I’m a divorcee without kids who likes to attend sporting events on occasion. Mostly I walk around and am fairly oblivious to any guys who might be around; believe it or not, I go to games to actually watch sports. If I’ve gotten noticed at all by the “weaker sex” at any games, I haven’t noticed it so much. 

That all changed when I went to an MLS soccer game with my friend and her kids. I took her daughter to get some food at the concession stand and felt like Hugh Grant's character from About a Boy. In About a Boy, the hero joins a club for single parents so that he can meet women. His theory is that women with children will overlook any of the more obvious flaws that he has. 

I didn’t exactly pretend that my friend’s daughter was my daughter--we don’t really look anything alike so I couldn’t--but someone might have assumed she was mine since I was holding her hand as we walked through the crowd. In all honesty,  she was like a dude-magnet. There were so many cute guys at the game with their kids walking by and they actually looked at both of us because she was so cute and we looked so happy walking together. 

In the past, whenever I’d noticed cute guys with kids, I never really looked all that closely in the (probable) assumption that they were married and none of them seemed to notice me either. I was pretty much invisible to them until I walked around with my friend’s daughter. 

When we got back to our seats, I asked my friend if she had noticed the same thing when she was walking around with either her daughter or her son. She said that was pretty used to it and mentioned that she wasn’t all that excited about my use of the term “dude magnet” in the context of her young daughter. 

I apologized for my inappropriate use of the term and thought about single moms and how guys with kids are more drawn to women who already have children. Maybe it’s because people in my generation all grew up with The Brady Bunch and have little versions in their head of the perfect step-families with matching sets of brothers and sisters. 

All of this doesn’t mean that I’ll kidnap the next cute kid I see or adopt a perfect stranger’s kid in the hopes of meeting a cute dad at a game, but I definitely won’t complain if my friend wants to bring her kids along again.