Drew Barrymore Opens Up About Dating as a Single Mom After Going on 'Howard Stern' Blind Date

The Drew Barrymore Show/YouTube

Drew Barrymore had a blind date experience that taught her a lot about herself.

On a recent episode of The Drew Barrymore Show, the actress explained that she was set up with four eligible bachelors earlier this week on The Howard Stern Show, ultimately picking one as her best match.

Reconnecting with the man, Clarke Thorell, Barrymore, 47, opened up about having "revelations" as a result of the dating experience.

"None of the gentlemen, including yourself, have kids," she said. "I have only dated, in the last few years, men who don't have children. I want it clean, I don't want to engage. I don't think anyone's meeting my kids, I don't know if this is going anywhere. I realized something yesterday, Clarke, which is I might live on planet parent."

Explaining that those who do and don't have kids live on "different planets," she noted that "I feel like I've never gone on a date with anyone who actually understands the thing that's the most all-consuming part of me."

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Though Barrymore, who shares two daughters, 8-year-old Frankie and 10-year-old Olive, with ex-husband Will Kopelman, recently opened up about exploring dating apps during an episode of her daytime talk show last month, she also dished that she can go "years" without sex.

The topic came up while Barrymore and Drew Barrymore Show contributor Ross Matthew discussed Andrew Garfield being celibate for six months to prepare for his role in the 2016 film Silence.

"Well, I get abstaining from sex — I did that my entire 20s," joked Mathews during the episode, according to Entertainment Tonight.

Barrymore added, "I was like, 'What's wrong with me that six months doesn't seem like a very long time?' I was like, 'Yeah, so?' "

The Drew Barrymore Show/YouTube

In a blog post after the episode, she wrote, "I'm sure that there was one point in my life where six months might have seemed extreme, but I'm on the other side of that now," and went on to explain that she has "very different feelings about intimacy" as an adult now "than I did growing up."

Barrymore went on to say she "searched [her] whole life" to understand the difference between sex and love, and had a revelation about it with her therapist, who told her, "Sex is not love! It is the expression of love."

For Barrymore, "a relationship with a man has not been top of mind for me for a very long time," she wrote. Instead, she explained, she "needed to stay very celibate and honoring and in some sort of state of [mourning] of the loss of a nuclear family that I swore I would have for my daughters and to find grace and acceptance and what our new normal of a blended family would be."