Making a child, minus the couple

Rachel Hope is 5-foot-9 and likes yoga, dance and martial arts. A real estate developer and freelance writer in Los Angeles, Rachel, 41, is seeking a man who lives near her, is healthy and fit, and "has his financial stuff together," she said. Parker Williams, the 42-year-old founder of QTheory, a charity auction company also in Los Angeles, would seem like a good candidate. A 6-foot-2 former model who loves animals, Parker is athletic, easygoing, compassionate and organised.
Neither Rachel nor Parker is interested in a romantic liaison. But they both want a child, and they're in serious discussions about having, and raising, one together. Never mind that Parker is gay and that the two did not know of each other's existence until last October, when they met on Modamily.com, a Web site for people looking to share parenting arrangements. Parker and Rachel are among a new breed of online daters, looking not for love but rather a partner with whom to build a decidedly non-nuclear family. And several social networks, including PollenTree.com, Coparents.com, Co-ParentMatch.com, and MyAlternativeFamily.com, as well as Modamily, have sprung up to help them.
"Many people look at the financial pressures and the lack of an emotional partner and decide that single parenting is too daunting and wouldn't be good for them or the child," said Darren Spedale, 38, the founder of Family by Design, a free parenting partnership site officially introduced in early January. "If you can share the support and the ups and downs with someone, it makes it a much more interesting parenting option."
The sites present what can seem like a compelling alternative to surrogacy, adoption or simple sperm donation.
"I've met so many women in this same situation, who aren't married and feel like they missed the boat," said Dawn Pieke, 43, a sales and marketing manager in Omaha, Neb., whose daughter, Indigo, was born last October. Dawn met Indigo's father, Fabian Blue, on a Facebook page — Co-parents.net — in June 2011, not long after the end of her 10-year relationship. She wanted a baby, but feared doing it alone because, she said, "I didn't grow up with my dad." Rather than focusing on a love match, she decided to find someone to share both the financial and emotional stresses of child rearing.
Fabian, for his part, had wanted to be a father since 2006. He had considered adoption, but "figured no one would let a single gay male adopt a child, and I didn't have the kind of income for a surrogate," he said. He went on Craigslist and parenting Web sites and had coffee dates with a handful of women, but "just like in any relationship there needed to be a spark and it simply wasn't there," he said. With Dawn, though, he said the electricity was palpable from the start. The two corresponded on Facebook and then Skype. By November he decided to move from Melbourne, Australia, where he was living, to Omaha.
They first met in person on Thanksgiving 2011. "I felt like this guy was my relative or long-lost brother, but then again he was also a stranger," Dawn said. They continued the dialogue: reading each other's medical charts, undergoing fertility tests. He moved into a separate bedroom in her home, and, she said, four weeks later, "He handed me a semen sample, we hugged, and I went into my bedroom and inseminated myself."
Spedale, who is writing a book on parenting partnerships, a term he prefers to co-parenting since the latter is sometimes used among the divorced, stresses the importance of having some kind of written agreement in place, not just for legal reasons but "to get that conversation going about things you might not have thought about asking," he said.
Colin Weil and the mother of his two-year-old daughter, Stella, made sure to draw up a contract and even went to couples therapy before she got pregnant. Colin, who is gay, met Stella's mother, who asked that her name not be used, in October 2009 through a mutual friend who knew that both were single and wanted children.
Colin believes this type of parenting arrangement is completely logical. "When you think about the concept of the village, and how the village was part of child rearing for so many cultures for so many thousands of years, it makes total sense," he said. "The idea that two people — let alone one person — would do it without the village is really nutty."