Mending the Widow’s Web: Remarriage After Widowhood

Widowhood begins with a flatline. It beings with the interruption of a rhythm, a faltering of the drumbeat of life, and the silence that follows it. The death of a husband is a difficult thing for a woman to bear, especially at a young age. The conflicting forces of love, anger, sorrow, and other emotions make it difficult to get through life as the grieving process does its somber task of assimilating the end of a relationship. Widowhood is a trying experience, and the prospects of remarrying bring a suite of conflicting emotions of their own.

Many consider suffering a universal experience shared by all forms of life. It begins with a need and progresses with a dearth. The psychological and biological needs of humans lead to a wide variety of agonies to suffer, and one of the most feared is the loss of a mate. By the very nature of biology and the passage of time, “[i]f a marriage does not end through a divorce over the course of the life cycle, it inevitably ends through the death of one spouse. A husband is likely to die before his wife and hence widowhood typifies the later stages of a woman’s life.” (Bianchi & Spain, 1986). The common incidence of widowhood begets a variety of painful feelings. The pains associated with the loss of any loved one are often collectively referred to as bereavement, “a specific state initiated by the death of someone who is close and dear. Bereavement usually brings on grieving, an expression of feelings through crying, pining, general malaise, and psychological, or even physical pain.” (Silverman, 1986). Modern accounts, based in evolutionary theory, “also view the suffering of grief as a consequence of love, but as a by-product of the way we build up a close relationship with the person concerned.” (Archer, 2004). People experiencing bereavement often act in ways alien to their typical patterns of behavior. As these people are dealing with “an extreme situation, they are experiencing extreme feelings, and they act uncharacteristically. While some of these atypical responses will be idiosyncratic to a bereaved individual, certain patterns in the expression of grief are found in most mourners.” (Silverman, 1986). The grieving process can consume a considerable amount of time. Despite assertions that the grieving process ends in usually six months, “bereaved people who have written of their own experiences have reported that it took at least two years before they could begin to look to the future.” (Silverman, 1986). Even after the grieving process is concluded, it is commonly reported that spouses long-dead hold their places in their wives’ hearts for the rest of their lives, and “[w]hile it is correct that the bereaved person must change the relationship to the deceased, changing the relationship does not necessarily mean ending it. Grief is a process that affects the rest of the bereaved person’s life.” (Silverman, 1986). This being considered, grief can serve as a major impediment to the courting process.

The deceased, like the normal grief caused by their death, remains a very real element of the widow’s life after the fact. In addition to inducing painful emotions such as sadness, sorrow, and anger, “bereavement has the potential to result in chronic patterns of grieving that may block successful functioning and the attainment of a satisfying life for the individual.” (Tyson-Rawson, 1996). While there are many different ways for an individual to cling to the past, the loss of a husband can be particularly devastating, as “[t]he marital pair may have such closely interwoven lives that the loss of one partner may cut across the very meaning of the other’s existence.” (Wortman and Silver, 1993). Humans’ relationships without other humans inevitably shape both parties, and marriage usually represents a very deep relationship. If for years and years, a woman shares her life with a man, her “self-image has been shaped by [her] identity as half of a couple. A husband’s death leaves numerous voids in a widow’s life, not the least of which is the requirement that he/she reexamine herself and move from a ‘we’ to an ‘I.’” (Lieberman, 1996). This crisis is perhaps the greatest of crises associated with widowhood, as it cuts closest to the woman’s self and certainly dominates the whole experience of grieving. Ultimately, this crisis is as follows: the widow must not only suffer the loss of her husband in her outward life, but she must accept it in her soul as well.

This is, of course, not an easy thing to accept. Accordingly, “[o]nly about 24 percent of the widows were anxious to remarry. About 53 percent of the widows were not sure whether it was wise for them to remarry, and another 23 preferred to remain single.” (Ferguson, 1981). As previously stated, widowhood is not an uncommon finding. All over the world, “widows make up a significant proportion of all women, ranging from 8 to 13 percent of the adult female population. Proportions of widows are generally highest in the developed countries because in them greater longevity and lower fertility levels increase the ratio of old to young in the population, and as women tend to outlive men there are more females among the elderly.” (Owen, 1996). Also due to the shorter average lifespan of human males, female widows are far more common than male widowers, so much so that “women are widowed twice as often as men. Women also tend to be widowed at younger ages, spend twice as many years widowed, and remarry half as often as widowed men. Among young women widowed before age 40, the median length of widowhood exceeds 15 years.” (Bianchi & Spain, 1986). Considering the time periods before death or possible remarriage, “[t]he period of widowhood is often lengthy, particularly for women. Only one-quarter of widows remarry within 5 years of the loss of their spouse, and the average woman remains widowed for the rest of her life, typically about 19.5 years.” (Wortman and Silver, 1993). Widowhood can weigh heavily on a woman’s soul, but the weight of the soul is only the beginning of the challenges it presents.

Widowhood mercilessly presents a wide variety of difficulties beyond the purely emotional aspect of the issue. From an economic perspective, widowhood is not all that different from divorce in terms of being cut off from an important means of gathering resources, and “[m]ost studies have shown that households maintained by widows have low family income and that women experience a drop in real income after becoming widowed.” (Bianchi & Spain, 1986). Many new widows experience difficulty learning to stand again on their own two feet as independent economic units. On top of this burden often comes several others in the form of children, and “[m]any widows face the dilemma of being the sole parent.” (Lieberman, 1996). Dealing with the economic necessities of death can easily weigh heavy upon the soul already so burdened with dealing with the psychological agony and the responsibilities of raising children.

Social difficulties also present themselves in the transition into widowhood. A typical case involves that initially after the death of the husband, “relatives and friends rallied around the widow, especially when her husband died suddenly. Her neighbors brought her food and flowers and took care of her children. But after a few weeks or months, the widow’s social life waned because she had no longer a partner.” (Ferguson, 1981). A husband can offer a vast expansion into a social world by the means of interaction his personality offers, and after a social life that had for so long shared with a partner, many widows find themselves lost as one half of a social unit.

The loss of a social organ does more than just force the woman to function without it, however. Many widows feel a distinct change in their social lives among those considered friends. An overall feeling of incompleteness characterizes the experience of widowhood, and “[m]ost widows believed that they had lost status and felt like a ‘fifth wheel’ when visiting their married friends, going to a party, or entertaining at home.” (Ferguson, 1981). It is a difficult adjustment to go from married to single. Many widows carry the perspectives they had on single women into their new life as a single woman, many believing “that a single woman was not always welcomed by other married women who were afraid that she would try to seduce their husbands.” (Ferguson, 1981). Feelings of alienation can even come of the ways in which friends do socially reach out. It is often not lost on some people that they are welcomed in some outings and excluded in others. In one study, “[s]ome widows felt rejected because their girlfriends were still inviting them but when their husbands were out. The fifty-year-old widow of a doctor said that her friends had arranged for her to play bridge with them the night their husbands were out.” (Ferguson, 1981). With all these factors considered, it is not hard to understand that the feelings of loneliness in losing a spouse can be easily compounded by the way a new widow’s social group can react to the loss.

This alienation is perhaps the greatest external hurdle that impedes the successful continuation of life and relationships. The loss of a loved one results in a sort of paradigm shift of priorities, and “create a demand for the bereaved to rediscover meaning by formulating new representations of the self, the other survivors, and the deceased- and the relationships among them. A significant death begets a life crisis, ‘a situation that is so novel or major that habitual responses are insufficient’.” (Kirsten Tyson-Rawson, 1996). The suddenness of independence being thrust upon one can be quite shocking to the whole system. Lieberman writes, “Dealing with grief and loss are the paramount tasks during the first months of widowhood. In the midst of mourning, a number of challenges present themselves. Paramount is how to begin to take on a new identity – that of a single person.” (1996). This new identity brings its own set of challenges with it. In fact, adopting a new identity is quite a long process including such steps “as developing a new self-image, reconstructing friendships, becoming the head of household, managing finances, and finding new meaning in life.” (Lieberman, 1996). All this responsibility can take a toll on a new widow.

This toll has long been the topic of study. Health issues and other misfortunes have long been associated with widowhood, and “[i]n the twentieth century many scientists have researched possible connections between widowhood and mental illness. Their work has been largely inspired by Sigmund Freud’s well-known 1917 paper, ‘Mourning and Melancholia.’” (Lieberman, 1996). Freud believed that through both repressing feelings of grief and through wallowing unproductively in it, an individual’s psychological health could be gravely damaged. Feelings of alienation and grief must be properly managed and vented, as, in excess, “[b]ereavement in the individual has been linked not only to emotional distress and disturbances in mental health, but also to problems in social relationships, cognitive functioning, self-esteem, and physiological problems.” (Tyson-Rawson, 1996). Unhealthy grieving prevents the creation of a new mental self-image, a necessary advancement. The way one’s life can seem derailed after the loss of a spouse can leave one feeling impotent and confused. This is because the old way of functioning no longer applies, pointing to “the need to construct new guidelines for behavior and understanding of experiences in the world of social interaction – a new internal working model.” (Kirsten Tyson-Rawson, 1996). Essentially, this amounts to reprogramming one’s social responses to focus on an identity as a single person, rather than a couple. Despite the difficulty of such mental remodeling, “[t]he creation of this new model of relational meaning is necessary if the bereaved person is to reestablish stability following the crisis of death has typically been termed ‘resolution,’ literally ‘re-solving’ of the dilemma presented by the loss of someone important.” (Tyson-Rawson, 1996). The goal of building the new model is to function effectively in the absence of the dead spouse. It empowers one to finally tear away from the howling void of the grieving process, but it dauntingly entails letting go.

As previously mentioned, at the core of this storm of emotions is the failure of a biological need in the loss of a mate. Unsurprisingly, many widows complain of a “[l]oss of affectional and sexual interaction…” (Lopata, 1996). A new widow is likely to isolate herself in the grieving process, and the fresh wounds and unresolved emotions make finding a new mate virtually impossible and usually psychologically inappropriate. Despite the attachment many women hold to their wedding rings, “[m]ost psychotherapists and counselors advise widows that in removing their wedding bands they are accepting the reality of death and the beginning of a new phase of their lives. The ring, the symbol of marriage, is better put aside after the death of one of the partners, they say.” (Ginsburg, 1987). The removal of a wedding ring, of course, is a signal to any observant male, opening a floodgate that could potentially unleash a new and possibly painful series of emotions. In one study, “Malatesta, Chambless, Pollack, and Cantor studied 100 relatively healthy, community-dwelling widows between the ages of 30 and 89 and concluded that ‘younger widows, when compared with their older counterparts, viewed changes in body image, the dearth of unattached men, and financial resources for social activities as representing significant sexual barriers’.” (Lopata, 1996). Beyond this, there is often unwillingness or feelings of obligation to the deceased that prevents new relationships from forming. A widow’s lingering relationship to the deceased spouse involves “strong themes of both lettings go and holding on. These two themes are intertwined and are not polar opposites. Letting go may begin even before the death of a spouse. There is often a period of anticipation in which the possibility of death is considered.” (Moss & Moss, 1996). With the interest of health, the process of letting go is a necessary one, and the possibility of a new relationship can offer a new path to a new future.

The possibility of remarriage brings another set of complications with it. After suffering one such loss, many women experience fear at the thought of it happening again, as “it is statistically proven, over and over again, that women outlive men. You have to then face the very real possibility that you could wind up a widow once again – and that’s enough to scare anybody who’s already been down this road!” (Fleet & Harriet, 2009). Beyond this, there might be even more than one person’s emotions at stake. Children are another fact that must be considered. Just as the wife has lost her husband, the children have lost their father, “and no matter how great they may feel about your new love and the prospect of a new life as a new family, on some level, they may see you as trying to ‘replace’ Dad.” (Fleet & Harriet, 2009). Also in the interest of the children, there is the very real economic side of the equation. Fleet and Harriet advise, “You may be receiving financial benefits as a widow that you may lose once you remarry. You must take this very important point into consideration; particularly if you already have children.” (Fleet & Harriet, 2009). These concerns, combined with the continuation of the grieving process and the myriad factors associated with it, provide a formidable gauntlet both emotional and social. Successfully navigating this gauntlet “requires much more than just coping with grief. Widowhood is a complex series of events and conditions involving the real and painful loss of a partner of several decades and the rupture of two intertwined lives.” (Lieberman, 1996). Success in widowhood can be the difference between a successful life and existence as an emotional wreck.

Widowhood carries its horrors with it, but what does not kill strengthens. It can challenge the woman to become more than she had thought possible. If the trials of loss can be passed, a new life awaits the widow, with new horizons, hopes, and dreams. And, perhaps, somewhere beyond, there will be a smiling spirit who, despite all the suffering they entailed, is proud to have catalyzed it.

References

Archer, J. (1999). The nature of grief: The evolution and psychology of reactions to loss. New York: Routeledge.

Bianchi, S. M., & Spain, D. (1986). American women in transition. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Ferguson, T., Kutscher, A. H., & Kutscher, L. G. (1981). The young widow: Conflicts and guidelines. New York: Arno Press.

Fleet, C. B., & Harriet, S. (2009). Widows wear stilettos: A practical and emotional guide for the young widow. Far Hills, NJ: New Horizon Press.

Ginsburg, G. D. (1987). To live again: Rebuilding your life after you’ve become a widow. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Lieberman, M. A. (1996). Doors close, doors open: Widows, grieving, and growing. Morton Lieberman.

Lopata, H. Z. (1996). Current widowhood: Myths & realities. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Moss, M. S., & Moss, S. Z. (1996). Remarriage of widowed persons: A triadic relationship. Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (163-178). Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis.

Owen, M. (1996). A world of widows. London: Zed Books.

Silver, R. C., & Wortman, C. B. (1990). Successful mastery of bereavement and widowhood: A life-course perspective. Successful Aging: Perspectives from the Behavioral Sciences (225-264). New York: The European Science Foundation.

Silverman, P. R. (1986). Widow-to-widow. New York: Springer Publishing Company.

Tyson-Rawson, K. (1996). Relationship and heritage: Manifestations of ongoing attachment following father death. Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (125-143). Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis.