The Bumble profile that scored me my husband

The key: lead with your red flags 🚩

Instead of doing something serious and poignant (or pithy, perhaps?) about staying sober for New Years’, I thought I would do something just for fun: explain to everyone how I, a sober then-34-year-old single mother of 3 boys under 5, got a husband on a dating app. Enjoy.

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I met my ex-husband in 2010 in graduate school and we separated sometime in 2020 or 2021. Post-Covid, in any event.

Prior to that, I had met people through mutual friends, in the bars, or, since I had graduated high school in 2006, undergrad in 2009, and started grad school in 2010: through school.

So when I became single at the age of 32, with 3 boys under 3, I had not once, not ever, dated online.

I was also newly sober. New to sobriety, dating online, and dating as a single mom.

In any event, this is my experience.

When I first started talking to my husband, in fact, I had exactly zero intention of finding another husband. He was so sweet and so kind and so genuine, that I just thought, my God. I have to warn him.

Oh, you sweet lamb, I said to him. It’s the Wild West out here. They’re going to eat you alive.

But we started talking, and we never stopped talking, and not so many months later, we were wed.

While I was curating this profile, I was early in sobriety. I was still amazed at how blue my eyes looked. I also had just had my hair done when I took this picture, so I was very, very blonde — and, in a bored sober doomscroll, I had been bamboozled into taking a skin quiz on Facebook and found a foundation that I still love to this day (Il Makiage).

One thing that I was very forthright about: my sobriety.

In the early days on this dating app, I didn’t have a response to drinking listed. As I recall, the options were something like: never, sometimes, frequently, or sober.

But people would say things like, you want to get a drink? (And in my early sobriety, my answer was something like: No. But also yes. Terribly yes. More than anything. But no, really. I want to live, and so, I choose not to drink.)

The longer I was on this dating app (and I often downloaded and deleted it), I started to answer like this: No, I don’t drink at all. I’m an alcoholic. But you know, like, the fun kind, the kind of recovery.

I also listed the ages of my kids because that was a first question and I wanted to eliminate as much conversation as possible.

I added the detail about the IUD because that was a common refrain I heard when I told people my twins and my baby were 15 months apart.

“You know how this happens, right?” People would say to me on the street. And this was when I was still married and pregnant, no less.

So, by and large, a major key was this: cut off things at the pass.

Lead with your red flags.

This is not an Instagram, it is not a Facebook, it is not the place to put on airs.

Or so I believe. I believe to genuinely get to know another human, you should both to your best foot forward, but also put a genuine foot forward.

Other like-minded genuine humans looking for genuine human connection will appreciate this.

I am not for everyone, that’s for damn sure. And the primary goal of my profile was to eliminate as many of those people right off the bat.

What my profile didn’t eliminate, I figured, me asking for their birth time and location to look up their birth chart and saying I would never be drinking, not once, not one, ever, would.

The other honest truth was this: I put my sobriety first so I could be the mom I wanted to be, and I was the mom I wanted to be because I put my kids first.

But when it came to putting my sobriety first: I had to face the fact that someone who came home and cracked a beer every day after work, or began peeling the orange to put into their old fashioned — was not going to work for me at that juncture of my life.

I was looking for a man who believed in putting his kids first, too.

A man without children just didn’t know what I did. A man with only one child, or even two, didn’t really understand.

People thought we were crazy to blend our families (my 3 and his 4), and even crazier to have another child, but our family is everything to us both.

The line that Billy won me with was this: I’m over here slinging juice boxes and wiping butts.

An involved man. A good father.

And of course, my number one value: humor. Both the high and low forms.

And in this picture: me, my baby, my breast pump, hand sanitizer (in a pre-Covid era, thank you, NICU babies), and my work.

The below picture was carefully chosen to illustrate that I both wear a one-piece bathing suit that resembles the original Barbie bathing suit, an oversized sun hat, giant sunglasses, and that you should know there will be stuff all over my backyard. I’m not even sure what is on the ground there. Maybe a shirt? A bag?

No one knows.

Also: good stories. A must.

In retrospect, I suppose I should have done one of those things people do where you put the heart over your kids’ faces, or whatever — but again, unabashedly me: I am no good with technology. With cropping. With whatever it is that anyone has to do that is not at its core on the level of printing Mapquest directions.

Mr. Rogers. The Berenstain Bears.

And more seriously: John Gottman. Billy and I had both read The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work by John Gottman while we had attempted to salvage our past marriages. We had filled out the pages. And for the most part, our former spouses had not. They had maybe thumbed through.

But when I met Billy for the first time (at my house, no less, further illustrating our naiveté of dating on the internet) and he carried a copy of John Gottman’s 8 Dates, I thought I have truly never met a man like this.

But in short: the most important thing about finding my husband was practicing a well known recovery principle : rigorous honesty.

I was Kristen — unabashedly, 100%, fully exactly who I was. I knew who I was and what I wanted and I wasn’t going to settle for anything less than perfect.

I had my whole life set up: I had a job, I paid my bills, I worked my program well, I was the healthiest I had been in my entire life.

What my husband and I have been called to walk through in the almost two years that we’ve known each other is beyond me. What we have had to walk through would have tested any blended family, to be sure.

Our responses to the shitshow we have had to endure have been similar because we share core values, but it has not been easy.

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But really, that’s it, it’s the hardest and simplest thing: just tell the truth.

Know your truth.

Know your core values and what you’re looking for and what you want.

Be honest. Be you. Be fully who you are and you will attract what will best serve you.

Welcome joy and honesty in 2025. Pluto has fully moved into Aquarius, and there it will stay for the next 16 years or so. Hard earned lessons have been won over the last 16 years.

The new chapter is here, and god, do I welcome it.