Dating after the loss of a spouse or life partner can be trying emotionally in various ways. You may experience guilt, sadness, fear, and a wealth of other emotions that you might not even be able to put a name to at any given moment. It’s understandable. Your partner was an integral part of your life and left an indelible mark on it.
While you want to honor the past, you also realize that you’d like to move forward and find someone with whom you can enjoy all of what life continues to offer. But your dilemma is how you can comfortably talk about your late partner with a new partner. And not just to explain your late partner’s role in your life prior to their death but the role they continue to play in who you are today, including how much you continue to miss them and grieve their loss. In other words, you want to honor both individuals in the way they deserve. Below are a few suggestions for how.
Approach new relationships with honesty about where you are in the grieving process.
Everyone grieves differently and in their own time. Consequently, only you will know if you are ready to begin dating. With this in mind, it’s OK to start and stop dating should you discover you aren’t ready even after going out on some dates.
The key to dating with integrity — for yourself and any prospective partner — is to honestly approach your relationships about where you are or find yourself in the grieving process. So, consider talking to the person you are involved with about how you are feeling in your grief, even if it is years after the loss. After all, no one can predict what sight, smell, or phrase will evoke a memory, and you want to give yourself permission to feel what you feel when you feel it.
Set aside specific times to deal with your grief independently, apart from new relationships.
While you want to give yourself permission to experience your grief in its fullness, you might consider not doing it exclusively with your new partner, even if they aren’t so new to you anymore. To that end, you can set aside specific times to deal with your grief independently. This is as much for your benefit as it is for your new partner.
No matter how supportive your new partner is of your grief and how much they respect the relationship you shared with your late partner, they aren’t you. They haven’t had your experiences, and they don’t walk in your shoes. As understanding as someone can be, that understanding has its limits, which grief does not. Time alone with your thoughts or visiting a place that is special due to the memories it holds is not a bad thing. Instead, it can promote healing.
Be considerate of your new partner’s feelings.
Like you, your partner is human. In spite of how supportive they are of you in your grief, it is bound to cause mixed emotions if it becomes “too much,” whatever that looks like for them. Jealousy or feelings of inadequacy could set in for them. You also don’t want to become resentful of your new partner for feeling the way they do.
There is a fine line between being considerate of your new partner’s feelings and walking on eggshells around them. You should never feel as if you have to do the latter. If you do, it’s a clear sign this person isn’t one you should consider keeping around. The point is to put yourself in your new partner’s shoes, considering how they might feel within the context of your reminiscing about your late partner.
Don’t compare your new partner to your late partner.
If you were with your late partner for a long time, especially if you were happy, it might be hard to resist comparing your new partner to them. Comparison is a natural human tendency, but if you are trying to move forward with a new relationship, it is something to keep in mind and in check.
Everyone wants to be considered for their individuality, for what makes them unique and, in your eyes, special. If you continually put them in a position of feeling like they are in the shadow of your late partner, never quite measuring up to the memories you have of them, it could take its toll.
Not comparing your new partner to your late partner is also helpful for gaining clarity about whether your new partner is the right match for you as you are today. It becomes difficult, if not impossible, to do so if you constantly judge them against your late partner, whom you might also have grown accustomed to idealizing since their death.
Find a partner who is considerate of your life story.
Experiencing love after loss requires finding and recognizing that special person who is comfortable enough with themselves to be considerate of your life story, which also includes your late partner. But given everyone’s humanity, there are natural limits to this, limits that will inevitably vary from person to person. Such is the beauty of love after loss — when someone enters your life not to replace the person who’s left you but to stand alongside them, growing with you as you grow.