dating after being widowed

Too Many Words


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The limit is 500 but I received a dispensation for another 50. So how many words have I written?

843.

A first draft should just flow freely. Even when you know there are word count constraints, the first rule is just get it down and done. Worry about length in the edit.

If I’d had a thousand, the mandate would have been relatively easy.

Explain how you and Rob made your relationship work.

Which begs the question of why our both having been widowed set the odds against us in a way that other relationships aren’t as challenged, but the book is advice based and geared towards women who find themselves dating and/or in serious relationships with widowers.

A widower once showed up in the forum who took issue with the idea that dating him would be more difficult than dating someone with a different set of variables. He argued that divorced or never married men presented women with similar issues. He ranted and raved quite a bit – which left the question of why he would need special handling not all that much in doubt – but he made a good point. One I don’t disagree with really. Dating is dating. Baggage is baggage to be unpacked and then put away in a drawer, donated to a charity or tossed in the trash.

And everyone comes to dating with a unique to him/her set of details for someone else to parse.

So what did we do?

In 550 words or less?

We wanted it enough to do all of the things that the experts tell you are critical in establishing and maintaining a good relationship but that most people are too lazy, caught up in life or simply resist because it wrecks the whole sexy romance aura of it to bother doing.

  • Did you know your partner’s complete medical history before you signed on the dotted line? Or debt obligations? Credit problems? Portfolio? Retirement plans? I did. And Rob had my info too.
  • And did you talk about your fears? Plans for the future? How to raise the kids – discipline and Santa Clause issues alike?
  • When things came up – as they do – did you speak up or stuff it until it exploded in a Technicolor montage of every little thing that drives you crazy, being sure to include all miscues and imagined slights?

There was not a lot of doubt where Rob and I were headed. Even in the very beginning, our emails read like two people mining for a potential relationship. We weren’t youngsters and we don’t come from the school of drifting until something is so obviously a relationship we are forced to make it an action item.* Though Rob thought we could perhaps live together for a bit, the immigration issues, compounded by insurance and employment and child concerns and my rather immovable point of view on the stupidity/just asking for trouble problem with the whole free-form co-habitation thing, made that a less desirable alternative. Rob gallantly refrained from pointing out that we were engaged and planning to be married in September anyway, which was really a sweet thing for him to do.

Both of us did the cohabitating thing with the late spouses. Rob and Shelley at the behest of her grandmother, who believed couples needed at least two years to practice before tying a knot**. I went along with cohabitating with Will but I laid my cards on the table first and put a time limit on it, and he was invited to agree or move along.  He found my conditions completely reasonable and actually proposed well before his time was up – as he had planned to all along I later learned. Living together is a rather pointless exercise for those who’ve decided that marriage is what they want anyway. But it mollified others and provides the illusion of having put time and thought into your decision.

When I share the odd story here and there about our courtship and the early part of our marriage, I leave out the work part. Partly because it’s not romantic and partly because I – incorrectly no doubt – assume that everyone knows that good relationships don’t bubble up from the sea-foam like Aphrodite.

Things came up.

We had three children in varying stages of not being terribly pleased with us. There were in-laws who felt trampled upon and friends who weren’t sure how to react. Our mothers were supportive but not all that secretly worried. My dad was about the only one who wasn’t too concerned.

Logistics. Moving and merging households. Immigration. And the emotional residue from care-taking and grief still wanting central stage from time to time, having been in the spotlight for so long how could it be otherwise?

550 words. I almost need a book.

*For the record – again – I am personally opposed to living together in a mindless manner. Nothing good is the usual result. As an off-shoot, I don’t think it’s wise to know what you want but keep it from the other person because they either a) don’t want the same thing really or b) you think they might meander into line with your way of thinking if you just stay casual about it. To varying degrees, they are all recipes for personal misery times two (or more if you are foolish enough to impose this on children either by dragging them along for the ride or creating one from scratch).

**At least that is what Rob told me she told them. My theory? No one was crazy about the idea of Rob and Shelley marrying. I suspect that Shelley’s grandmother used her considerable influence to simply slow the two of the them down a bit, and they went along because they were incredibly young and marriage  – at least in the days of our teenage yore – seemed pretty permanent. But that’s just my theory.

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A Lifely Update


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It snowed. I am sanguine to near total zen about it. Rob reminded me that last year’s final snow dump occurred on May 4th, which I don’t recall, but I do remember the walloping we took in early April after the ground was all but clear. Spring ditch rivers run close to the road and given the decided lack of shoulder on the rural roads, slipping off is not a preferred option.

No progress beyond cabinet installation as far as the reno goes. The man took measurements for the counter top, but it won’t be ready for another week at least, so there goes my dreams of Easter in semi-complete house. If we are even close to complete by May Long, I will be surprised. I am beyond ready to be done and Rob is so far past that point that he idly toyed with the idea of checking out a house that is for sale in Ardrossan – nearer to a rail track than the house we live in now. The trains run only early morning and late night in J’berg but Ardrossan is a main track with long rumbling parades of cars rolling through continually. If you ever watched my husband’s slow burn reaction to a train – anywhere it impedes his progress or makes noise – you would recognize that his level of reno fatigue is off the charts.

Mick has been full of news of late. We took her mother’s piano into the city for her last weekend and discovered, not to my surprise at all, that she was dating. And yesterday she let Rob know that she will finally be able to escape the kitchen work that has been steadily threatening to leave her fingerless. Through the machinations of one of her dubious friends, she is now employed as the IT girl for a company in the city. We are worlds of pleased for her because the digit injuries were concerning and it’s always nice when one’s child finds gainful employment that has meaning.

And I have an opportunity to submit a small piece to a dating book that will be published soon. The author writes a weekly advice column for the wives and girlfriends of widowers. I have written about it  before,  but he planned to take the blog stuff and turn it into a self-published e-book.  However, he is under contract to a publisher and they claimed dibs.  He was  surprised.  I wasn’t.  Self-help sells and niche dating stuff, especially written by a man for women, sells bigger.

Rob was puzzled, “Who would read a book about dating widowers?”

If I wasn’t so versed in the dating advice/self-help genre, I would wonder that myself, but I also know my fellow females and we, sadly, are prone to trying to coax pig’s ears into silk status. Therefore, we will read anything that we think might help us save loser relationships.

Harsh? By the time one gets to the point where an advice book is one’s only hope, one should have walked away long ago.

The truth is that men are not so complicated where dating and marriage are concerned, and they are like women in that they will change only when they see clear benefit that doing so is advantageous for them. You can’t change anyone or analyze a bad relationship into a good one.

But, Abel’s advice is common sense. He doesn’t pull punches or blow sunshine up bums.

His publisher wanted more stories about some specific post widow dating stuff, but I couldn’t find Rob and I in any of them. We just really didn’t have issues that harkened back to dead spouses in a grief-related way. Unsurprisingly, given current grief cultures Ayn Randian emphasis on “I am grieving so my needs always come first” advice that widowed folk are spoon fed by the various books and online self-help aimed at them, dating a widowed person has probably never been more confusing for those who haven’t been widowed themselves. They like to compare a widowed past to a divorced one but it’s too apples to oranges for analogies to match up really, but I am in total agreement with the non-widowed’s view that “your dead wife does not get top billing in our relationship and your grief issues are not a trump card to play whenever you want to get your way”. I also am behind the idea that children and in-laws should be kept out of relationships just as they were previously*.

Abel though thought I could just offer an overview of how Rob and I “made it work”. In 500 words or less. You laughed? So did I. Brevity is not my middle name

I don’t know that Rob and I “made” anything work. Relationships are work of a kind, and anyone who doesn’t think so is a fool, but you can’t make love be if both people aren’t on the same page and willing to throw absolutely everything on the table and make it all about the other person. I doubt that most people who are already having issues would be willing to follow the road map that worked for Rob and I, and indeed was quite similar to the one Will and I traversed.

And that’s about it. Employment continues to vex me. I am marginally invested in the blogging gig but covering current events wearies me and I fear for my karma. I listen to others talking about new jobs or watch as they pursue business ventures and am a bit jealous. Every vacant storefront begs me to speculate. A neighbor recently opened her own saloon across the street from the yoga studio. Edie and Silver are making plans to start an industrial plastic recycling venture. Jade, at the studio, is talking expansion. I have no ideas. She suggested volunteering at the schools and getting back into the classroom, but it’s not an idea that sparks anything inside me.

I think a lot about asking the domain owner if I can try reviving Moms Speak Up. Or even starting a site of my own so I can blog events rather than go the journalist approach which chafes and isn’t my best or favored writing style. I just don’t know.

But it’s time to get to Yin class. Yin is good for snowy Fridays when one has a cold (again) and is standing at the crossroads wishing it was really spring.

*But I realize that some people have always allowed children top billing and put up with meddling in-laws and often death simply magnifies this bad training. People should run away from those who allow any of this, imo.

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Coupling


One of the themes that runs through The Girls from Ames (which I just finished last night) is dating, finding the right and wrong men, marriage, divorce and more dating. As far as women have come, and I am told it’s a “long way, baby”, much of our lives is eaten up in the pursuit of coupling. The author notes the “girls” boyfriends and romantic ups and downs as far back as elementary school.

I don’t have a romantic past that stretches back that far. I crushed on guys certainly as a girl and teen, but I was shy, very fat and too ambivalent about the whole thing for there to be much to talk about. College was pretty much the same. I thought, and I don’t think I was unique, that someone would just “find me”. See me walking or in class or dancing in a club and know that I was the one for them. I hung hopefully on the edges and, of course, nothing happened. The few times I stepped up and laid my cards on the table – I was rejected – which is ironic when you consider that by stating my feelings and intentions openly I wound up married – twice. I was ahead of my time, I suppose.

One of the women in the book, Karla, was married and divorced with a baby in her mid-twenties when she met her second husband. It was one of those “just sorta knew” relationships. The other women in the book hold her relationship up as the ideal. It certainly is a meeting of partners where each one is more concerned about the other than themselves and see downs times as just as normal and necessary to a relationship as up times. Ebb and flow. If you can’t float a boat on both, failure is a given.

Two things that dovetailed this morning, one was an FB status update about Camp Widow. Some of my FB friends belong to a bereavement group that holds yearly “conventions” to deal with widow issues. Two of their speakers, according to the update, will be talking about the “how” of recoupling. There is a “how”? Specifically? Hmmm.  And I read a widow grog that seems to be mostly about dealing/rebuilding and much of what the bloggers there write about are the disappointments and challenges of rebuilding. The post today dealt with the anger and frustration of dating again. Mostly about comparing. I am probably just revealing my too practical side here, but why compare at all? Or make lists?

One of the girls in the book divorced in the last five years and is searching for the kind of marriage that Karla and the others seem to have. Operative word being “seem” and has a list, comparison dates/shops. But how can you find someone when you after assessed yourself and let go of who you were?

That’s key to moving on and new love, isn’t it?

I didn’t compare Rob to Will. Even if there had been a basis for doing so, I made up my mind to put Will and our relationship in the past. Nothing good would come of my trying to recreate that time or using my old self as a basis for future happiness.

There is the sutra argument that our true selves are eternal. Regardless of our current perceptions of who we are, which is based largely on the world around us, we are always us deep down. It’s necessary then to not rely over much on past actions, relationships, and such, as touchstones. The past has limited use in determining present day direction.

I knew long before Will died that I needed to be married again. I felt unfinished in a way that transcends the ability to put the feeling to proper words. There was someone out there and I was meant to love again. So when the time came, I put Will in his place in my past and I left him there. He had no purpose in my future. He was done, another piece of my foundation.

One of the things I loved about Karla’s story was the way her second husband, Bruce, totally embraced being her daughter’s father. I am puzzled by people who don’t dive in as a parent or people who refuse to allow their new spouses to be parents. Like a child can have too much parental support and love? My own opinion is that a potential spouse who can’t love your child isn’t a good pick and that children aren’t mature enough, or have the ability to see past their self-centeredness to know what is best for them sometimes. Loving a person with children means committing to parenting too. Otherwise, forget it.

All the talk – on blogs and talk shows and in books – about the need to be single, find yourself, learn to be you, blah, blah, blah – is directly contradicted by the fact that we spend most of our lives searching for love, maintaining/nurturing love and lamenting/longing for it when it ends. I don’t think this is a dysfunction. It is human. Alone is not the norm though it certainly can be unavoidable given the way society works anymore.

I identified with the girls in the book who felt there was something wrong with them as teens and twenty-somethings searching, putting their hearts out there and being rejected. I know better now. There is nothing wrong with me. I was being me and the rejection wasn’t personal really. It was steering me – too slowly it felt like – to where I was meant to be. We can be so impatient. We think we are ready and we’re not, or we think we need someone who is merely a want. Needs and wants stubbornly don’t match up a lot because our true selves are hard-hearted on our behalf.

I totally believe that we choose our destinies for whatever reason yet to be revealed and that it’s the human imposed perception of time that keeps us from realizing that we have so much more time in the larger scheme of things. Even if I live to be 110, the years are a blip in terms of my true self’s existence. The time I have spent on this plane with Will and Rob is just a drop in the bucket of the time our souls know each other, and we must carry little bits of each other around or else how would we know each other again?

Forgive the rambling. I am in the throes of yet another allergy attack. Two nights in a row. It appears I am allergic to cleaning solvents which is going to make cleaning a challenge and avoiding them in the world a priority – though how I am going to manage, I haven’t quite worked out yet.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the whole love and relationship thing. Without them, do we have lives at all really?