I knew dating as a widow would be difficult. But the hardest part surprised me.

1. Dating A Widow Reddit Video
2. Dating A Widow Reddit Stories
3. Dating A Widow Reddit Free
4. Dating A Recent Widow
5. Dating A Widow Reddit Stories

After my husband died, I didn’t know how to date.

Dating a Widow, Feelings of being Secondary I have met an amazing woman about two months ago, she happens to be a widow, married 22 years her husband had died about 20 months ago. I am having a bit of trouble with feeling like I am second, that if she could have her husband back she would. A widow is a woman whose husband died. There can be many reasons for death: poor health of a man, his karma, weak energy. But it all doesn’t matter when it comes to dating a widow, unless she was a reason for his death, of course. When a man meets a woman and finds out she is a widow, this shouldn’t be of any obstacles for them to follow the same healthy relationship rules and build a strong union.

Sep 18, 2018 But a few days ago, one 21-year-old woman took to Reddit to share a very specific issue related to her weight-loss: a lack of support from her partner. 'I'm losing weight but my partner is still giving me a hard time about my appearance,' she wrote, adding that he often makes hurtful comments about the way she looks in spite of all her hard work. About Community. This forum is only for those dating or in a relationship with a widow or widower. If you haven't been in this situation, you can only speculate, and speculation hurts and invalidates. Dating someone who lost their significant other is difficult until you learn how to maneuver the situation. It doesn't start great and settle in.

I was at the cemetery when I decided to set up my first online dating profile. I was visiting my husband’s grave nine months after his death, and I thought about how much life I still had left to live. “Please tell me it’s okay to find someone,” I said to no one in particular.

I wasn’t quite sure how to date. I was widowed at 38 and had plenty of dating years ahead of me. The problem was that I didn’t know anything about the modern world of dating I faced. I’d been with my husband Shawn since right after college, so I had no real idea how to meet single men that I didn’t just run into all the time on campus. My friends assured me that the way to meet people was via the internet. But what did I know about the world of online dating, from writing a catchy bio to appearing attractive in digital form?

Nov 18, 2020 While you may have some trepidation about dating a widower, most seek love again more quickly than widows, usually after one year vs. As long as five years on average for women. However, you really want to steer clear for a full year. On the other hand, there are a number of serious concerns if his grieving is still going on.

My research into the best online dating sites for widows and widowers was not encouraging. A quick search pulled up sites like “Our Time” and “Silver Singles,” but I was more than a decade too young for both of them. The other two whose names initially made me think they might be promising, “Just Widower Dating” and “The Widow Dating Club,” each had cover photos with couples who looked to be at least 20 years older than me.

My friends laughed along with me when the first photo we pulled up on one widow dating website was of a man who was clearly older than my father. I didn’t want to date a 70-year-old man, but apparently if I was looking to date other people who suffered a similar loss to mine, my options were limited. Where were all the other young widows and widowers? Maybe there just weren’t that many of us.

Dating A Widow Reddit Video

I looked into more mainstream dating sites. Yes, I could list that I was a widow on my profile. But would that scare men away? Worse, might it draw creepy men, like the ones who pretended to be widowers and stalked my Facebook page? Those men usually posed as “widowed military men” and sent me message after message until I blocked them. How could I be honest about who I was and what I wanted but also attract the kind of guy I’d actually want to know?

I spent hours trying to figure out what to put in the forms online. But as I thought about whether to actually make my profile live, the bigger question remained unanswered.

Did I really want to do this?

My husband died. What was I supposed to tell my date?

It’s a lot to date a widow. First of all, a new date needs to know my status, which is likely to mean that I end up telling a stranger about the worst thing that’s ever happened to me within a few hours of meeting him. Even if I manage to communicate that I am a widow before the first date, a load of baggage remains. Is he supposed to ask about my late husband? Am I supposed to avoid my loss entirely? How soon is too soon to mention Shawn’s name?

Recently, I met a handsome stranger and we got to talking about religion and spirituality. “I believe in God,” the man said, “but not a God that intervenes here on Earth.”

“I agree,” I said, “because otherwise, why the fuck is my husband dead?”

Not surprisingly, it had the effect of stopping all conversation. Of course it did. This type of behavior — speaking before I could really think about my response — is something I found is common for many widows. In many ways, we have lost the ability to make small talk or to say anything other than exactly what’s on our minds. Most of us have dealt with experiences that our peers won’t have to face for decades, and that means that we don’t have the patience to play games. What you see is what you get. In my case, that means you get a 39-year-old widow with three young kids. How do you put that on a profile?

It’s not just the profiles that are hard. Almost every widow I know has a wild story about a stranger’s reaction after learning her relationship status. One of my friends was hit on by her late husband’s friend, a barber, as he cut her son’s hair. Another found love in a grief group, only to find out that the man was horribly demeaning and all they really shared was the incredible bad luck that brought them to the group. Yet another went on several dates with a “nice” guy who she later found out was arrested and incarcerated for a decade for possessing child pornography. “That will scare you into never dating again,” she told me.

Of course, plenty of widows meet a great “chapter two” (widow parlance for a love after loss) and are able to move on to a new relationship. But when I look at my digital options, I feel overwhelmed by even the seemingly small issues that arise all the time. Most of the formerly married people I see online are divorced. While I am of course okay with dating a divorced man, I have found that widows and divorcees have different points of view about the past. Divorce — even one that was amicable — severs a relationship with some degree of clarity and purpose. The death of a spouse is more complicated.

The issue remains that my past relationship is not gone because either of us chose it. Neither Shawn nor I wanted to separate, and I certainly didn’t want him to die in my arms at age 40. This terrible tragedy happened to us, but we didn’t want it. So, for example, a divorcee will probably call their former spouse their “ex.” But Shawn is not my ex — he is still my husband. We did not choose to end our relationship because it wasn’t working out.

My late husband is still part of my life

I guess that encapsulates why it is so difficult to date a widow, especially a young one like me whose loss is so new. Shawn lingers over my life like a fog. Though I see his continuing presence in my life as a beautiful morning mist that surrounds me with love, I worry that my potential dates will see it as a murky haze that makes real communication impossible. Maybe the real problem is that any affection I might feel for another man would always be shared, at least in some way.

A widower would understand this. But most of the men in my potential dating pool are not widowed, and thus, it can feel impossible to explain how I might be able to move forward with someone new while also keeping a piece of my heart with my late husband. If the roles were reversed, and I was a non-widowed single person dating a widower, I’m sure I’d feel a degree of insecurity about my partner’s attachment to his late wife. But the other option — to leave Shawn behind forever — is not something I’m going to choose. So the dilemma remains.

A few days after setting up my online profiles, I decided to take them down. “They just make me feel bad,” I told my friends. I wasn’t quite sure why I felt this way, only that I was pretty sure I couldn’t communicate the wholeness of my experience in just a few sentences and a handful of photos. I cried as I deleted the last profile, though I didn’t know if it was from relief or something else.

As I dried my tears, I thought about Shawn. “I know he’s out in the universe cheering me on,” I said to a friend later that night. It was true. Before we started dating, Shawn was my friend, and he used to offer me dating advice. I wonder what he’d say about my tragic forays into the dating world.

I bet he’d smile and have a good joke ready to help me feel better about it all. And that’s what I miss most of all.

Marjorie Brimley is a high school teacher and mother of three. She spends her nights replaying the weird encounters that go along with being a recent widow and blogging about them at DCwidow.com. You can also find her on Facebook and Twitter.

Names have been changed in this story to protect the privacy of the interviewees.
While decorating the Christmas tree, Lara found a place for the special ornament she made for her family this year—a red plush picture frame decorated with little hearts and snowflakes. Displayed inside it was a photograph of a woman, a woman who is not her.

The woman has big eyes, a strong chin and, as Lara describes, a “million-dollar smile.” Lara knows her face well—there are images of her throughout the house she shares with her husband, Dave, and their four kids. Photographs placed in the rooms of the three oldest children. Snapshots tucked in binders on a bookcase in her bedroom. A giant portrait showcased in the den.

Though she never met her, Lara lives with the presence of this woman, Charlotte, who died by suicide in 2011. And she’s been trying to, as she explains, “make room” for her ever since she fell in love with Dave, the husband that Charlotte left behind.

As both the new wife and the new mother to the children the couple had together, Lara, 30, takes the family to Charlotte’s grave every month, makes sure there’s a cake on her birthday and includes her in holiday traditions, such as tree decorating. She does it for the kids, mostly, but also for herself.

“As much as it can hurt me, being allowed to participate in the grieving process to an extent by facilitating these opportunities allows me to not be ignored,” she says. “Otherwise, when grieving happens, I don’t exist.”

Lara shares her thoughts and frustrations in an online support group for women like her—the wives and girlfriends of widowers, or WOWs and GOWs as they call themselves. In this safe, private community, they’ve forged a unique sisterhood, aware that their chosen role can be a difficult one for the outside world to comprehend.

These are women who know what it’s like to experience profound love with a man who may also—maybe even always—love another woman. Women who are swimming in a massive gray area with very few resources to guide them. Women immersed in a world of grief that is not their own. Women who are constantly told to grin and bear it.

“It’s so conflicting, it makes my head spin,” says Rachel, a 42-year-old professional who has been dating a widower for three years.

As a human, you want to show compassion and sensitivity, she explains. But as a romantic partner, you don’t want to be making out on the couch while gazing at an urn filled with another woman’s ashes—an object that has been the source of many arguments in their relationship, and even a brief breakup.

“You get to a point where you say, ‘I don’t want to hear anymore,’” she shares. “I can’t listen anymore. I don’t want to know what her favorite color was. I don’t want to know what her favorite perfume was.’ I don’t want to live in the shadow of someone else.”

Members of the group spoke with Upvoted on basis of anonymity. In the community, made of women mostly in their 30s through 60s, they share stories with candor and ease. One woman was dating a man who kept his first wife’s clothing on a mannequin in the front entry of his home. Another woman married a widower who insisted on trying to relive his favorite memories with his late wife by taking her to the same restaurants they loved, dancing with her at the same nightspots and planning the same beach vacations. (She didn’t discover the eerie parallels until she was deep into the relationship.) Another new wife revealed that her widower husband sobbed through their entire wedding night, wrought with guilt that he was betraying the woman he spoke those same vows to first.

The WOWs and GOWs face many of the same complexities: unaccepting in-laws, social media drama, and a constant feeling that they’re being measured against the deified first wife (some call it the Rebecca Syndrome, after the Daphne du Maurier novel of that name). “It’s so easy for people to judge our situations without knowing our whole story,” Lara says. “You have people who are livid that you can be confused or hurt by how a person chooses to grieve. And then you’re the witch from the fairytales. You’re the evil stepmother. You’re the bad person.”

Men and women grieve differently. Psychiatrists from the San Diego Widowhood Project studied surveys from widows and widowers. They found that 25 months after the spouse’s death, 61 percent of men were either remarried or involved in a new romance, compared to only 19 percent of women.

Abel Keogh, author of Life with a Widower: Overcoming Unique Challenges and Creating a Fulfilling Relationship, along with other widowhood-focused guidebooks, explains that when a spouse dies, women are much more likely to allow themselves to fully dive into the depths of pain before putting the pieces of their lives back together—and even consider the idea of dating again.

Men, on the other hand, try to power through, or skip, this critical grieving process.

“They think their lives are broken and they have this need to go out and fix it,” Keogh says of the recent widowers he’s met or heard stories about. “In their minds, fixing it means starting to date again. You’ll see widowers who date months or even weeks after their wife dies. It’s like they go out there and say, ‘Oh, you’re pretty. Can you fix my life?’ They end up getting into relationships they aren’t ready for.”

Keogh shares this insight not just from talking to thousands of women over email and through the private Facebook group he runs, Dating a Widower, but also from personal experience. He was 26 when his first wife took her own life while she was seven months pregnant. “I started dating five months after she died,” Keogh says. “I felt awful for having this feeling that I needed to date, but it turns out this feeling is pretty normal.”

“You’ll see widowers who date months or even weeks after their wife dies. It’s like they go out there and say, ‘Oh, you’re pretty. Can you fix my life?’ They end up getting into relationships they aren’t ready for.”

Author Abel Keogh

Lara met Dave online through a networking site. His profile listed him as widower and a father, but Lara was looking for friendship and nothing more—she’d been divorced for a couple of years and had recently been through a brutal breakup. When they first met, Dave had been widowed for less than a year, but he had a strikingly positive outlook, she says.

“He commented that what he had been through had shaped him,” Lara explains. “It gave him a greater appreciation for people, for relationships, for life in general.”

“We just clicked,” she adds. “It felt like we were long lost friends.”

After a few months, their friendship evolved into a romance. She met Dave’s three children, who were all under 7, and became close to them very quickly. She soon started feeling very protective of them. “There seemed to be this need by everyone around them to constantly check in and ask, ‘Are you still sad? Are you still mourning? Oh, that’s awful.’ And this would be on days when they were happy and doing great. It was almost like people were not okay with them moving forward in life and finding joy.”

Early on in the relationship, Lara felt like she was walking on eggshells. She didn’t want to say anything or do anything that would add more pain or strife to this family. But soon, she noticed herself getting annoyed at certain things.

“If I’m on a date and I bring up my ex, saying he loved this particular type of food or something—that’s not appropriate! That’s not okay. But these are things that are allowed with widowers,” Lara says. “Once, I was like, ‘Hey, can I talk about my ex now?’ I just said that to be ironic. And he said, ‘Sure.’ I felt like I was losing my mind.”

As she became more invested in the relationship, she teetered between feeling guilty for taking on a role that was intended for somebody else, and feeling completely invisible. “Mother’s Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving—every single month, there was some huge deal that would drag on for days and days and days that the late wife became the focus of,” she says. “It was hard not to be bitter.”

One day, she sat on her bed and broke down in tears. She felt she may have gotten herself in too deep with Dave, and the weight of it all was too much.

Dating A Widow Reddit Stories

“I told him I wasn’t sure if I could do this,” she says. “I didn’t feel I was unselfish enough. I didn’t feel that I was emotionally strong or capable enough. I was worried that I would make unfair demands. I was scared of becoming the stereotype.”

At that moment, Dave just listened.

“He was just sitting there, stroking my hair, saying, ‘You are such a kind person and I’m so grateful for you because you’ve tried. You’ve tried so hard, and I hope you know that I love you and would do anything for you.’ That was comforting.”

They got married, and shortly after their honeymoon, Lara discovered she was pregnant. After she had the baby, she stepped into a web of other issues. Two years after Charlotte’s death, Lara was still living out of suitcases at Dave’s house. The closet and dresser drawers in the bedroom were filled with Charlotte’s clothes, and in-laws and family friends told her she was being “too demanding” for asking him to put them away.

“There was no space for me there,” she says. “Everyone found my concerns offensive. I thought I was being a bad person all the time. The loneliness was overwhelming.”

Depressed and in the throes of new motherhood, she started looking online for help and resources, but couldn’t find anything she really identified with. Many widowhood blogs suggest that any relationship post-bereavement will be one of “three hearts”—the third heart being the deceased spouse.

Lara believes that philosophy takes things too far.

“While it’s okay to miss and love the deceased, talking about him or her as a part of the current relationship is unfair,” she says. She compares it to a divorcee pining for an ex-lover while in a new relationship.

She finally found a few private Facebook groups and discovered that other girlfriends and wives of widowers had similar concerns. (Anecdotally, men in crisis don’t seek community as often as women, so support groups for boyfriends or husbands of widows are rare, if they exist at all.)

Dating A Widow Reddit Free

Many discussions centered on what do about objects that belonged to or were associated with the late wife. Rachel mentioned that one time, her boyfriend gave her a bottle of perfume, Clinique Happy. She later found a half-used bottle of the same fragrance under the sink. “It was like, ‘Oh, gosh. Is he trying to replicate her? Is he trying make me into her?’” she says. “It quickly went in the trash.”

Another topic that’s often discussed is how to deal with death in a digital age. Lara says social media has made grieving more twisted in recent years, especially when friends and family members of the widower look to him to keep his late wife’s memory alive. On days such as the late wife’s birthday or the anniversary of her death, when people tag him on Facebook in every post about how amazing she was, she says the online love fest “gets rubbed in our faces.”

Several months into their relationship, Rachel was annoyed that her boyfriend still maintained his late wife’s Facebook page. “He would publicly profess love for her on her page and then the next day, he’d post a picture of another woman—me,” she says. “That felt very strange.”

Dating A Recent Widow

She eventually asked him to have her page “memorialized,” so nobody could administrate it. To her, that was a big step.

For all the complexities in her relationship, Rachel says she does see marriage in their future. Though first, she says, her boyfriend needs to “do the work” and move on from his past. She believes he’s trying.

“I want to know I’m number one in the present,” she says. “I need to know that his allegiance is to me rather than to honoring her memory.”

Author Abel Keogh says it’s up to the new wives and girlfriends to set their own boundaries on what is acceptable behavior—and every relationship will look different. The important thing is that there’s progress being made.

“It can be something like, ‘Hey, today he took down some photographs, and next week, maybe her voice is off the answering machine,’” he says.

It takes time. After being married to his current wife for 12 years, Keogh says his late wife will always have a special place in his heart, but “99.99 percent of my time and attention and focus” is on his present life and family.

In a Reddit discussion, widows and widowers shared what it was like to enter into a new relationship after a spouse dies. Redditor Slimpikin, who lost his wife to cancer, wrote that it can be hard for the new woman because the feelings attached to the first wife are usually all positive, in contrast to “the usual and customary practice of bitching about an ex.” But he’s in a great relationship now, writing that “a lot of the emotions are similar, things like devotion, trust, consideration, and attraction.”

“It’s a heartbreaking situation to be married to someone who continually strives to honor another woman and another life.”

Sometimes, for WOWs and GOWs, it will feel like a two-steps-forward, one-step-back process. After three years, Rachel’s boyfriend recently took the urn out of the house and laid it to rest at a cemetery. She felt a sense of gratitude and relief, but questions remain.

“Now it’s like, okay, is he going to be at the cemetery all the time? Where is his head really? How fully present is he really? Are there things that remind him of her? When he’s staring into space, is he wishing she were here? I’m not a jealous person, but there are things said and done that led my mind to go there,” Rachel explains.

And then there are some situations that end unresolved. Erin, who married a widower in 2009, is now a widow herself. Her husband passed away last month after suffering from kidney failure, heart issues, liver disease and, ultimately, a heart attack at their home.

“Talking to me one minute, and dead the next,” she says.

In the support group, Erin simply wrote the words, “He’s gone.”

He was buried next to his first wife, as was his wish. In his obituary, Erin was listed as the “second wife”—which was his wish as well. Reflecting back on her marriage, she says she always felt like she was living in adultery as the “other woman.”

Dating A Widow Reddit Stories

“It’s a heartbreaking situation to be married to someone who continually strives to honor another woman and another life,” she says. “And worse when they die and you know you never had their heart. You never get married thinking, ‘Oh great, one day I get to go bury him next to another woman. Won’t that be nice?’”

For those in the group, there will always be more questions and gray areas, but they also talk about why they stay, what makes it worth it. “I love my husband and kids,” Lara says without hesitation. “I can’t imagine not being his wife. I can’t imagine not being their mom. I can’t picture my life without them. They are my joy, they are my everything and I would do anything for them.”

So members of the group keep supporting each other, celebrating each other’s everyday victories—perhaps it’s making peace with certain relatives or donating another bag of clothing to Goodwill.

For a while after she was married, Lara felt she couldn’t touch anything in the house as it was all too sacred. All of the curtains and throw pillows were handmade by Charlotte. When Lara would talk to Dave about changing things up, he kept brushing off the idea, saying he had to think about it.

But they ended up moving to a new house and Dave finally told Lara to decorate it however she wanted.

“He said, ‘This is your space now,’” she says. “That was very cathartic for me.”

Recently, Lara received photographs from their wedding three years ago. She says it’s taken her way too long to get the prints, but now that she has them, she can’t wait to frame them and hang them on the wall.

It will be another mark of her place in the family.