dating widowers

Five Years and a Bit


English: A simple illustration of a cake with ...

Image via Wikipedia

My birthday present from Rob arrived just today. It came from Arkansas, which is fitting, by way of Florida, which is just odd. He’s been obsessively keeping tabs on it via the tracking number for  over a week, quizzing me daily on the contents of the mail.

“The package you’ve been waiting for showed up today,” I told him when I called his office after lunch.

“It’s your package,” he said.

“Should I open it now or wait for you?”

“Can you wait?” he asked, which was silly because of course I can, but I know he can’t.

“Okay,” I reply.

“Oh go ahead and open it,” he said, “and check to make sure that it hasn’t been tampered with. Remember what happened to Unbearable.”

Our virtual friend, Unbearable, lost a rare book in a tragic postal heist.

“I paid to have it gift wrapped too,” he added.

It was.  Both in the package and gift-wrapped.  And I pried the gift box open.  It was quite tiny and I couldn’t begin to imagine what I needed – or wanted – that would be housed in such a shiny red box.

Inside was an even tinier satchel of red and when I tipped it upside down, a silver chain and pendant dropped into my hand.

When he asked me weeks ago what I wanted for my birthday, I initially couldn’t think of a thing. I have everything I need and nearly anything it occurs to me to want. It’s a rare and privileged person who can say this, so I don’t do so lightly, but as far as the material goes – I am blessed, if there is such a thing. But when pressed, I did come up with a small list which included: an om sign for my yoga room door and a Buddha for the corner.

“They are incredibly hard to find,” he told me days later, “but I think the alternatives will suit you.”

Dee gave me a set of figurines made in Haiti that they discovered at The Ten Thousand Villages website. Each figure is performing an asana.

And from some vendor in Arkansas, a very special place in our personal lore, he found the pendant and chain.

If either of us believed in coincidence, we’d note the timing of his gift. The anniversary of him sending me a private message back on Ye Olde Widda Board was this last weekend. Neither of us believe in coincidence. Just timing, which has always been quite convenient where we are concerned.

Five years. While mostly it feels as though I have known Rob forever, and he me, the truth is that it’s just five years, which isn’t even forever in dog years. It only brings one to the brink of middle-age.

“It’s beautiful, ” I told him. “Thank you, Baby.”

“Well,” he replied, “It’s been five years and I thought you were due another piece of jewelry.”

The first piece of jewelry Rob gave me was a  gold double heart pendant with a small diamond in the crook of the uppermost heart. The occasion was our very first face to face meeting in Idaho Falls, the anniversary of which is a mere two months away. We’d been “dating” virtually, at his suggestions, for just a month when we met up. With only the rarest of exceptions, I have worn that necklace every day since.

His second gift of bling was my engagement ring barely a month later, which was joined by the wedding band three months after that. To say we moved quickly is overstating because I know couples who’ve moved at twice our speed, but I won’t be surprised if you clucked your tongue back then or if you marvel now. Both responses are within the realm of appropriate.

I am not a jewelry person though I have tried to acquire the habit on and off out of a sense that it is something women do, but aside from wedding rings, the occasional necklace and the odd navel piercing – it’s never took. Rob thinks I should just wear one of the other necklace or else,

“You will look like an old white lady rapper wanna-be,” he said.

I am loathe to give up my hearts but the om is quite becoming and I have already worn out one clasp on the heart necklace, so perhaps it deserves a break.

And I am a bit surprised to be surprised by a gift. Often, when pressed, I end up shopping for myself and letting Rob and Dee choose from my selections, wrap it and present it to me gift fashion. It’s not as unromantic or thoughtless as it sounds. I always get what I need this way and I learned it from my Dad, who used to assign each of us gifts to buy him at Christmas time.  Inevitably he would call me the week before Christmas and say something like,

“I need a new pair of jeans. Waist 34 and inseam 30. Don’t spend too much. Go to Target or J.C. Penney’s. Make sure the pockets are plain. I don’t want any of that damn fancy stitching.” I could hear his eyes roll across the miles as he uttered the last sentence.  He had a low opinion of men who had fancy stitching on their jeans … or wore them prison bitch style.

He was, perhaps, a bit more Virgo than most Virgo’s I know, but he also never had to return things the day after the holiday either.

Surprise isn’t necessary to enhance a gift’s awesome factor when it is from my husband or children, but it is sweet and wonderful and it is another reminder of how, truly, I have everything.

Dating While Widowed – Widow Card Fall Out


Vector image of two human figures with hands i...

Image via Wikipedia

A new comment appeared on a post I wrote about widows who “play the widow card” when dating or within new relationships. The gentleman had recently broken up with his girlfriend, who had been widowed. He liked my post and wanted to add a bit of advice of his own, based on his recent experience:

“Playing the widow card in the relationship arena is a no-no. It’s manipulative and unfair, and frankly, widowed who do this are the worst kinds of assholes.” Never a truer word was spoken. I have just had my heart-broken by someone who had started having sex with their next door neighbour THREE DAYS after her husband died and who was in that relationship when we met. All unbeknown to me of course, and hidden by the “friends who set us up” until after we broke up when the truth comes out.

From someone who considers themselves a kind, considerate person I would offer the following advice to widows thinking of dating again.

(1) Get your house in order (literally) – If your house is still a shrine to your late husband with holiday, wedding and family photos everywhere that is not fair. Have a few special photos (after all, he’s not a secret and a decent man will respect your previous love) but leave the rest for a memory box.

(2) Address your late husband and your relationship but leave the reminiscing to with your friends. The new person in your life wants to be your future not be trapped in your past. Try and not talk about him too often.

(3) Be honest about your past relationship. Acknowledge his flaws as well as good points – noone can compete with a saint. A good line is “You and XXXX are different people. I loved him and of course I miss him from time to time but I your are my future and I love you and you have your own unique qualities that XXXX didn’t have”

(4) Get your house in order emotionally. If you don’t have a plan for your life and are waiting for a guy to make you happy you are not ready

(5) If you have children, DEMAND (away from you) that you are shown respect. You are not a guest in their life. Defend your new partner against rude behaviour or even worse a child that simply refuses to acknowledge you in any meaningful way. Defend your new partner in front of your child in such instances and talk it over later. Allow your new partner to have a say in-house rules – do not say “XXXX and I decided that this was how we would approach this” Discuss issues and allow your new partner rights – he should not be a spectator in his own life.

(6) Finally, and most importantly, if you realise you are not ready and cannot cope with the new relationship, BE HONEST and tell your new partner, don’t make keep him there for comfort whilst playing emotional cat and mouse. Don’t play the Widow Card – be an adult and explain gently and kindly that you think the world of that person but you are simply not ready.

Hope the above does not sound bitter….

It’s good advice and I appreciate that he took the time to share his story and leave a comment because too often in the widowosphere the point of view and the experiences of those who date widowed people and their feelings are overlooked or downplayed as though they are less important than those of the widowed dater.

A key thing to remember when you begin to date again is that your prospective dates are people with feelings just as precious and fragile as your own. If you venture back into the dating arena loaded with odd notions about your feelings being primary and your past pain being put on a pedestal, you are not ready to date. Dating requires us to be more cognizant of the other person than of ourselves. But what I read from the trenches of both those who date widowed and those widows who date – it seems that the burden of deference is placed squarely and unfairly on the shoulders of the non-widowed boy/girlfriend.

While it’s probably not premeditated on the part of the widowed person, many of them have become accustomed to wearing their pain on both sleeves and being treated accordingly, and it’s only natural that this is going to provoke a protective response in a new partner. However, I would caution both parties to not give in to the pity – giving or receiving. Relationships can’t handle an imbalance like that for long without one party or other feeling hurt, misunderstood or plain old fed up.

For the record, no matter how much your love tells you that he/she doesn’t mind the shrine in the bedroom or the toothbrush still on the vanity or the 57 pictures in the hallway and living room … he/she is just being polite. Giving you space and hoping that you will eventually love him/her enough to see that these things have to go if your relationship has a hope in hell of not dissolving one night into something tearful and ugly.

And for those who dated widowed, door-mat behavior encourages your lover to be self-involved and entitled. A healthy relationship hinges on both partners having their needs met.

I am forever amazed by stories of love-making that takes place in the glow of an illuminated portrait of the deceased spouse that began its existence as a blow-up at the departed’s memorial service, or the tales of widowed who are appalled when called upon by their non-widowed girl/boyfriend to suck it up, don the grown up undergarments and do something for them for a change.

Relationships of consequence require you to think more of the other person than you do of yourself. The only people who can get away with thinking more about themselves than their loved one are called “children”. The parent/child relationship is an uneven one. It is give/take for decades really but that of couples should be give/give. And if you aren’t ready for that, it’s okay. Just don’t date. And if you aren’t getting that from the person you are with, consider whether or not you ever will and then consider valuing yourself enough to walk away if you can’t live with the answer.

Related articles

Apparently I am Callous


But what else is new under the sun?

Dirty feet

Image by Yannig Van de Wouwer via Flickr

A blogger I follow posted about how since the dawn of the blogosphere the dilemma we life bloggers face when the issue that brought us to the keyboard isn’t really the reason we stay on the web anymore. He began as a widowed blogger following the death of his husband, and his story was compelling. Single dad finds love, marries and in short order is widowed when his new husband is stricken with cancer.

It helped that he is keen and articulate and not prone to the navel gazing rut so many life bloggers – myself at times included – can fall into. His observations were insightful and he is a good writer.

After a time, he was picked up by Widow’s Voice and became a contributor there, but after a time, he began to do what all widowed people do even if they don’t realize it: he moved on. He still called what he was doing grieving but it’s a common mistake. The grief industry is built on faulty information that is part pseudo-science and mostly anecdotal, and it is fed by a culture that labels any normal event or action a dysfunction in need of 12 stepping.

We grieve in the beginning but the moving on process is not grief  unless you count the grieving we do for the people we used to be and can’t be anymore, which is apples to oranges. Moving on is work and it’s emotionally draining at times to be sure, but it’s not grieving. I don’t know if it has a name really. But during this time, we note our losses keenly when we are faced with the effort involved with the whole rebuilding of our lives. We miss and maybe long and certainly feel sad. All valid enough emotions on their own that they don’t need to be lumped under “grief”.

So this blogger is moving on. New city, job, home and new love. Enough “new” to send even a non-widowed person into a spin, but being widowed, he has grief to file it all under even when that’s not it. However, the issue is his blogging. Being a life blogger, he naturally shares his now, which is not really the raw, visceral stuff of active grief and his freshly widowed readers noticed.

He noted their notice and wondered if it was time to retire. It’s a natural reaction. The newly widowed are not fooled by those of us farther out. They know we aren’t really “feeling it” the way they do. It’s not posing really, but it’s disingenuous to claim one is a widow when one is moving into the territory of becoming “someone who was widowed once”. It’s noun versus verb territory, and most of us get there in the second or third year.

The trouble is that we are not supposed to admit it. Doing so is to relinquish membership in the “club no one wants to belong to”, and when you’ve found camaraderie there, it’s hard to walk away from it despite the fact that you really do need more in common than dead spouses to be friends or more. It’s no different from any other bonding event that brings people together. Marriage, motherhood, employment. At some point that one thing just isn’t enough.

But, my point. You are probably wondering and at 553 words perhaps I should get to it.

I commented on his post. Someone replied to me but yet at me. “I don’t want to cause controversy” which means, yeah I do but I don’t want to own it if actually happens. And the short was that I am wrong and callously so and probably a dgi to boot. Oh, and I am “rigid” and bossy.

When I first found widow boards and blogs the thing that struck me with the most horror were those who clung to the label and the false idea that grief is a quasi-mental health issue that is more or less chronic. You would always grieve in their opinion. It was like low-level exposure to nuclear waste to read what they wrote. No way a newly widowed person could avoid buying in to one degree or another without risking the community shunning that goes along with objecting and pointing out that most widowed folk never see the need for offline grief grouping let alone online or blogging. Most bereaved people couldn’t be fingered in a line up at the year or that and a half mark. Sure, they feel sad and they miss, but as I said earlier – those are distinct feelings of their own.

Another blogger at Widow’s Voice wrote recently about being a “fraud” because she really doesn’t feel any of the things she is supposed to feel. Commenters were kind and supportive of her right to not grieve like a “normal person” but adamant that this is not they way most feel.

Which is funny.

The Internet is a small place and the blogosphere smaller still. It could be argued that those who populate it aren’t really representative of the larger population or even what is considered “normal”.

I left a comment assuring her that she was not a freak because I knew that not many others would. Surprisingly the comment made it through. The woman who moderates there is not generally open to widow views that don’t match her own or the faulty grieving model the site pushes.

And your point is? Right, I was going to get to that, wasn’t I?

Grieving and moving on are highly individual for the most part but the fact is that most people don’t spend their lives doing either. They tackle one and move to the next in a relatively expeditious manner. If human beings weren’t able to do this, we’d have perished as a species before we even got started. It’s wrong to tell people grief is something that it is not or to lead them into self-fulfilling prophecies by misrepresenting where you are really at in the process. Telling people there is no right or wrong and yet clearly saying the opposite with what you write or how you present the facts is not being helpful.

Most of the struggle I had in the last three or four months of that first year of widowhood are directly attributable to the bad examples and just plain wrong information I was provided by widowed people who were years ahead of me. Granted, a generous handful of these people were mildly dysfunctional to bat-shit crazy even before their spouse died and so perhaps I am judging them too harshly. But some of them were simply using the venues for purposes unknown though being helpful couldn’t be truthfully numbered among them.

Both the Widow’s Voice bloggers I mentioned seem genuine and I think their views and struggles in the moving on period are valuable. I wish them well and hope they blog on, remembering though that at some point it’s not grief anymore. Not really. Not the way the newbies live it, and there comes a point when you aren’t doing them any good wearing the widow mantle as though it were a tiara. It’s like the high school prom queen who never really got over graduation and growing up.

Related articles