happily remarried after widowhood

Flutter and Mystery


Marriage Day

Marriage Day (Photo credit: Fikra)

Krya Sedgwick, actor and wife of fellow actor Kevin Bacon, mentioned in a recent interview that she still gets the romantic butterfly effect when she sees her husband.

“When he walks into a room…my heart gets a little fluttery and I think, ‘Oh! He’s so cute. He’s so hot.’ ”

Married now for 23 years, her revelation that her husband still does it for her and that,

“He’s still a mystery to me,”

because she learns new things about him even after so much time together actually made the news outside of the ladies magazine circles.

With marriage and monogamy in the “not cool” or “so grandma retro” menu columns these days, it’s not hard to see why Sedgwick’s enduring fascination with her husband astounds the public as much as the discovery of a long-lost pre-historic fish off the coast of New Zealand. It’s a Ripley’s Believe or Not item in a culture where the majority of adults define themselves as single and those who do couple default to common co-habitation with the occasional side order of child or two. Marriage is viewed as archaic, useless and the death knell of sexual/romantic love.

Which makes one wonder why gay people clamor to marry, doesn’t it?

Except I don’t wonder.  Marriage comes with all sorts of nifty legal attachments which protect couples in case of emergency and it bestows a sort of maturity and realism that many adults today prefer to pretend isn’t necessary because it interferes with the American notion of freedom to pursue our largely solo happiness and stay eternally youthful – if only in our own minds.

But that’s a topic for another day. Today’s topic is flutter and mystery.

While I am not at all surprised by people who are surprised to find that sex settles into the comfortably known after the honeymoon period of a relationship logically and predictable moves on to the build stage, I am not at all sure what is meant when some talk about cooling passions or loss of romance. I suppose that some people don’t understand that love has stages and that “wooing” is a different phase than “falling in love” and then “love” itself. It’s not as if we are well-schooled in relationship. In fact, beyond the plumbing aspects (if that), young people must most often rely on their parents (iffy), peers (iffier still) and the media (downright disastrous) for their relationship education.

So while the legion stares in wonder at the Sedgewick-Bacons, I just nod sagely. I get this.

Even after five years – which is still pretty young even if you morph by the dog year standard – I find my husband a near endless source of fascination. How could I not? He is me and yet not me at all. Just when I think I know everything, it turns out I knew nothing at all really.

Rob fascinates me. Our relationship still tickles and amazes me. Our life, though perhaps on the surface routine enough, is like a present within a gift within yet another festooned party box.

I feel flutter. I am drawn to the enduring mystery that is like a game of Clue that changes, and yet doesn’t, with every dice roll.

What I don’t understand is how so many people don’t understand.

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Dating While Widowed: New Relationships are NOT a Form of Grief Therapy


English: Comfort in Grief

Image via Wikipedia

There is an unsurprising, yet disturbing, number of dating and remarried widowed folk who seem to feel that coupling again is part and parcel of the “healing process”. It’s something to be done for distraction’s sake, or to ease the emotional aches and pains. They regard new partners as means rather an ends, who should give way to urns as centerpieces, constant chatter about the past and memorabilia of all shapes and sizes.

Let’s be clear. Dating is about seeking new companionship – casually or for the long-term – and can only really be about the two living people engaging in the relationship. Your late spouse is not part of the equation in any active sense of the word.

Recently a commenter voiced the common lament of many widowed back out in the dating trenches,

If you truly love us, you would embrace our lost love as much as we do.

And if you loved them, you’d not expect such a thing because though a new partner can be understanding, sympathetic and even feel bad for what you’ve been through – grieving isn’t a date night activity. They can’t feel what you feel and to ask them to periodically put the brakes on their romance to cater to your heartbreak over someone else is cruel.

At some point, in order to truly be ready to open up to love and a relationship, a widowed person needs to deal with the past and then put it away. In some cases, this packing up includes tangible objects. No one should expect his/her new love to live in a museum to a dead love or to man up daily against feelings of jealousy or inadequacy.

There is nothing obvious in our home that points to the fact that both Rob and I have deceased spouses. We are five years into a relationship that with luck has decades to go. In order for our relationship to flourish, it needs its own space to grow. It needs to be free of shadows, comparisons, and artifacts that speak of past marriages.

Even though we both understand that memories linger, you won’t catch either of us expecting the other to share feelings about a past with which the other wasn’t privy.

Expecting a new partner to listen to endless references or stories is unfair to them and ultimately unproductive if the aim is building a new relationship. Don’t use someone. You are not entitled to make yourself feel better at someone else’s emotional expense. And if you aren’t ready to put your late spouse in your past where he/she belongs, don’t date. You aren’t ready.

A new love should inspire you to make room and dream about the future.

 

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Today is Five Years


rob and i the night before our wedding

Five years ago today I was home from work with yet another sinus infection, checking my work email and taking care of a bit of business virtually when I received an email from Rob proposing that we take our friendship in another direction, a romantic one.

He confessed that the thing uppermost on his mind anymore was me, and though it took him by surprise, and couldn’t have been less timely, he saw no reason to let a good opportunity pass him by. Oh, and by the way, did I feel the same? He kind of thought I did, but if I didn’t, please don’t be creeped out.

In typical Virgo fashion, he went on to outline a plan for us to virtually date and eventually meet up over my Spring Break to take a trip together to the West Coast. What did I think?

I was stunned. I had to call my BFF, who simply said, “I told you so.”

She had been convinced weeks earlier that Rob saw me as more than a friend. In fact, she’d spent a good deal of our lunch date the day before extolling his virtues and trying to convince me to overcome my hesitancy and simply pursue him, which was something I wouldn’t do because Rob was quite vocal about wanting to wait until after the first anniversary of Shelley’s death before dating again. He also frowned vigorously at the behind (and not so behind) the scenes meat market on Ye Olde Widda board. Some of his disgust was just the hypocrisy. Dating was routinely trashed and daters harshly hung up for public flaming, but the reality is that it was more common than the board matrons cared to acknowledge. And partly, it was due to the fact that he’d been a victim of widda stalking and he shied away from being seen in that light himself.

His closing line included a bit about not been able to breathe properly until he’d received my reply, so I wrote “breathe” and “yes”.

And that’s not quite all there was to that but it was the beginning of what is now.

Hollywood marriages are measured in dog years, so at five together ourselves, Rob and I are particularly old married folk. Sometimes it seems as though I have known Rob forever and in a spiritual sense, I think that is true, but it catches me by surprise a bit remembering that I have not known him always.

He’s had his desktop screen saver off for some time but switched it on again this past weekend, and all these old photos popped up. Pictures of Mick and Edie when they were small. Family pictures of long ago. One picture of Shelley came up from their time in San Diego. It was an impromptu goofy shot with her in her pajamas and Rob blushed to his toes, looked sheepish and said, “I didn’t know that was on there.”

All roads lead to where you are standing right now, don’t they? A good thing to remember.

Happier anniversaries are a better place to put one’s energy. Today is certainly in my top five and probably the most fortunate day of this life of mine.

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