Drew Barrymore gets emotional discussing dating as a single mom

Being a single parent comes with a laundry list of hardships, no doubt. A big one of those is dating—especially when your children are young. In a new clip from her show, Drew Barrymore chokes up and admits she doesn’t “know how to date with kids.”

“I don’t know how to date with kids, you know. I’m not there yet. I have two young girls, and I’m like, I don’t want to bring people home,” Barrymore told Queer Eye star Bobby Berk in a clip that aired on CBS Mornings on Wednesday.

Barrymore shares daughters, Olive, 9, and Frankie, 7, with her ex-husband Will Kopelman. Her ex has since remarried, and while Barrymore says she’s totally supportive of him and his new wife, her experience has been completely different.

“I think that it would take me a very long to meet someone and get to know them before I could even ever introduce them to my daughters,” she says in the clip.

It’s heartwrenching to watch her cry and be so vulnerable, but what she’s talking about is so relatable for so many single parents—especially those who are divorced and/or widowed. She admitted to CBS Mornings that she’s never talked about how hard it is to date as a single mom before.

“I had never realized and said aloud that I don’t know how to date with kids,” she said. “I’ll go on an occasional date but that’s only in the last two years. It took me four years to get back out there and people have different processes and then, enter a pandemic.” 

According to research from the Pew Research Center in 2013, four in 10 new marriages were remarriages. And more of them were men (64 percent) than women (52 percent). The study showed that women don’t appear to want to get remarried as much as men do. The majority of divorced or widowed men in 2014 (65 percent) were open to the idea of remarriage, but only 43 percent of women in the same situation were open to the idea. 

Barrymore herself says she has no interest in walking down the aisle again and would prefer not to date a man who wants marriage or kids.

“I would maybe live with someone again maybe, but I’ve had kids, and there’s no way. I will never, ever, ever, ever get married,” she said. 

She shared the clip from the interview on her own Instagram page, where she thanked Berk personally for allowing her to open up about such a difficult topic.

“Thank you, @bobby for creating such a safe space for me to open up, and get real about something that so many parents go through.”

The full interview between Berk and Barrymore will air during Thursday’s episode of The Drew Barrymore Show.

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