Shortly after my son Billy had his first birthday, his Dad and I ended our relationship. It was a tough time and I was not prepared for the loneliness I would feel as a single parent. I found myself dreading the weekends when the loneliness of being a single parent was compounded, and feeling guilty that I wasn’t able to really enjoy time with my son. What I longed for during that time was a connection with other people in a similar situation who could relate to what I was going through.

When I discovered (despite 1 in 4 families being single-parent families) there was no app or community that offered this, I felt compelled to create the solution I needed and the one I wished existed. I wanted to give the term single parent a bit of a positive rebrand - so I decided to call the app Frolo - a combination of the words ‘friends’ and ‘solo’. Frolo Community launched in 2019 and has exploded into an app with a thriving community of tens of thousands of single parents across the UK and Ireland. The Frolo Community has become a nurturing, positive and safe place to connect with people who get it, where Frolos can easily make friends, seek advice, as well as share experiences such as virtual meetups, playdates, nights out and trips away. My life has been so enriched and empowered by the Frolo community and the friendships that Billy and I have formed. The way I felt when I first became a single parent has been completely flipped around in the best possible way, and I know many other Frolo users feel the same.

As the community has grown, it has also become clear through feedback from the community related to dating as a single parent, that we can often find traditional dating apps not to be the most supportive or empowering experience. As single parents, we often come across the term ‘baggage’ being used to describe kids, and a lot of our single parents struggle with knowing whether it’s sensible to even mention having children on a dating profile for fear it might go against them or be a safety risk. With this in mind and due to popular requests from our community, we went ahead and created the Frolo Community’s ideal scenario - a respectful and empowering dating app experience for single parents where everyone has the same shared importance of family - Frolo Dating. Already many Frolos have found love with other single parents through Frolo (including an engagement!) and we are excited to see many more lovely relationships and blended families form in the future.