young widowhood

It’s the Little Frustrations


The trouble with people reading your blog is that you lose it as an outlet for meaningful thought and feeling processing. It becomes a venue for others as they search for

A couple dating in a cafe.

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information, entertainment and  a place to share their own musings.

And I am not complaining. There was a time when few people even stumbled across this blog let alone came in search of it. Progress has its drawbacks as well as its perks.

Sometimes, however, I still feel the need to mindlessly run thither and yon across the keyboard, qwertying my way back to a more zen place.

Lately, the search terms have tipped decidedly in favor of widower dating queries. They read like lamentations. Desperate pleas for any scrap of insight, inspiration or tool to help the googler make sense of what is more likely fairly obvious but they just aren’t ready to accept.

Sometimes people who’ve been widowed are dating even though they aren’t ready, and sometimes widowed daters are just dating without any intent beyound spending a few hours here and there, sharing good times and possibly swapping bodily fluids.

The problem? Is the dead body in the room. The single and the divorced, who have only their perceptions of dating to work with, mistakenly place too much emphasis on the idea that widowed people are emotionally shell-shocked and that any hesitation, game playing or even hurtful behavior is somehow mitigated by this common grief myth.

The best thing a person dating a widow/er can do is ignore that fact. The widow thing. Just expect the same courteous, interested and emotionally genuine behavior that one expects of everyone they date. Be upfront about how you feel, what you are looking for and where your personal “crap” lines are draw. Remember too that dating is about getting to know someone not fixing them. Falling in love with someone’s potential is stupid regardless. A widowed man may seem like a great catch because he was a terrific husband to someone who is dead and can’t actually attest to the veracity of that anymore, but if he is a crappy boyfriend, odds are he wasn’t all that great of a husband either.

But here’s something I have noticed. Women tend to fill in the gaping holes in a relationship with narratives they will pull from the thin air if needs be but more often are variations on past relationships they have had with other men.

Don’t do that.

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And here’s why. Heartbreak might have common denominators but the most basic fact of being widowed is that someone died on you. Literally died. A person with whom you plighted your troth, shared with more intimately than anyone you’ve ever known so far. You had sex with this now dead person. Possibly made babies with them. They took all your secrets with them when they left. You will not see them again across a room or when you swap children on weekends or inadvertently run into them when they are out to dinner with their new love. They are dead. The dead molder or are scattered to the wind or sit like knick knacks on a mantle.

Relationships end. Painfully. The lingering can be bitter, filled with recriminations, animosity and torturing self-doubt. But relationships, though coupled with people, are not people. You do not go to the morgue to identify a dead relationship any more than you hold its hand while it sucks for its last breaths like a fish on dry dock. It’s heartbeat doesn’t gallop like a herd of frightened horses beneath your fingertips before fluttering to stillness like a butterfly smashed up against the windshield of a car at highway speeds.

The flotsam of a relationship is divided up with each partner taking his/her half. Dead people are not very helpful cleaning out closets, basements or alerting the post office to their change of address.

As much as you might be tempted to overlay your break up experiences onto your widowed boyfriend, it will be an ill fit, resulting in continued misunderstanding and frustration. And it’s the little frustrations that sink budding love and undermine existing love.

Here is what matters:

  • People who love you show you that love consistently through their actions
  • Falling in love with someone’s potential is like having an affair with your own reflection.
  • Being in love with “being in love” leads to disappointment and frustration for both parties.
  • Everyone comes with a past. Fixate on it and be miserable or live in the now and build a future.
  • While you can impress someone with your patience and understanding, they won’t necessarily grow to love you for it.
  • Make sure you are over your own issues before assuming your problems stem from your mate’s “issues”.

Love is actually pretty simple, but it’s the most simple concepts that are the hardest to grasp, or so I learned during the years I spent teaching 7th graders. Abel Keogh recently wrote a piece about trusting your gut. Love is love. It feels right and gets better over time because even the issues that come up as relationships progress become a part of the growth rather than detours or roadblocks that must be continually negotiated . Doubts that become nags are trying to tell you something you need to know. Don’t rationalize them away. Don’t assume that the issues that keep or kept you from moving on after your last relationship can help you understand his or that patience is actually an admirable virtue where romance is concerned.*

He loves you when he shows you day in and out without time-outs.

*I have to admit a certain curiosity about the whole “be patient with me/I need more time” excuse that my gender so willingly accepts and would love to meet the woman who turns it around and says “I could use a bit more patience as I learn to put up with your need to keep your late wife’s toothbrush and a bit more one on one time dating that isn’t a dolled up booty call.” But I am unlikely to ever find her.

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Review of Abel Keogh’s Dating A Widower


*Disclaimer: I follow Abel’s blog, which features a weekly series of posts on dating widowers, and I am a member of his Facebook group, Dating a Widower (DAW). I am a fairly active contributor at both venues as they center on a topic related to widowhood (which I have been) and dating/remarriage related issues surrounding widowers (my husband Rob was widowed too.) To disclaim (protest?) further, I contributed an essay to this book that Abel included, which is why I received a copy of it. End of disclosure.

I discovered Abel and his blog via a list of widowed bloggers on the web link page of yet another widowed blogger in the webosphere of all things grief and gloomy. The web is choked with widowed folks these days, sharing their stories, building platforms for support groups/organizations, launching book careers off the backs of uplifting memoir and even hosting conventions for widowed to gather and network. Yes, even in mourning, we still network. Abel’s blog and posts stuck out from the crowd for me because, while many of the bloggers/writers in the genre focus on the grief process with its irritations, perceived indignities  and sometimes actual problems/issues, he wrote about moving on, and he did it in practical, no-nonsense terms that make sense.

A blogger for over a decade, Abel’s focus via the Widower Wednesday series, a q&a column for women who are in relationships with widowed men and find themselves dealing with problems that aren’t covered by the women’s magazines and self-help literature, came about as a result of Abel responding to the specific concerns of readers who were flooding him with emails, hoping for advice and a peek into the widower’s mindset where moving on into a new relationship was concerned. Widowhood is not divorce, and many women find they have no frame of reference for issues that are bereavement driven. They also sometimes wonder if the issues they are struggling with are actually grief issues at all. In addition to the blog, Abel also began hosting a peer-to-peer group on Facebook where women who are in relationships with widowers could gather privately to exchange stories, vent, seek insight and encourage each other.

The emails, blog posts and DAW group eventually became the basis for the  Dating A Widower book.

The book itself is a nuts-and-bolts look at moving on, dating and remarriage when widowhood is at least half the equation. Each chapter deals with specific problems/issues that are common concerns and illustrated with stories of real women and how they’ve coped. Although it might appear that the point of view is primarily from the male perspective, the gender perspectives are quite evenly balanced and Abel allows his contributors to share their insight and hard won wisdom, allowing the reader to take what they want or need from each chapter.

At 114 pages, it’s a quick and comprehensive read. Abel shares his own story, culminating in his remarriage 15 months after the death of his first wife, and his now wife, Julie, contributes her perspective as well, which provides a welcome “other side” that most relationship stories don’t provide. They both write from the heart, and their story provides a good model for any “mixed” marriage couple to follow.

There is even a chapter written specifically for widowed people who are, or are thinking about, dating. Given the dreadful lack of literature dedicated to widowed folk who are past active grief and looking to move on and remarry at some point, this is a welcome – and well done – addition.

If a reader is looking for a book that validates the idea that widowers are not first men but fragile souls in need of rescue or retraining as though they were wet behind the ears pups, this is not that book. Instead, it reminds the reader that the widowed man is a man first and always and a bereaved spouse second or even farther down the list depending on his personality and responsibilities. It also emphasizes the basic bit of dating knowledge that all women should have tattooed on themselves somewhere that it’s easy to see and read, “a man who loves you will move mountains to show you how he feels and a man’s actions are worth more than a thousand of his words”. So, if a reader wants straight answers, practical and applicable advice and compelling real life stories she can relate too – this is just the book you’ve been searching for – so far probably in vain.

Dating A Widower – Starting a Relationship with a Man Who’s Starting Over by Abel Keogh is available in several formats and more information can be found here.

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Widowhood is Not Divorce


Day 150: And that's that.

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The Divorced and the Widowed normally agree to share a thin isthmus of common ground where the idea that each state marks a loss of a marriage is concerned, but while the Divorced believe the losses are slight variations on the same theme, Widowed adamantly object to what they see as a presumption.

Divorced feel that mourning the end of a marriage with its letting go of hopes, dreams and an intimate enduring relationship mirrors very closely the process that widowed must also go through.

“Except for that dead body in the room,” widowed counter.

And they are correct.

Let the howling protest of dissent begin.

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