How DID SINGLE DADS become the new heart-throbs?
FOR a novelist with a knack for romance, this is great news: the latest fashion in pool-side paperback heroes, it seems, is ‘hot single dads’.
Mills & Boon spotted the trend earlier this year, saying that its titles containing the words ‘single Dad’ were flying off the shelves. Harper-Collins churned out a bundle of six for Father’s Day.
These romantic leads still tend to be rich, or doctors, or hero paramedics, and obviously they still have rippling pecs and manly stubble. But now they’ve got babies, too.
it seems that women just can’t get enough of these caring types, who are more likely to peep round the door of the nursery on the way to the bedroom than lead a girl into a room of Pain and thrash her with a leather strap like the creepy, violent Mr Grey.
i shall immediately rush into print, mindful of the style for this new genre.
‘Darren looked down at her, as her eyes filled with tears,’ i’d begin. ‘A thrill of electricity went through her trembling body as his strong hand rested on her bare shoulder, warm through the thin silk of her camisole. The scent of Calpol and baby-rice on his breath made her dizzy. she steadied herself on the stair-gate.
‘Mesmerised, Fiona moved towards his embrace as, with infinite gentleness, he eased off the straps of the iggle Piggle-print papoose and looked for somewhere to put the baby down . . .’
Of course, many have greeted this development with a fair amount of scepticism. Do women really want someone else’s cast-off? surely a single girl wants a single man, with no complications, no worrying evidence that another woman got there before her.
But it had to come, this fantasy. Why? Probably because of today’s perilous dating landscape.
read anything from Bridget Jones’s diaries to online dating blogs, and what is the most common worry of young women? What is it that’s on their mind as their 20s rush past and the ticking of the biological clock grows louder? it’s that today’s young men ‘won’t commit’.
‘There are so many different kinds of romance heroes, but single dads have a nurturing and caring element that is very appealing,’ says a spokesperson for Mills & Boon. ‘The heroes are real and relatable and often offer hope of a second chance at happily ever after.’
WRITERS have hit on the allure of a man who has a track record when it comes to pledging his troth — even though it didn’t last and resulted in him becoming a father to another woman’s child.
We sadly conclude that nowadays, a man who has shown a flicker of maturity in a previous relationship — regardless of the baggage he subsequently carries with him — is deemed a catch. That speaks volumes.
The alternatives, today’s women complain, simply do not come up to scratch. Too many of them don’t want to settle down. They are fun, they are sexy, they are great mates, they are admiring and even loving in a couple — but they seem worryingly wedded to a ‘kidult’ lifestyle.
Five-a-side football, stag weekends abroad, computer games, clubbing, mini-breaks to the sun, snow or jungle. To them, a beach is not a place for sandcastles, sandwiches and paddling. it’s for surfing, scuba diving, paddleboarding and evenings of sangria and seduction.
By the time they have disposable incomes and steady-enough careers to think of marriage and children, they have other options to distract them.
They are likely to get enough sex without putting a ring on anyone’s finger, and they don’t have a biological clock in there, or not so as you’d notice.
if George Clooney can wait to 56 to father twins, and old rockers with faces like geriatric lizards can pull luscious new baby-mamas with a mere snap of their fingers, why not carry on with fun and freedom and keep your abs taut for future decades of wooing?
Why get tied down now by some weeping hormonal woman and a couple of crying babies as you grow a dad-bod and a buggy-pusher’s hunch? especially as you’d also be running the risk of her taking off with someone else and leaving you with a sore heart, no house and years of alimony. if it is true that young men dodge commitment for longer than their fathers did, you can see why.
so you can understand the appeal, for the dreaming modern girl, of picking up a novel about a man who has proved his willingness for fatherhood, and seems actually to like it.
‘Darren’s powerful hand moved gently, burping the baby as he sang along with the flickering image of Peppa Pig. Looking at him, her eyes damp, Fiona knew that he, and only he, was the man who could make the wheels on her bus go round and round . . .’
But a word of caution girls: if this chap is a good father, his child will always come before you. Yes, it will. That is hard-wired instinct. it’s a blood tie.
And if he is not a good dad, that bodes ill for your own future.
Moreover, his child may well take against you and decide you are a wicked stepmother. The work you put in to making a single dad love you will be nothing compared to the hard labour of winning round a beady-eyed, defiant five-year-old who reckons you’re in the way.
And if his child’s mother is still around, you will be permanently measured against her.
Plus, if you and Dreamy Darren have children together and he has been operating as a weekend-access dad, he may find it a bit of a shock having full-on, full-time responsibilities again.
He will have to be told that all that nursery stuff, those school lunches and gym kits, all that hanging around sweaty ball-ponds and bouncy castles and the boring imposing of rules about screentime and curfews — all that is a shared job. And a big one.
To his second brood he’ll have to be bad-cop sometimes, but he’ll never dare with his first child, because he or she might stop coming round.
Well, OK, that’s just the gloomy scenario. There are plenty of good ones: happy blended families, widowers and divorcees finding new energy and momentum, teenage half-siblings enjoying the new babies, calling step-mum by her first name and being genuinely grateful that she made poor, lonely single-dad happy again.
Good luck to these new-formed families. it’s true that if you meet a good single dad, he has certainly passed a reassuring maturity test. Whereas when you snare a merry bachelor, you are, as the saying goes, buying a pig in a poke.
But there’s another dark reflection that crosses my mind on hearing of this new trend. While Mills & Boon and the others churn out these glorious fantasies of fully proven, readycooked fathers falling in love again with dewy heroines, the reverse is not happening.
i have not noticed any men’s literature or magazines getting all starry-eyed about the irresistible glamour of single mothers. Have you?
You’ll be more likely to get people talking admiringly about chaps who bravely ‘take on’ a woman with a child, as if they were self-sacrificing heroes.
No. On balance, if i were reincarnated and had to be a young woman again, i’d stick with the old fantasy of a chap heart-whole, unencumbered and ready for the great adventure.
There was a delightful newspaper advert reproduced online the other day from 1865 in Aroostook County, Maine. A young man of 18 wrote that he had good teeth, a patriotic spirit, 18 acres of land, a bull, two cows, nine sheep and a house and barn.
‘My buckwheat looks first-rate and the oats and potatoes are bully...i want to get married. i want to buy bread and butter, hoop-skirts and waterfalls for some person of the female persuasion during life.’
Yep. i’ll settle for him.