce, cancer – on top of bringing up children. By throwing myself into finding someone for mum, I wonder if I, too, am like that child in Sleepless In Seattle – trying to re-establish a nuclear family, to regain the stability that was lost when my parents divorced.

I hate the idea of my wonderful, witty, kind mother ending up alone (or, even more terrifyingly, lonely). I often fret about her growing older, possibly with no one by her side. My boyfriend, whose parents are still together, thinks I should chill out and leave her to it. He thinks she’s happy as she is and that she’ll work it out – that it’s not for me to project on to her the kind of life I want her to live. But, as with all the would-be matchmakers I speak to, it’s not just a sense of responsibility that spurs me on, it’s the conviction that those who brought us up are wonderful people who deserve to be cared for and appreciated.

Clint Bouchez, a 52-year-old development manager from Reigate, has been divorced since 2006. His daughter, 26-year-old Charlotte, worries about her dad ending up alone (Charlotte’s mum remarried, to someone she met on Match.com five years ago, and Charlotte herself is in a cohabiting relationship). But when I meet them in a central London bar, I can see it’s more than that: Clint is a catch, and Charlotte wants the world to know it.

“My dad is the perfect man,” she says. “He’s comfortable, he’s generous, he knows how to look after a woman, how to treat a woman. He’s a proper gentleman. He’ll always pay on the date. He likes to be spontaneous, he’s romantic and he’s fun. If I don’t mind spending Friday and Saturday nights with my dad then it says quite a lot, considering I’m only 26.”

Charlotte and Clint go out on the razz regularly, and when Clint isn’t trying to stop her dancing on the piano, Charlotte sometimes gets chatting to women in bars who are giving him the eye. She also wrote his My Single Friend dating profile, which has led to numerous dates, though nothing long-term yet. They’re clearly very close; they’re going on a family trip to India later in the year, and are both Bruce Springsteen fanatics, having seen him in concert several times. “My mum’s a massive Springsteen fan,” I tell them. “Is she single?” Charlotte asks, eagerly. “She is,” I reply. My heart quickens with the thrill of a possible match, but Clint is after a career- or businesswoman, and my mum is not that. The hunt continues.

Clint enjoys Charlotte’s efforts. “I don’t find it odd, and most people are complimentary, especially women who say it’s lovely that we have such a close relationship.” He says it’s not something he would have done for his own parents. “It was a whole different time. I don’t think I even went to the pub with my parents.”

But a lot has changed since Clint was young. He tells me a story of how he saw a girl on Fulham Road with “amazing legs” in 1982, then kissed her at a disco and ended up in a relationship with her for two years. She didn’t have a phone and had to use a call box, but they made it work. “It’s hard now just to walk over and ask a woman, ‘Can I buy you a drink?’” he says. Internet dating has changed everything. “I question what that spark is any more,” he says.

Clint’s words remind me of something Gilly said, about that “old-fashioned” spark, that feeling of romantic destiny, something that can get lost with internet dating: “I suppose in a way I want to see somebody and I want them to see me and it’s that initial chemistry of ‘Oooh, who are you? What do you do?’” she says. “I’m a great believer in fate.”

Sparks and kismet seem a long way from websites such as E-Harmony, which claims to be able to locate your perfect partner through a series of probing questions about your preferences (according to Clint “the form-filling is unbelievable; that’s exactly what dating isn’t about”). Perhaps this is why the only person I speak to who has successfully found love for her single parent avoided the internet entirely.

Phoebe Patey-Ferguson is a 24-year-old festival producer and PhD student who, seven years ago, conspired to find someone for her mum Alison, 49, a nurse. “Mum had a few relationships when I was younger, and then she was widowed in my early teens,” Phoebe says. “She had recently recovered from cancer and chemotherapy, and I used to spend a lot of time at my friend Martin’s flat, where he lived with his dad, Phil, a builder.”

Martin’s parents had divorced when he was 16, and he and Phoebe had been friends for years – they’d even had a teenage snog. They had a running joke that they should set their parents up, since Alison had a thing for ginger men.

But after a hysterectomy, chemotherapy and weight increase due to steroids, finding a man wasn’t high on the agenda for Alison. And Phoebe and Martin didn’t really think that anything would end up happening between their parents, though they made a point of introducing them when a mutual friend had a party. The two parents talked for hours. The matchmaking pair engineered further meetings, and eventually Alison and Phil started going on dates.

They married within a year (Phoebe was maid of honour and Martin was best man) and will celebrate their sixth wedding anniversary in May. “I know my mum better than anyone, so I think I was the best person to set her up,” Phoebe says. Alison agrees: “Phoebe has been the steady constant in my life, whereas men have been the most unpredictable and given me the most grief.”

Alison, whose relationship with Phoebe’s dad faltered early in their marriage, says: “Some part of me wanted love unconditionally. At the time of being pregnant and having Phoebe, love [between mother and daughter] was and has been unconditional. With children you don’t worry how your hair looks, if your weight goes up and down, or how to dress when you go out … I think Phoebe gave me the confidence to think: I am worthy of love.”

Back to my mum’s inbox. It’s still full of approaches, but despite numerous dates, she is yet to meet someone special. She has been put off by men with too much interest in pornography, or who seem to be playing away. A fling with a “gorgeous Frenchman” didn’t pan out, though he did text her about a month ago when he was drunk. “It was just a booty call,” she says, adding: “Being back on the dating scene has taught me some new vocabulary.”

She’s struggling to find someone with whom she has much in common. “One younger man I met up with was very good-looking but clearly thought I was past it,” she tells me. “This, and the reactions of two other men I met, taught me never to answer the approaches – or bother to approach – men who go to the gym more than three times a week. They either put pressure on me to become a gym bunny, too, or were embarrassed to be seen with anyone who didn’t have visible muscle tone.”

Am I putting too much pressure on her? “No, darling,” she says, “it’s more of a societal pressure. Success for a woman is still determined by whether or not she is married.” So she’s not irritated by my meddling? “It’s more of an affectionate tolerance,” she says. “It’s amusing – just what is this role reversal? Are you trying to get me off your hands? You’re 27 and seem to think I’m approaching relationships from a similar standpoint, but I’ve been through it all already. I’ve learned to enjoy my own space. What you might interpret as fussiness is actually completely natural when you’re my age.”

All the parents I spoke to are philosophical about a future that may or may not involve a partner – much more so than their children. Without exception, they insist they are happier on their own than with someone who isn’t suitable. “Sometimes I think that the space beside me in life may never be permanently filled,” my mum says. “I may well simply give up hope and carry on writing, painting, gardening, and living some of the time in France – listening to loud music of my choice, and reading books or the newspaper whenever I feel like it. That, to me, isn’t too bad a prospect – especially if the odd fling is still a possibility.”

Who knows what will happen? As Gilly says: “watch this space”. Mum’s messaging a few people at the moment, Jo’s going to see the Steven Tyler lookalike, and Clint is still very much on the lookout, daughter in tow. “I always remain hopeful,” he says. “I honestly believe, sooner or later – and so does Charlotte.”

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is the co-author of The Vagenda, published in paperback by Vintage on 5 March