Monthly Archives: April 2011

Dating a Widower

Posted on by Ann
Day of the Dead - Band

Until I read Abel Keogh’s Widower Wednesday, I had no idea that dating a widower was such a widespread practice* that it required its own self-help dating niche. Silly me though because where divorced and never-married men get lumped together in the douche category when they exhibit behaviors that clearly speak to their disinterest in anything other than their own needs, widowers get a pass. Proving that the “widow card” is a mighty little act of self-interest in more areas than simply workplace or guilting one’s family, friends and the occasional stranger.

I am still working on my “success” story for Abel’s upcoming book on dating widowed men. The whole idea that Rob and I are some freak success doesn’t sit well really. I never actually approached our relationship in terms of our being widowed. We liked each other. We became friends. He proposed dating. Then he just proposed and we got married. In “how-to” terms, it wasn’t any different from the first time. And I don’t know that it should be sold as being different either. When we start making exceptions for bad behavior the slope gets shit slick in a hurry.

Abel’s book simply covers the questions that women have posed to him. They wonder if their feelings or the situations that arise are normal. It’s normal to wonder if you are normal. He hopes to caution women away from men who are clearly not ready for relationships or might be using their “grief” in a manipulative manner. In essence, his book is no different from the other dating books out there because the bad behavior men exhibit in relationships really is the same regardless of the label he wears.

What I wish is that women would stop reading men like tea leaves and just ask for and expect to get what they need and walk away when they don’t get it.

On our way back from the city yesterday, we were listening to the CBC’s book talk. One of the authors had written a romance novel that she based partly on the somewhat universal notion women have that love is like the books and the movies they grew up on. Girl meets Boy. They clash. And clash. Until they realize that their antipathy is really love and then they continue to clash all the way to the altar and beyond – because that’s what love is, right?

But it’s not. Love is not that hard. It isn’t fraught with tension, second-guessing and tears.

At least it shouldn’t be and if it is, one should step back and really look at what is and isn’t going on.

A man who loves you is not ambivalent in his expression of it or his desire or in his follow through. If you are loved, you will know it. If you don’t, you probably aren’t loved.

No one wants to hear that or be the one to point it out to someone else. Hence the world of dating self-help. It’s a way to use anecdote, pop psychology and a lot of sugar to tell angsty women what they already know – that he’s just not that into you. Or that his idea of how you fit into his life and future plans isn’t the same as yours.

Lots of couples fall into the trap of being with someone who doesn’t quite fit because they despair of finding someone who does, and it’s sometimes hard to know if the ill-fit is a genuine mismatch or just two people not putting their best forward due to some self-inflicted story they’ve insulated their emotions with over the course of dating and its past disappointments. But if it feels like you are a square peg who hips will never slide through that round hole – it’s time to be really honest with yourself and the other person because love shouldn’t be a drama-fest unless it’s a Hollywood movie or a bad paperback from the rack at the grocery check-out.

Rob and I didn’t “make” our relationship happen. It was a logical progression of escalating feelings. Honestly, grief was never an issue in the way that the world of GOWS (girlfriends of widowers) are taught to believe. Grief isn’t a life long disease. It subsides within a year to a year and a half, and falling in love again, in my experience, should speed that process up quite a bit. Widowed hate the idea that new love is “healing” and I don’t disagree though only because I dislike the “healing” terminology. It makes feeling sad because someone you loved has died seem not normal somehow. However, the best remedy for a “broken attachment” is a new attachment. What worked for us when we were teenagers suffering through a break-up or unrequited love still works when we are grown ups – falling in love again. The simplest solutions endure for a reason.

If you are dating a widower and he is anything less than totally into you, keep looking. You can do better because if he loves you, there is no guessing or tears.

*Disclaimer, it was rather widespread at the YWBB, though no one wanted to own that inconvenient truth. Widowers are in short supply on the grief sites and they are hunted like trophy animals by some widows due to the old wives’ tale of widowed men being proven and seasoned husbands. I don’t think that is the case given the number of my fellow females who are willing to settle for less than stellar consideration. The odds of a widowed man having been not so great a husband but simply married to a woman willing to put up with him is probably 50-50.

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The Descent Into Hell

Posted on by Ann
Ary Scheffer: The Temptation of Christ, 1854

Image via Wikipedia

A friend’s Facebook status reminded me that today is Easter’s infamous vigil. It’s the Christian equvilant of the Jewish tradition of “sitting shiva”, which is the mourning period for the dead. Instead of a person, however, Christians today mourn/anticipatory celebrate Jesus’s death and descent into hell.

I am not versed in how this day goes in any other religion except my natal one, Catholicism. My friend is of the Eastern persuasion, and her recollections on Easter differ from my own as they spin Holy Week in a more positive way than the gore, guilt and unworthiness focus of my Catholic youth.

But as I remember the lesson from my Catholic schoolgirl days, Jesus died on Good Friday and descended into hell. There, he rallied the souls of the faithful departed and led them to heaven. It’s a zombie version of The Rapture. The gates of heaven were locked against humanity after some snit God had in the Old Testament. Christianity, as a whole, makes a lot less sense when the Old Testament is examined too closely, and the nonsensical idea that God is anything other than capricious and scary as … um … hell, can be found all over the bible’s earliest books.

I bring this up because of a conversation I overheard Dee having with a friend who stayed over the other night.

Her little friend is Catholic and Dee herself was baptized in the faith back when I still entertained ideas of leaving her belief system up to the tutelage of others. I didn’t catch the opener but as I walked by her bedroom, I heard an audible gasp and then,

“But you have to believe in Jesus!”

I cracked the door a bit and observed Dee’s friend staring at her as though she was possessed and spewing green bile.

“I don’t believe in Jesus,” Dee assured her with a calm and determination that made me proud and a bit awestruck.

Later as we were driving the friend home, I caught a whispered conversation as the little girl tried to convince Dee of the consequences of not believing.

“If you don’t believe in Jesus, there is this place you go to after you die that’s not nice,” she said, quite earnest and clearly concerned for Dee’s afterlife.

“I don’t believe in this,” Dee said, again with an assurance that seemed a bit too large for her tiny 8 year old self. “I believe that when we die, we go to the underworld and our souls are weighed with the feather of truth.” (she did not add the part about the hippodoodel that eats the wicked who wasted their lives and then try to lie about it – and it’s interesting to note the Egyptian that has crept into her Greek mythology).

“How does she square this with her idea that her grandfather and Daddy Will are in heaven?” Rob asked me as I related the story to him later.

“I have no clue,” I said, “but it’s not any worse spin than most Christians employ trying to reconcile the inconsistencies in their beliefs.”

There is a tiny residual bit of Catholic in me that worries about what I have wrought, but mostly, I was really proud of her. She wasn’t the least bit worried about what her friend would think of her beliefs. They were her beliefs and she held fast.

Rob and I are doing a far more awesome job than I realized with this raising a kid thing.

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It’s 6 A.M.

Posted on by Ann
A 2010 Girardin MB-II school bus belonging to ...

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I am not getting enough sleep. And if the light-headed space cadet feeling wasn’t clue enough, shoulder blades melting into lock-down is a red alert.

It’s partly my own fault. Spending time with Rob is priority, and with renovation, his lengthening work day, and kid things keeping us both busy, we tend to make up the us time by stealing from the Sandman, but we pay a heavy toll.

However, even when we do manage to get to bed at an admittedly relative decent hour, there is still the matter of the 6 A.M. wake-up call.

This morning it was the neighbor’s diesel truck roaring to life, but it could have just as easily been the yellow school bus that also revs up at an ungodly early hour. It’s not a new issue, but as the end of the school year still eludes us by well over two months, I am past exhausted with this slumber interrupter.

And there is little that can be done. Because I like the neighbors. Dee plays with their children and they are pleasant and not in any way objectionable as people, which is so refreshing for me I am loath to disturb the wake of that boat even just a little.

Most of my adult life has been spent in active avoidance of my neighbors. They have been National Inquirer noisy, demanding, obnoxious, creepy, drug-addled, dangerous, criminal and lecherous. There was the guy who lived below me who came in every night at 3 with his buddies and cranked up the television, which ended with a screaming match between us that woke the entire building but put an end to his party apartment ways.

I lived across the hall from a drug dealer, whose customers thudded up and down the stairs all night long, and I lived underneath a girl who liked to do her aerobics at midnight.

At university, my first apartment was shared with the hands down winner of bat-shit craziest roommate ever and our next door neighbors appeared to dine regularly on something that smelled like wet matted dog fur, a situation I only improved slightly when I moved into the next apartment – right next door to a frat house.

My first house was sandwiched between two middle-aged married lechers, who made it nearly impossible for me to do my yard-work in peace.

The house I owned before moving here had me contending with hostile Stepford wives because my lawn was tidy to the impossible suburban standards and exposed me yet again to an alcoholic pervert in the adjacent lot, who ironically was someone who teased me mercilessly about my weight when we went to the same junior high.

Making nice with neighbors was not a high priority when I moved here. Rob is not exactly gregarious and keeps interactions to the minimum he can get away with and those he knew also knew Shelley, so they were polite and distant, but after four years, and with Dee out and about, I have gotten to know a lot of people around here. Teaching yoga at the community hall has made me a known quantity even beyond the block.

And I like it.

Sure, I wish the renter across the alley was a better pet owner because that dog of hers barks all the time, and the guy at the end of the next street who lets his dogs live in the house while he occupies the garage give me pause, but most people are pleasant and good-hearted.

So I don’t really want to make an issue of the school bud or diesel truck. I don’t want to be “that” neighbor. The picky princess one.

But, gawd, I am tired and can’t wait for summer to come and the big yellow bus to be mothballed.