2 | Joy
September 6, 2009 at 8:41 am

I know you posted this almost a month ago, but I have been thinking about how this question has related to my life and situation. I am in a committed relationship with a widower. He and his late wife were together for only six years. So their relationship was mostly courtship and cancer. I wish I could say I would do things differently if I could do them again, but I don’t think that I would. I believe that this is my journey and if I did it any other way, I would change where I am right now, and I love every minute of my life. I had a twelve year marriage that crashed and burned and I was just starting a new life when I met “my guy”. We became dear friends, his wife had been gone for three months and for some reason we just could talk for hours about things. Working in Hospice I know how important it is for people who are grieving to be heard, so I was listening. I have heard his whole marriage to her from the inside out. At some point we realized that things were shifting into something else, so we took a break to see if that was what was best for both of us. It was and so we started dating, all of the sudden I wished I didn’t know everything that they had done dating. Without realizing it I would refuse to do things, because they had done it. I was in the middle of my own identity search, feeling very lost about who I was and what I needed or wanted. In some ways it was easy to hide in is late wife’s already existing life. I have talked with friends about some of this and they say it is the same as you get older and date people who have been married, except you know that the person really dislikes that “x” and so you must be better. In dating a widower, they don’t dislike that person; in this case they were mad in love for each other. I think it is really hard not to compare and wonder. Also he had her on a very high pedestal of perfect. I wasn’t sure I could compare up to what I was hearing. Dating went well and he asked me to live with him. I loved the idea, except that his house was a shrine to the late and great. But, don’t think that that stopped me, if being his grief counselor wasn’t enough, I now stepped into helping him let go of the shrine. I even made a photo DVD for him and her family. Once I was in the house my fear of him thinking I was her or a replacement model got even worse. I thought about it before almost all decisions I made with him. I helped clean out her 4 closets of clothing (he had a half closet in the lowest level). I started to really see the facts of their relationship. People can say things, but their stuff doesn’t lie. She smoked and drank a lot, he never mentioned that, she was a workaholic, that was missed in conversation, she was a shopaholic and that left them in debt along with her medical bills. I hope when I pass on, people choose to forget some of my most human traits and remember the best of me the way he did. But, that didn’t make it easy for me to feel good enough. He was a second rate citizen in his own house. He was comfortable being dominated, that wasn’t my wish for my next relationship and I shared that with him. That he either wanted a 50/50 thing or time to go. He liked the idea and went for it. I was starting a new life and was excited about that, I had wanted to go and get my hair done. I was going to blond up my blond, but then I went red blond, his late wife (LW) had dyed her hair blond and I didn’t want to look like her. I was going to cut my hair off, no then I might look like her. I love to wear warm cute hats in the winter, that winter I would not wear one because the ten photos of her around the house and on her stone are of her with a red hat. I froze my ears a lot that winter. In the spring “my guy” found all my hats and asked why I didn’t wear them. I explained and he told me that just because she had 10 hats didn’t mean she wore them, she didn’t, that one photo is the one time she wore a hat and it was just the best photo that everyone liked. After that I tried to ask more when I felt I was compromising to not be like her. I knew her clothing size and what lingerie she wore. I knew too much and it was hard to not compare. That is about the time I looked around the web for an idea of what it was like to date a widower. I found this blog and some other things and that really helped. I had made some mistakes along the way and we were going to have to live with the consequences of that. I was going to compare for a while because I knew too much and he needed to be open to helping me through that. It took time (a year or so) but I stepped out of her shadow and really stepped into who I have always been. We found someone else to be his grief counselor, because every time I tried to help the “not feeling good enough” came back which wasn’t healthy for me. The SHRINE took a year to fully remove, walls painted, my stuff in my home. I slowly learned to appreciate some of her talents, because they were not mine. I am not a decorator, I don’t shop at home stores I did not get that skill. LW loved to do that, so when the decorator did our house she shopped the house itself, she didn’t have to go and buy anything and so the items in new locations with my stuff mixed in is amazing. “My Guy” and I talk about the comparison thing any time I need to now, which isn’t very often. It is nice to have that feeling transform to something else, confidence. For me communication is the key to my heart and he is good at communication. In some ways I know that I found more of myself because I was working so hard to not be someone else. I would dig deep to see how I really felt about things, if it was really important to me and it had been to her as well, then I guess we had something in common. If you asked my friends they would tell you that there is no way I could be compared to someone else, I am very unique in so many ways, there aren’t others of me walking around. But for a couple of years I really did lose sight of all that beauty within me and feared that I was just a replacement. I had a great counselor through out this process and a really good pastor and a life coach and a whole host of other amazing people. When I really forgot what a gift God had made in me, my life coach made me write down all the ways that I was unique and me. I kept that sheet on the wall for over a year, I even wrote parts of it on the mirror to read each day. That was very helpful.
As for the sex and romance thing, having been married once I can share that it ebbs and flows and when you don’t feel good about yourself, or feel confident about the greatness that is all of you, or totally overwhelmed with life, it is the first thing to shut off.
I have to tell you, don’t give up, you are doing great. You have many gifts and I would like to thank you for this one. Thank you for starting this blog, continuing to post and for seeking out answers to your questions. In that you have helped me in so many ways. Trust that God can lead you through these tough times. In the end that is really what got me to where I am today. I had to let go and trust.