A Guide to Dating Women Raised in a Matriarchy

My freshman year in college I went on a date with an earnest boy from my dorm who had ears that stuck out when he grinned. He had been raised Catholic and gone to an all-boys school, and I was charmed by him. I was also generally enthusiastic about college dating, because I hadn’t done much of it. We sat flirting in a booth near the back of a club called Elevate, and everything went well until he broached the subject of my childhood.

That’s when I first experienced the trap that has bedeviled me and men I like since, the topic that can make a night pivot from lovely to unendurable in seconds and that I have learned to deflect at all costs upon meeting prospective partners: my single mother.

“What was it like growing up without a mom?” he asked gently, solemnly, steering us toward a moment of profound connection. I was stirred by his closeness in the booth and the strobe lights above. I wanted to be the type of girl who was breezy but able to be vulnerable when prompted. The problem was that I didn’t grow up without a mom. I actually grew up with a single mom, which is precisely the opposite. He paused and looked at me intently, and then said, “Oops, I meant dad.”

The truest answer would have been, “It was like living my entire life the only way I’ve ever lived it.” I don’t know. What was it like to have lungs instead of gills?

I have since learned that it is a shocking amount of trouble to tell men on first dates that I was raised by a single mom. They are always well-intentioned, flirtatious, curious, nice — and blindingly ignorant. At first I thought they just lacked imagination. But I’ve come to see their responses as indicative of a more primal fear: Lots of people think that women need men, if not for their charm and likability, then at least for their ability to father children. A girl with no dad suggests maybe men aren’t so necessary after all.

I grew up firmly in a matriarchy. My grandmother divorced my grandfather when she was 31 and had four young daughters. She wanted more kids, so she very briefly married a man she had met at the neighborhood plant store in order to get his sperm to have a fifth child. She raised her five girls mostly by herself.

My mom chose to be a single mom and also had five children: My older siblings and I have donor dads, and my two younger siblings are adopted from Guatemala.

When I tell my dates I grew up without a dad, I can see the synapses in their brains begin to spark. The first question that comes up for them is, I think, simply a curious one: What would a life without a father look like? And then panic sets in: Where did the father go? Were there no men? What happened to the men? Does she hate men? And then, the rational and generous part of the brain re-enters and produces a soothing idea: It must have been a weird and almost inexplicable life, which I can try to excavate through my clever questions.

After college, I went on a first date with a tall, blond man I met at a party. He took me to a warehouse-turned-restaurant in downtown Oakland, where he ordered us many small plates.

After he’d provided an unsettling explanation of his job helping public utility companies raise the price of water without being sued, he asked about my dad. Feeling forced, I told him I had a single mom.

“So how old is your grandmother?” he asked immediately. I couldn’t really figure out the connection in his mind, and also my grandmother had just died. I told him she was dead, but he forged on.

“I ask because I just want to know how young your mom was when she had you.”

My mom had me when she was 34, in a way that could not have been more planned, since she slept only with women and basically lived in a separatist lesbian community. When the tall boy learned I didn’t have a teenage mom, as I guess he expected, he became flustered. After dinner we made out next to his car, and I told him I did not want to go on a second date.

These days, it’s actually very normal to have a single mom. Forty percent of American kids are born to unmarried women. I’m here to let you know: You don’t have to worry if the girl across the table has a single mother. There’s no apocalypse coming for you. We probably even like men — that’s why we go on dates with them.

Sometimes, a question about my missing father can broaden into a question about the existential nature of all my family relationships. At a first date at a bar in Brooklyn, after we took whiskey shots and talked about the neighborhood, a guy asked me what my parents did for a living.

“My mom is a rabbi,” I said.

“And what does your dad do?”

“I have a single mom.” That was my way of saying, The End!

“No dad?” I said I had a donor dad.

“And do all of your siblings have the same donor dad?” I said no, some were adopted. I tried to drink my beer.

“So which of your siblings are real?”

This counted as a strike against him and can serve as a teaching moment for all men. Never search for the realest sibling in the bunch.

Recently, I was flying from New York to Los Angeles with my current boyfriend and we were watching “Wonder Woman,” an inspiring story of women living and thriving on an island without men. At one point, Wonder Woman and her male love interest have what I have come to recognize as the first date conversation of a girl who grew up in the matriarchy.

“Have you ever met a man before?” Capt. Steve Trevor asks. “What about your father?”

“I had no father,” Wonder Woman says. “My mother sculpted me from clay.”

I tucked that answer away, for next time.

Zoe Greenberg is on the editorial staff of the Opinion section.

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