How to Find Love Again After Your Husband Died
Simon Thomas has admitted he sometimes feels guilty for finding love again after the death of his wife in 2017, and questions whether it is "too early" to be in a relationship with someone new.
The former Sky presenter lost his wife Gemma, 40, to acute myeloid leukaemia in November 2017. Since then Simon, who has a young son, has been vocal about his grief and announced in November 2018, a year after Gemma's death, that he was in a new relationship.
At a recent Marie Curie event, where he spoke of his experiences, he said there will always be three people in his relationship: "Gemma will always be a presence in my life. She will never ever be forgotten. For my son's sake, and mine as well, there will be a third presence in this relationship. I know Gemma would be happy for me."
The reality of looking for love again after losing your soulmate can be terrifying and confusing. You might feel guilty, like you're betraying the person you lost. You might worry what your friends and family members will think. And then there's the question of how soon you start dating again? When do you even know you're ready?
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Grief is a powerful and complex emotion – as such, no two experiences are the same. Shalini Bhalla-Lucas knows this all too well. She lost her husband to cancer when she was 40 – they had been together for 19 years. She was fortunate to have found love with him at 21, she says. "I felt I'd found my soulmate and I know that if he was still alive, we'd still be together."
It took her 18 months after his death to even entertain the idea of moving forward with her life. The 43-year-old, who lives in Surrey, says the subsequent death of her father marked a turning point: "Both my father and Jeremy died from cancer and they really tried to fight it, but they couldn't – the cancer won. I felt like I owed it to them to live."
Part of this meant getting back out there and dating. "It has to be one of the most difficult decisions I've ever made because I felt like I was betraying Jeremy," she says. "I felt like I was betraying our memories, our history, our life together. And I also wondered how he would feel."
These feelings of guilt and betrayal are something that grief counsellor Dr Chloe Paidoussis-Mitchell sees a lot of in therapy. It's a very common, normal response, she says, because it's the next step in letting go of the person who has died: "It's really important not to be judgmental and to recognise it as a normal step in recovery of grief."
Sadly, it's not just self-judgment that can prove difficult. Guilt can also be fuelled by others. Daren Margetts, 52, lost his wife Mandy to ovarian cancer in 2022 and met his partner, also called Mandy, 11 months later through an online group for widows. He is also a member of Widowed and Young (WAY), which supports 3,000 young widows and widowers across the UK. He describes a "double standard": if you start a new relationship after a loved one's death, some third parties think "you are jumping in too early", but if you are still mourning them after a year and not seeming to move forward "you're defaming their memory".
"We can't do right in other people's eyes," says Margetts, who lives in Birmingham and has been with his current partner for three years now.
Sian Tyrrell
This fear of what others think can be crippling for some. Margetts says that before his wife died she made him promise to find someone new to love. But he acknowledges that in a lot of cases where a death is sudden, people don't have this kind of closure and may feel guilty about opening themselves to love. This can be made even worse by the opinions of others and this can fuel loneliness, which we all know can impact negatively on a person's mental health.
Kimberley Gray, 48, lost her husband Stuart of 25 years to cancer in 2015. The couple had moved to Cornwall – away from all their family and friends – to live the dream life they'd always wanted. She knew her husband was on borrowed time and very soon after the move his health deteriorated rapidly and he died.
All of a sudden she felt very alone. "One minute you love somebody, the next minute they're completely cut off," she explains. "But the love is still there."
For months Gray felt numb and had to focus simply on putting one foot in front of the other, but after nine months she realised something needed to change. It was New Year's Eve and she felt completely miserable. "In my mind I went: 'right, this is up to you, there's no one else that's going to make this life work.'"
She recognised at the time that one of the solutions to moving forward was to slowly start introducing new people into her life. "I didn't get into it to replace Stuart, I missed the banter of having a man around," she says. "I thought I'll get a bit of that banter, open up a new social life, and if anything comes from that, great."
The PR consultant worried about that third-party judgment. "You worry that people think: was their relationship all it was cracked up to be? How could she possibly have loved Stuart if she moved on that quickly?"
She recognises though that meeting other people was something she had to do to move forward with her life. Looking back, she says she probably began dating earlier than others in her situation, but not knowing anyone in Cornwall, it was more about building a network of people around her.
While Gray has been with a new partner for three years, she says it has been a slow process (she would often need two days after each meet-up to process what was happening), but believes her relationship has succeeded as a result.
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Timing is something which crops up again and again: it's important to remember that "too fast" could be a matter of months for some, but for others it could be years. There is no right or wrong answer. Similarly, just because you feel ready to receive love from a new person, it doesn't mean you're dropping and forgetting the person who has passed away.
"The connection with another can happen at any time," says Dr Paidoussis-Mitchell. "There are no fixed stages of recovery when it comes to grief, you dip in and out of it, so having a judgmental attitude is pointless."
She advises people who are grieving to take small steps when it comes to dating – like Gray did. "Don't make major dramatic decisions unless you are at a place in your grief where you feel like you're 'overcoming' it," she says, "and by that I mean you've constructed a life around it."
For Shalini, who is a dance teacher, author and mindfulness coach, it was speaking to others that helped her come to the decision to start dating – and she emphasises that it's never about moving on, only about moving forward.
She had met her husband Jeremy when she was 21 years old, so didn't experience the complex world of dating until she was in her forties. Almost two years after her husband's death, Shalini signed up to online dating and decided to put all of her effort into it: "I wasn't looking for my soulmate, I'd already found that in Jeremy. I was looking for companionship, fun, laughter."
She spoke to 50 men in the space of seven months, and dated 21 of them. To her surprise, she fell in love. Despite their relationship only lasting for two months, she was amazed to find she'd had the space in her heart to love someone new in a different way. "I hadn't realised until after [the break up] that I'd fallen in love with him," she says. "I hadn't in a million years expected to feel like that again."
It can be all too easy to forget the heart has an infinite capacity to expand with love. Dr Paidoussis-Mitchell offers the example of having children – you can have multiple children and love them all. The same can be said for romantic love. "You can still carry and honour the love of the person that's died and have space in your heart to expand and love another," she explains. "Accepting that helps you release the guilt."
She says it's important to hold both in your heart and find ways to do that – this could be having days where you think about the person that's gone, where you visit their grave, or for others it might be sitting down with a new partner and talking to them about a lost loved one (if they feel comfortable doing so).
Ultimately when it comes to love, everyone is different. And it's the same with grief. As Shalini Bhalla-Lucas puts it: "It's universal, but also very personal." She has since written a book about her experience called Online Dating @ 40, and while she's not with anyone at the moment, she's not given up hope.
In fact, quite the opposite. "What I feel came out of that experience was that I have the courage, I have the desire, and more importantly I have an open heart to love again. And I think that's really important.
"I grieve Jeremy every day. I'll never move on from him, but I will move forward."
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Source: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/three-people-on-finding-love-after-loss-and-the-guilt-that-came-with-it_uk_5c94b006e4b01ebeef0dd5a6
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