i have mixed views here.
as teenagers children will know that you’re likely to be dating. They’re not babies, and they aren’t as naive as people seem to think they are. So I would follow their lead on this.
I wouldn’t be telling them that you’ve met someone or seen someone x amount of times, but if they ask whether you date then I absolutely would be honest with them and say that yes you do, but dating doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
I also disagree strongly re waiting a year before introducing the kids for various reasons.
Firstly, people say that you should wait a year to see whether the relationship is going to last. While on some levels I agree, the reality is that how long you’ve been with someone is 0 indication as to whether the relationship will last. After all, if it was then you wouldn’t be in the position where you’re dating with children in the first place, given that the relationship they were born from was presumably a long-term one and didn’t last. So that argument immediately loses its credibility.
Secondly, the longer you’re together, the more established a relationship becomes, and the harder it is to walk away. So if you have a loving and what you believe to be a good relationship, and you’ve been together a year or more before introducing the kids and it turns out that the relationship doesn’t work with kids in the mix, you’re less likely to walk away from it because you’ll still be holding on to the good bits which have already been established.
That doesn’t mean you should introduce the kids to every bloke you’ve been out with a couple of times, but as a relationship becomes more established it’s something you can think about.
To the poster saying the children don’t need to be involved in OP’s love life, that is ridiculous when you’re talking about teenagers. No, you don’t have to blend families or move in together, but the OP has a right to see people, and her teenage children A, deserve to know that she is, and B, need to understand that their mum does have a right to a life. Also, they’re not babies. This whole idea of shielding teenagers from the idea that adults do date is just stupid. They already know. So why lie to them.
Interestingly my own DC was introduced to my DP a few weeks into our relationship, not because I wanted that, I in fact had planned to wait at least six months, but my ex came round with DC when they were staying with him and DP was here, and eXH gave me an ultimatum, either I tell DC I was seeing someone, or he would. I actually introduced DP as a friend but they figured it out. And me and DP are still together twelve years later, although we never have lived together.
But my DS did actually say to me when we talked about it that he would have felt lied to if I’d been seeing someone as long as a year and had never mentioned it to him, so I do think that at that sort of age you need to consider that.
I mean there are posters on here who think their children will feel betrayed when they find out Father Christmas isn’t real, and yet those same posters are happy to lie to their children sometimes for years about real life?