Emily Ratajkowski has opened up about the kinds of men she met after her split from Sebastian Bear-McClard.
In recent years, more women have spoken candidly about the relationships they have left behind and what came next.
That conversation has ranged from Lily Allen’s album West End Girl and its revealing details to Ratajkowski’s latest reflections on dating after divorce.
Ratajkowski married Bear-McClard on 23 February 2018, and they later welcomed their son, Sylvester Apollo Bear, on March 8, 2021. She filed for divorce in September 2022, and the split was finalized in 2025.
In an essay titled ‘Motherf**ker’ for The Cut, published in June 2026, Ratajkowski says that she and Bear-McClard stopped having sex six months after their son was born. Around a year later, they separated, before she filed for divorce in 2022.
Since then, she says she has been navigating life as a single mother while also re-entering the dating world. In the essay, she explains both why she returned to dating and the kinds of men she came across.
She writes that she did not start seeing men again because she was ‘just looking to get laid,’ but because she ‘wanted to feel a man’s desire’.
“And to be reminded that I was a sexual being, not just a mother of a toddler,” she added.
Ratajkowski then details the different personalities she encountered and what those experiences revealed to her.
One man, she says, was ‘older’ and ‘like a walking, talking Myspace page: bright hoodies, obnoxious gold jewelry, with a preference for passé hipster bars like the one he’d chosen’. She had already described him to friends as ‘washed’.
She remembered him wearing ‘one of those bright-colored sweatshirts’ and leaning against the bar in a pose that ‘didn’t flatter him’. She also says he greeted her with a ‘vaguely insulting’ hug, the kind that felt more suited to a co-worker than a date.
Even details like his ‘nasally stoner voice’ while asking about a ‘speciality cocktail’ did not put her off. Instead, she says it made her more ‘determined’ to sleep with him, as she was trying to step into the role of ‘a villain’ like Catwoman after divorce rather than seeming ‘tragic’ or like a ‘victim’ and instead becoming a ‘woman who needs nothing from men’.
She gave that man the nickname ‘Elder Millennial’. During the date, the nearly 40-year-old made Ratajkowski ‘disassociate completely,’ called her ‘pretty’ and asked to ‘grab a drink as friends’ before she ultimately returned to his house.
At that point, she writes that she had decided to ‘f**k her way into a new kind of women’.
Other men followed too. There was a DJ who was ‘the closest man in the vicinity and the lowest stakes’ and a ‘friend of a friend’, although she says she did not sleep with him.
Then there was ‘Elder Millennial’, whom she describes as being ‘obsessed with dental hygiene, psychedelics, and dirty talk’.
Ratajkowski says she began ‘compulsively dating in order to figure out what sort of woman [she] wanted to be’.
After the breakup, she recalls feeling looked at with condescension and pity, something that reminded her of childhood ideas about how it was ‘crucial to avoid becoming a single mum’.
“Having a child with the wrong man was the fastest way to ruin your life as a woman — it meant having no freedom, no choices, no emergency exit. All baggage and no security,” she writes.
Once the divorce was filed, she says she threw herself into dating as a way of rejecting the ‘vulnerable’ ‘good girl’ persona she had tried to maintain in her twenties.
But in the end, she came to feel that her ‘performance as the supervillain’ was just as far removed from her real self and her actual desires as the ‘good girl’ role she had once inhabited.
She concludes that her post-divorce experiences with men became ‘a silly game of performances with no substance’ — something that may have been necessary for a time, but not a path she wanted to stay on forever.