remarriage of widowed people

Settling


Found this vintage McDonald’s commercial on Jezebel.

One of the commenter’s had this to say,

“Women settling since 1988.”

Rob thinks women have been lowering their expectations for a while longer.

Settling is such an interesting concept because it is based on the premise that having expectations of others is always a good idea and that accepting people for who they are – realizing that no one and nothing can avoid the alterations of time at any rate – is not the best way to go about judging people (I would use the would “assess”, but I don’t think that many of us do that).

I remember the commercial. I was twenty-five and I knew women like the one in the commercial. Shoulders padded and Melanie Griffith business suits that ran the gamut of neutral colors with the occasional sea-foam green thrown in to show “the Man” that they were still women and not going to conform completely. Men hadn’t changed nearly as much as women had in terms of roles yet and the smell of fear was palpable in the dating arena.

Settling. Play this scenario out about ten years and you’d find that he was a store manager and she was just getting back into the workforce because both of their kids were now in school all day, relieving them of the crushing financial burden of childcare. They needed her job to help them pay for the extras necessary to keep up with the neighbors in the new subdivision where they’d built a house. They are happy-ish but probably too tired to notice. Her friends, the ones who never married, think he’s held her back. His think she is a nag who is never satisfied and hasn’t held up well physically. They fight a bit but mostly they work, parent and household before collapsing into their queen sized bed to watch Survivor and falling asleep to the ten o’clock local news. Settling.

Or not. This is the life for many, many people. They think they have it all, even if “all” is a little exhausting to maintain. Their Facebook updates overflow with minutia about kids, television and material acquisition. They might not always be sunny and optimistic, but they are more content than not. They are happier and count themselves more fortunate than their single friends at any rate.

When I was twenty-five, every guy I knew was like Larry. No expectations. That way nothing was lost and failure was impossible. How I avoided marrying a Larry, I will never quite understand.

Distraction/Denial Po-tay-toe/Po-TA-toe


Two things inspired me to trip across the keyboard instead of take the nap that my yoga training weary self needs, first was a discussion about Patanjali’s sutra on the benefits of distraction during hard times and the second was the search term that turned up today on my blog.

The search?

grief denial through remarriage

Classic.

There is a school of thought in the grief is practically a 12 step program camp that says that anything short of total immersion in the grief “process” is denial.

Oh, okay, a vacation with the kids here and there is fine, but only if one goes all angsty about it because it feels wrong to have fun when someone – a dead someone – isn’t there to have fun too*.  Holidays are permissible too if the travel destination is one that the dead person loved. Plenty of garment-rending opportunities in emotional minefields made tangible. Very good grief work for the committed.

But I heard this a lot in my day, remarriage before your kids were grown or a decade or two had gone by – whichever came first – were sure signs that a person was “running away from his/her grief”. And there’s a footrace I’d like to see. Outrunning one’s self is an Olympic caliber event.

Here’s what baffles me – beyond the idea that grief requires active, directed participation – the act of dating, falling in love and remarrying are probably three of the top ten biggest drivers home of the undisputable fact that your spouse has died.

Sure, there are stories here and there of people who rushed into marriage and “came to their senses” in the ensuing months or first years and then divorced. I am not convinced that grief was the blinder or the resurrector of good sense. These were people, generally speaking, who never had or seldom employed sense pre-widowhood.

People who don’t do well in the dating world after a divorce or death probably didn’t date at all or very well prior to their marriages.

Tragedy doesn’t rend you. You aren’t a different person. Tragedy – like a yoga practice – just exposes deficiencies that were already present. Or in some cases, forces recognition. People tend to drift, or coast, through life once they’ve snuggled into the equivalent of a gerbil’s nest. They might have doubts, dissatisfaction or realize they aren’t living in accordance to what they’ve been taught or believe, but they are content, warm and cozy, and that’s enough. Until it’s not. Hard times shine bright harsh light on our realities.

So what do the Sutra’s say?

The Yoga Sutras are amazing. It’s like the Bible or the Koran minus the fairy stories. Unvarnished universal truth that is no different today than thousands and thousands of years ago. It predates Christ or Mohamed or Buddha. Human beings and their basic “issues” are as predictable as the trauma/drama of teenagers. Self-interest is hardwired.

According to the sutra’s the distraction is the life obstacle and what you do to get through, around, over or under it is the solution. Taking that and applying it? Falling in love again is the key to overcoming the death of a spouse.

Maybe not “the” key. Patanjali provides a long list of “distractions” that a person can immerse themselves in when obstacles come along. An asana practice or meditation being among the ways a person can go about righting themselves after being upended, but at the end of the list he concludes that whatever a person chooses and devotes him/herself to will serve equally well. It’s individual, so some divorced/widowed people might choose to rebuild their lives as a single. They cultivate careers, hobbies and children. They volunteer. They nurture friendships. How’s that different from choosing to love and recouple? It isn’t unless you factor risk because there is always risk when people connect with each other. I would argue that there is risk in going it alone as one can never know if the safety net he/she weaves will hold over the length of life any more than recoupled folk do.

But it’s a fascinating discussion, isn’t it. And to think, Patanjali wrote it all down for the edification of others before Buddha sat under a tree or St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland or John Paul II ignored pedophilia in the priesthood so he could be adored. Boggles the mind.

*And seriously, where is the glorious after-life in all this lamentation? Sometimes I wonder if people who proclaim a religious belief in the here-after have less faith than Thomas. One would think all these dearly departed had been packed off to a hell dimension or something.