Emily Ratajkowski didn't want the label "divorced single mother"

Model Emily Ratajkowski has spoken openly about how she felt aversion to the label "divorced single mother" after her split from ex-husband Sebastian Bear-McClard.

In a personal and emotional essay published in The Cut, the 35-year-old model and actress described her experiences with single parenthood, her return to the dating world, and the internal turmoil that accompanied that period of her life.

Ratajkowski briefly spoke about how her marriage to Bear-McClard "fell apart" just six months after the birth of their son Sly, who is now five years old.

She described that period as a time that seemed "simultaneously instantaneous and infinitely slow."

She called the transition to motherhood "a violent entry into a new reality, with a crying baby on her sore chest and a wedding ring on her swollen finger."

Ratajkowski and Bear-McClard married in 2018, separated in 2022, and their divorce was officially finalized in 2025.

After the breakup, she says she was forced to confront her long-held fear of becoming a single mother.

Speaking about new relationships, she pointed out that she noticed that many men were especially attracted to the fact that she was a mother.

"They were particularly drawn to the idea that parenting involves sacrifice and that it is an integral part of my life. Did they want me to be their mom? Maybe," she wrote in the essay.

When she started dating again, she consciously embraced the role of the villain, presenting herself as "a woman who doesn't need anything from men."

She cited comic book characters like Poison Ivy and Catwoman as inspiration.

"I've seen too much and discovered what many women only find out after a divorce in their forties. I went through the breakup of a family, and I was only in my early thirties. That was my story of the emergence of a villain," the model wrote.

She added that living in New York helped her see single motherhood as something more attractive and freeing.

"I was a city person. Being a New Yorker made me feel sexier as a single mother. Bohemian. Or so I told myself," she claims, later describing a relationship with a man she called an "older millennial."

When he told her he loved her, just three weeks into their relationship, she felt, as she says, "a familiar tightness in her chest."

After she asked him to keep their relationship non-exclusive, she noticed that he began to realize that she was actually "the cold-blooded supervillain she'd been playing all along."

Still, she admits that behind that mask she was still vulnerable.

"Despite playing the role of a supervillain, a character I believed made me untouchable, I was just as lost and vulnerable as I was in my twenties when I played the role of a good girl," Ratajkowski wrote.