Dating

Dating a Widower


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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Too Many Words


My own work. Created using "Inkscape"...

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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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Short Man/Tall Woman


Me with 8 foot tall woman

Image by cgrossmeier via Flickr

Is it a form of bigotry to discount short men as mating prospects? Blogger Kay Steiger thinks it is. She’s stirred up a little hornet’s nest at The Daily Dish with responses to her recent diatribe against prejudiced women of a certain stature.

Although not a dwarf herself (she’s 5’6″) and freely admitting that she’s never personally dated a man shorter than she is (her current paramour is in fact freakishly tall by any measure), she finds some women’s disinclination to date … beneath them … puzzling and open to scrutiny even.

Being on the tall side of womanhood myself, I have never had much option where height and dating is concerned. Most men are eye-level or lower and if I wanted to date at all, I wasn’t in a position to rule out such a large segment of the male population. It was a matter of practicality because I found very early on that young boys and men of most ages don’t like to date tall women. And their reasons for this are just as lame as the reasons women give for not dating shorter men.

Aside from Rob and a guy I had a wildly irritating attraction dance with at university, I have never dated or been married to someone taller than I am.

Will was an inch shorter. It made him crazy enough that I played along with his assertion that we were the same height. He was slightly built though with a solid muscle base that made him much heavier than he looked. Dee inherited that from him. She is a peanut to the eye but lift her at your peril.

The shortest man I ever dated was just 5’2″. Bald and as tubby as a Hobbit to boot. None of these things doomed the relationship but his obsession with being shorter than I was one of the tipping factors for our not dating very long.

I went out with a red-headed ROTC Marine during university who I towered over as well, but he didn’t even seem to notice, which made him unique.  Most men I dated, and they were shorter, noticed – a lot.  It was tiresome.  My height is not something I can alter though I avoided heels as much to increase my dating potential as I did because I found them dangerous to walk in.

Ms. Steiger, however, seems to confuse actual bigotry with attraction, and attraction is all about finding a “good fit” with someone who could wind up fathering your children and being the one to hold your world together when it threatens to fall apart. It can’t be underestimated or lightly scoffed into a shameful submission. And it certainly shouldn’t be analyzed from the point of view of a petite girl who apparently only dates taller.

Being with Rob has been a physical revelation. Not only is he taller, he is bigger than I am. Because the other side-effect of a man who is shorter than you are is that he is often smaller in other ways. Less muscle. Not as broad. Sports the same or a tinier waist span.

Rob can lift me easily. In our early courting days, being swept up the stairs like Scarlet O’Hara was not uncommon.

I don’t have a wider shoulder span than he does or bigger hands. His biceps require two of my hands to encircle and he couldn’t get a leg into my jeans let alone wear them with ease.

The looking up thing though is surprisingly hard on the neck. I can understand why a shorter man might want to avoid that.

His greater height makes spooning actually possible and I can fit into the crook of his armpit while we are sitting close without having to slump in my seat.

Which isn’t to say that any of these “advantages” means that short men should despair of taller women if they are attracted to them. I certainly didn’t use any of the above as criteria in my dating days. In fact, intelligence, a biting sense of humor, lovely eyes and a firm lifted bum* atop a pair of shapely legs will take a man a long ways in my estimation.

Oh, and it doesn’t hurt to be able to grow a beard. As Beatrice once said, “He who hath a beard is more than a youth.” Which is a good thing too.

In my opinion, the physical side of attraction probably stems from those moments in our childhood when our sexual awareness was taking shape and we began to thrill or be repelled by all manner of things big and small. My beard thing has its roots in my dad’s habit of not shaving when he was on vacation and the teasing way he would whisker rub us. It developed further when I was a just teen and wildly enthralled with the Bee Gees for reasons I can’t even begin to rationalize. Twinkling eyes were a hallmark of my dad’s family. All the men had them though for a time I was drawn to big chocolate peepers because the first boy I ever adored beyond reason was a little fellow (yes, he was shorter) in kindergarten whose eyes were melty brown and his hair fringed like Jack Wild.

If not for attraction, we could easily interchange one mate for another. We could be Borg like in our ability to assimilate romantically, but where would the fun be in that?

But I think short women should refrain from comment on this topic, they don’t have the proper perspective.

Quickie Update: I emailed my two cents to Andrew and he actually posted it. You can read it here. It’s number two, in case that wasn’t obvious.

*Hockey butt. Both Rob and Will played hockey as youngsters and it does a man’s lower half good, imo.

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