“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.
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.
I cried as I deleted the last profile, though I didn’t know if it was from relief or something else. “I know he’s out in the universe cheering me on,” I said to a friend later that night. 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.
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 issue remains that my past relationship is not gone because either of us chose it.
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.
Where were all the other young widows and widowers? 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? Recently, I met a handsome stranger and we got to talking about religion and spirituality.
I bet he’d smile and have a good joke ready to help me feel better about it all.