Being the Wife of a Widower — Is He Ready or Not?
There have been times in the last 9 years when I have felt victorious, like we are moving forward. There have been times when I have wondered what on earth I was ever thinking. I know I’m not planning on going anywhere, and in the last few years my husband and I have worked most things out. We still have issues, and whether he likes to admit it or not, they stem from the loss of his first wife. At this point in our relationship I like to think we are okay now. We still have issues from time to time, but it’s nothing like the beginning of our relationship I know when I was hurting the most I had no one to reach out to. I thought if there was someone I could talk to, someone who understood, someone I could poor my heart out to I would be okay. I was never able to mourn the loss of the relationship as I had expected/wanted it to be, and I had no one to talk to help me through. Sometimes I think it was this inability to communicate to someone, to share, that made the healing process take so long for me, and I allowed myself to fall deeper into the darkest depression I had ever been in because the only person I had to talk to was myself. I don’t want that for anyone else. I keep thinking how much I want to reach out to others who are hurting because of similar situations, but it’s difficult because I still don’t have it all together.
Now I understand that’s okay.
The fact is, no relationship is perfect. There may be times in a relationship when it feels perfect, but it doesn’t last because no person within the relationship is perfect. To be honest, being married to any imperfect person means constant adjusting, forgiveness, and acceptance. Being married to a widower does bring its own challenges, but when you get to the root of it you are still looking at adjusting, forgiveness, and acceptance. When I say acceptance I do not mean acceptance of any and all things. There’s a limit, and a line must be drawn. You are the person who must define those limits for yourself and draw those lines. Do it rationally and as selflessly as possible, but keep it within reason or you will be miserable.
Part of my struggle in telling my story is to figure out what to tell. How much detail, should I start at the beginning or should I start where I am now? Sometimes I think the details don’t matter because no details are the same across different relationships, but the hurt…oh, that is the same. I’ll start at the beginning, but I’ll try not to bore you with too many details. Perhaps you’ll find some similarity in our journeys, and as I continue to post, perhaps you will find comfort you are not alone!
So it began like any other romance…
My husband and I met at a factory I was working in at the time. He had just been hired into a position in upper management. I saw him in passing as he was given tours of the place, and over a short period of time we had said hello, smiled, and said a few words to one another in passing. I had a crush, and it was pretty immediate. He did too. He had been good friends with the accountant at the time, and he’d had her call my manager’s desk to ask me questions about whether or not I was single, or if I was interested in anybody. I was pretty blunt, and I told her the only one I was interested in was the manager they’d just hired (I was a little concerned she was asking for someone other than him, so I had to make sure I was clear). I still remember him calling my home number that very night under the guise of calling to talk to all the employees of the company about how they felt about the company. It didn’t take long before he explained why he’d really called. Within a week we had gone on 2 dates, and I had gone to church with him (of course we both brought our children along).
Looking back I now see there were red flags in our first phone conversations telling me he wasn’t quite as ready to be in a relationship as he thought. To be honest, those things did give me pause, but I brushed them off as strange, but no big deal. They were a big deal. If you are dating a widower, don’t ignore or brush off those signs giving you pause because they don’t lie. For instance, the one I remember most was when I told him I felt like I was in high school again (I was explaining my excitement). His response was something like this: It’s more like feeling like I’m in college because I already had a high school sweetheart. Now, those weren’t his exact words, but they might as well have been. I had been talking about a feeling of excitement within a relationship, and he was talking about a person. He couldn’t “feel” that way with me because he already experienced that with her in high school, and there was no way I was taking that position from her. What he didn’t understand (and maybe he still doesn’t) was it was never about her position in his past, but simply about the excitement of being in a relationship with someone you really liked. He wasn’t ready for me because he wasn’t ready to put me up in the same place she was. Already he had set parameters. Already he set up barricades where I could not go.
If he sets up barricades you either need to run the other way, or you need to steel yourself up, and get ready for whatever comes your way because it won’t be pretty. You are going to hurt like you’ve never hurt before. That doesn’t mean you won’t end up having the most beautiful relationship you’ve ever experienced…in the end…but you are going to go through a lot to get there. I stayed to fight. I was not a very good fighter because it drove me into the darkest depression I’d ever been in, but I satyed. Honestly, I had NEVER dealt with depression before this. It was the most painful, most lonely situation I had ever been in, but I fought (probably not the right way).
Ignoring the signs I wasn’t going to be his number one (you can have more than one number one…just not at the same time, and he wasn’t ready to let go of her spot and live in the now), I allowed myself to fall in love, treat him like royalty, and spoil him like he’s never been spoiled. That’s just the kind of person I am. I spoiled him with affection and time. I didn’t have money, so I didn’t give him things, but I cooked, baked, scratched his itches, worked with him at his farm, watched baseball. I was his team mate, his cheerleader, and his biggest helper. To be honest, I think if I hadn’t been all those things it would have been over. He saw in me someone he could love, would love. I was pricesless, he knew it, he just wasn’t ready, but at the same time he was afraid to let me slip through his fingers.
I’ll tell you what I know now from his own mouth. He told me this a few years ago. His love for me grew, and he knew it would. He says he loves me more every day. Do you know what that tells me (and what he has never, and will never admit to)? All that means is he knew in the beginning he was going to love me, and he couldn’t let me get away even though he wasn’t at that point ready to let his late wife go and say goodbye. He loved me in the beginning, but it was a love and a happiness he felt ashamed of having because he felt as if he was being untrue to the love he shared with his late wife. He knew she was gone. He knew she wasn’t coming back. He knew I was right there. He was at a transition in his life where he had to make a decision to hold on to her and be alone forever, or move on and love again. I did not understand this, and he did not communicate this to me because he didn’t understand it himself. I was kick start moving him into a new life, but he didn’t know how to transition, he didn’t know how to help his children transition, he didn’t know how to keep the balance of allowing them to know who their mother was, but still to honor and love me. He didn’t know how to involve me in his transition, and so he went it alone. He did not communicate with me, and I did not communicate with him. It’s amazing we didn’t end up in complete disaster, but it nearly led us there on several occasions.
These things are difficult, so as I slowly tell my story, remember, just because there are warning signs doesn’t mean the man is a lost cause. You could be the one and only woman to take him from the depths of his sorrow…but you will experience great sorrow as you pull him out of his. You can be one of two kinds of women in this situation. Both are strong women, but the type of strength exuded is different, and many times one type will call the other type weak (and visa versa), but that is not the case. The strength you choose to use in a relationship like this is a preference based solely on your own personality, and neither strength is wrong.
Strength number one: You leave
It takes a strong woman to leave a man she loves. At some point you have to ask yourself what it is you really want, what you expect out of the relationship. If you find he is unable to meet those expectations, and you know both of you would be better off apart, then do it. Do it without casting judgment on those who choose to stay and hope for the best. It’s true the best may never come, but every individual must choose for themselves how long to endure the sorrow before they consider it a hopeless cause.
Strength Number Two: You stay
It takes a strong woman to stay with a man she loves when the love he gives doesn’t meet her expectations, and to continue loving him and pouring herself into him yo bring him happiness in spite of her sorrow. This doesn’t mean you stay forever. There are things he can do which you should never in a million years put up with.
How you know it’s time to say goodbye:
Just because he’s caught in the crossroads doesn’t mean he’s a hopeless case. There are circumstances where it is hopeless, and you better hit the ground running in the opposite direction when you run into these situations.
1. He has a shrine set up for her
It doesn’t matter where it is. It should not exist. If it’s up somewhere the first few times you go to his house, that’s one thing, but it had better be gone within the 4th or 5th visit. If not, you’d better have a serious conversation with him before you decide to go any further in the relationship. If he compares her to you, or you to her…run away.
What is acceptable is pictures of her in the kids’ room, boxes of her things he’s kept for the kids for when they are grown, photos in albums. You have to accept she was a part of his life. If he has kids, she still is to an extent. If they did not have kids, I would be less obliging to him and less patient with his ties to her. In the end, you have to decide what you are okay with, AND you need to communicate this to him in a delicate, sensitive way. You can’t expect to come in, and within a week tell him to forget her and his past with her, but there absolutely has to be boundaries.
As an example, the first time I went to his house there was a picture in a crustal frame on his dresser in his room of her on their wedding day. It might have been there a week, but then it was gone. There was a large picture in the living room he’d had made after her death where someone had taken a picture of her and blended it with some pictures of their boys together (they’d not had a family picture made before she’d died, so this became the family picture). That was also gone within a week or two.
2. He talks about her non-stop
If all he can talk about is her, or memories of her…run away. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It only means he’s not ready for another relationship, and he’s just not ready to let her go. If his past is more important than the now, then the now isn’t something he is ready for. Perhaps you aren’t the one to help him out of his sorrow. It’s possible no one is. Some people can’t get out of the past, and you shouldn’t put that kind of weight on your shoulders.
He can talk about her to his kids. He can even bring a memory up with her in it, but it shouldn’t be all the time. You have to set the limits. You have to know what feels right and doesn’t. I hope this helps some.
There are some things my husband said and did in our relationship that made me know he wasn’t ready, but there were things he did that showed he was. Every man is different. Mine was ready, but he struggled about the best way to get there. He struggled with being true to himself, his children, but also how to be true to me. Mine needed a reason, he wanted a reason, he wanted to be ready, and so in way that is what made him ready. But even in his case, and in the case of so many other widowers, the process of being ready and then acting it out is long and full of uncertainty. He told me once during an argument when I told him how much he hurt me (this was years later) that he didn’t know how to act, and that I should have told him. I didn’t tell him because I didn’t know how to, and to be honest, at the time I don’t think he would have taken it well. He has apologized profusely for the pain he put me through…most of which he had no clue because I never let him see or hear the tears I cried.
I’m sorry for the tricky situation. I am sorry there’s no clear answer. Communication is key, but communication at the right time and in the right way is key as well. In my situation, communication after the fact with him apologizing for the sorrow he caused in me was the only communication that would have work. If I had communicated during the time when he was struggling to balance his new life and choices out with his old life I do believe he’d have thrown his hands in the air, and we would have been done. By staying I had taken a risk that I might have wasted 5–9 years of my life on him, but I didn’t. He was a risk well worth it. If it had turned out the other way, would I still be saying he was well worth the risk? I don’t know. It’s a risk you take when you fall in love with a widower.
To continue reading about my journey as a wife of a widower, you can follow the links below:
From Happiness to Despair, and Back Again — Series Introduction
Is He Ready or Not? — You are HERE!