young widows remarrying

Dating While Widowed: Erasing Your Past


Miniature of Catherine de' Medici, "a rar...

Miniature of Catherine de’ Medici, “a rare portrait of Catherine before she was widowed in 1559, when she adopted the veil and severely plain dress of a widow.” (Hearn, Karen, ed. Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530-1630. New York: Rizzoli, 1995. ISBN 0-8478-1940-X.) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Not much induces the widowed to pick up pitchforks and growl in unison like the idea that they should have to tear down their shrines in order to be decent candidates for others to consider dating.

“Anyone I date or remarry is just going to have to fine with being a member of a threesome.”

Or something to that sadly creepy refrain is what is generally trotted out and translates thusly,

“Love me. Love my dead spouse. And if you don’t, well than you are just too immature and/or insecure and/or possibly jealous to be a good fit for me, and we are NOT amused!”

This is often followed by truly Hallmark heart-warming anecdotes about someone’s auntie who was tragically widowed but went on to remarry this awesome guy was totally okay with the pictures, the shared headstone and being a hankie on anniversaries. There are, apparently, a Chicken Soup for the Soul’s worth of these selfless men, and women, who don’t mind building holidays around the widowed person’s in-laws, whole walls decorated with the awesomeness of love lost and don’t mind being “just the second wife/husband”.

Even more militant are the widowed parents determined to anchor their children to perpetual mourning by making sure that the “real mom/dad” is never forgotten. As if children are in danger of forgetting that their mother or father died young and need to have it in their face daily lest they develop a healthy parent/child relationship with their step-parent.

First, can we lay the “immature/insecure/jealous” thing to rest already? Drive a stake through this trope once and for all?

When your new partner intimates in some way that he/she isn’t feeling the love, whether the cause is pictures, in-laws or daily recounting of good times past, this is not about anything other than the perfectly normal desire we all have to be number one in the heart of the person we love. Whether you feel the feelings are justified or not is secondary to the actual issue, which is, your lover isn’t feeling loved.

They are, in fact, feeling second best at best and merely a warm body stand-in at worst. Making this be about you and your need to “grieve it all out” is probably a sign that your partner is right. You are not really as ready to date or remarry as you thought.

Look no one expects a widowed person to hide all aspects of their past. No one.

That is a myth.

What you are expected to do, however, when you decide to date, have a serious relationship or remarry is live in the present tense and put your primary focus on your new partner.

Would you be okay knowing that your new love spent most of his/her time being sorry that he/she wasn’t still with their last partner? Would a shrine to this on the mantle be okay? Arranging all your holidays around the last partner’s family would be acceptable? Would you like to hear daily how SoNSo was the best (fill in the blank) ever and wonder what that made you?

And yes, I concede that a few prospective partners might on the surface appear to be okay with a new husband or wife who primarily identified as a widowed person first and foremost, but I am going to say these saint like martyrs have a lot in common with unicorns, lusted after but still mythical. Even the most understanding partner has moments of “Oh, come on. Really?”

Do you have to purge your home of all traces of your late spouse when you begin to date?

I would say no. Dating is just getting to know you, having fun, assessing possibilities. I don’t know many adults who make it a habit of bringing home “just dates” to meet the children and check out the new foam mattress you got at Costco. But if a “date” progresses to “someone I am seeing regularly, seriously considering and/or shagging”, you should probably reassess your physical surroundings and ask yourself,

“If I were X, how would I feel about pictures, urns, closets waiting for a dead guy/gal to come home?”

And think about it from the perspective of the non-widowed person you used to be because the odds of dating a fellow widowed person aren’t that great (even if you do hang around the widowed internet chat rooms, message boards and websites). Your live person dating pool is more likely to be inhabited by the never-married, the serial monagamists and the divorced, who have no valid reason to expect that as a widowed person, you should enjoy some super-special pass on doing the heavy lifting of moving on anymore than they did because they have pasts too.

Are some mementos okay?

Of course! Whoever said they weren’t?

When you hear “it’s a good idea to clean out closets and tone down the presence of your late spouse in your living space” and you translate it to “shred everything!” perhaps reassessing your relationship readiness, or asking yourself just why it’s critical to your children’s well-being that an entire wall of the family room be dedicated/dominated to your late spouse, is in order.

It’s perfectly normal to have a few things out and about if you like, but it’s not so much to keep a photo on the nightstand if you are knocking the headboard with someone else or to insist that toothbrushes or robes be left in place like they were evidence at a crime scene. At some point, a late spouse’s personal items have to be cleared out and put away and that time – if you are a decent person who values the feelings of those you might get intimately involved with – is before you get intimately involved.

Why?

Because not doing so is a way of controlling your new relationship and new love by putting him/her in a Catch-22 that can only end with your dismissing him/her as “immature, insecure and jealous”.  You get the “poor widow me” high road and he/she gets the a scornful boot toe up the bum-hole.

Anyone who gets involved with a widowed person has empathy for the situation, wants to be helpful and understanding and usually goes above and beyond in the pursuit, but every one of these folks is hoping that at some point you will come to value them as more than “the person I am with because the person I would rather be with is dead”.

That’s what constant reminders of your late spouse – in any form – is saying to those you date and re-mate.

Even when you think you are being selfless by not spending every single holiday with the in-laws or by keeping at least the bedroom dead spouse picture free, there is a fine line between occasional reminders as you move on and build a new life and set of memories/memorabilia with someone else and being that guy or gal who is still so focused on their late spouse that people silently wonder why your new spouse is still with you because they can’t believe how appallingly selfish you are.

How do I know if I am over the line?

You could ask. Really. Ask. And not in a way that is designed to catch out your new partner so you can proclaim “I would never ask you to erase your dead spouse (if you had one) from your life!” Followed by you bursting into tears and him/her feeling like an asshole.

Or you could just be honest with yourself and assess your living space as though you weren’t widowed. Think about how often you interject conversations with “we” memories when the “we” is you and the late spouse and not you and the one you are currently with.

You’ll know. You probably already do.

What if my new love is fine with everything?

They are lying to you because they love you. Didn’t you ever put up with crap from someone just because you loved them so very much in the hopes that one day he/she would just see how awesomely understanding you were and change their ways?

No one is fine living in the perpetual shade of a dead love. No one is okay with being number two (or three or four because some of you even downgrade your new partner to a status below that of your children) in someones’ heart.

Few people are all that enamoured of their own in-laws let alone a second set (or third if they happen to be divorced or widowed themselves), who take precedence or are allowed to interfere or dictate or are happy living in a house that clearly isn’t theirs because their pictures, taste in decor or perhaps even their personal stuff hasn’t any room to compete with the pictures, favorite chair and flotsam of the dead person who was there before them.

Everyone wants to be cherished and feel as though he/she matters most to the person who matters most in his/her heart.

Even if you are dating a fellow widowed person. Even then. There is a line that when it is crossed, hearts will be broken and it’s not insecurity or immaturity. It’s you who will have done that by not having a clear understanding that moving on means doing just that in deed as well as words.

There is no way to erase your past and reasonable people know this. There is a point when you are wanting to have your yummy chocolate cake past and eat it while your new love wonders how long you are going to sit there and stuff your face in front of him/her.

Choosing to date again (and it’s a choice because accidental dating just doesn’t happen) is being ready to live in the now and give yourself fully and be more concerned with the feelings and well-being of your lover than you are with the past and hanging on to it.

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Julia Roberts is Not My Guru


I have a basically unread copy of Eat, Pray, Love that I will likely never read at this point especially now that there is a movie version. Reading a book that you can watch is just very not done in my homeland. Americans are practical in their quest of the lowest road that will not make them appear too lazy or uneducated.

I am probably one of only a handful of women in the western world who hasn’t read more than the chapter excerpt of Eat, Pray, Love which appeared in Oprah magazine sometime in early 2006. I bought the book because I wanted to use the O magazine version as a reference on my comps. We had to write a bibliography of all the books or magazine articles we quoted, or that influenced ,the gazillion mini-thesis papers that made up the examination at the end of the masters program I was just finishing in the spring of 2006. Unfortunately, I had reached my limit on the number of magazines I could use and needed books. So I just figured since I liked the chapter, perhaps I could claim to have read the whole book and then do so after the fact, in case I got quizzed on it during our Masters week in July.

As a matter of fact, or point of reference, take your pick, I was working on those comps exactly four years ago. Or I was trying to. My father was having surgery and Mom was freaking out. He had a growth that needed removing that could have been cancer but the doctor didn’t think it was overly likely. I was prevailed upon to come home for Spring Break and … step up? … despite the fact that I had a thesis paper to finish and comps to take.

Big memory of that week, being annoyed that I was stuck taking care of kids, sitting at the hospital with Dad and generally being expected to be strong and serene while Mom and DNOS went about their normal routines for the most part. It was like they didn’t notice that I had really important agenda items on my plate that I couldn’t delegate. Sigh, always the delegatee back then

Anyway, Eat, Pray, Love.

I’d heard about this movie. Investigated the author and novel’s premise a bit more. Decided she was a poser and dismissed it all as self-help garbage.

“Why do people need to travel to exotic locales to find themselves?” I asked Rob on our most recent lunch date. “Your self is inside of you. There is no need to go looking.”

“Well,” he said, ” I’m a little hurt by that statement because it’s kind of what I did after Shelley died and I took my trip down south to revisit places we’d been together and see people we knew.”

Which, to my mind, made what he did different from what Eating Author did. She was running away in hopes that the bad stuff about herself would be sloughed off as she discovered new things or cultivated new things or something like that. Rob was reconnecting with memories – the good ones that get lost sometimes after your spouse dies.

I remember at the time I read that single chapter thinking “wouldn’t it be nice to have such simple problems and be able to shed a whole existence and start fresh with someone else bankrolling you?”   That just wasn’t my reality and never had been. When life needed overhauling, I had to stick around and do it and pay for it myself.

However, in a way, coming to Canada has been my mini-Eat, Pray, Love – minus the pray part or Yoda or getting to hang in India.  Canada? Not India. I have put on weight though. Perhaps I am like Eating more than I care to acknowledge?

Since Rob would rather sledgehammer a toe than go to a theatre to see a chick flick with delusions of enlightenment no less, I will likely only see this if the universe nudges me to pick it up at the bookmobile but since the book hasn’t moved me to crack its spine in fours years, I doubt it.

The Details


Wedding Dress

Image by LollyKnit via Flickr

So, we have gone from a small ceremony with just ourselves and our daughters to planning a wedding on location and with guests no less. And it makes me smile to think about it really because I can remember us not long ago joking about theme weddings in Vegas.

It doesn’t matter really. As long it is us. Rob and I. Our girls.

I bought a bride’s magazine the other day. It felt like an odd thing to do. At my age. Looking at “princess” gowns like a teenager getting ready for prom.

When I married Will, it was in a dress that I didn’t really like, wearing accessories that were better suited to my sister DNOS, who had picked them out, than myself. The ceremony was written by the Catholic church and the songs prescribed by them as well. The reception was old school with a sit down dinner and dancing afterwards. All I had wanted was my toes in the sand, a flowing, slightly sexy gown and white cake with sickeningly sweet thick icing.

This time I will have the mountains, and I have come to love them more and more, a very exotic Canadian who fulfills the sexy requirement more than just slightly, and a ceremony written by the province of Alberta.

I don’t know if Tool has ever written a wedding appropriate song, and I can’t eat cake anymore without making myself sick. And I don’t think the gown will be white much less princess-like.

Details. It’s a good thing I am marrying a Virgo*

 

*Rob planned the entire wedding really, I picked out a dress for me and a flower girl dress for Dee. I also arranged for the few flowers we needed. Mostly though – it was Rob. Interesting my late husband, Will, was also keen on wedding planning, the mark of an enthusiastic to be wed man though Rob did tell me that when he married his late wife, Shelley, he couldn’t have been less interested. He was just nineteen though and as he tells it, whenever pressed into wedding planner mode, he was more than willing to oblige her. (see How Do You Know)