Desire does not wait for grief to finish. It can arrive three months after the funeral, on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, while his shoes are still by the door.
There is a reason for that and it has nothing to do with disrespect. Grief lives in the head. It replays the same week on a loop and you cannot think your way out of it. The body is the one place the loop cannot follow you into. So for a lot of widowed women, wanting sex turns up long before the crying does.
Perhaps it has already happened to you and you have not said it out loud to anyone. Who would you tell? The children? His mother? The friends who are still checking in on you? And what if the guilt gets there first and decides you have no right to any of it, that a good wife would be sitting quietly with her sadness instead of downloading an app?
I have buried two partners twenty years apart, both to cancer, and I wrote an entire memoir about what came afterwards. I still could not tell you where the grief stopped and the wanting started. So I put the question to my guest Amy Gabrielle, author of Widow in the City: what do you do when desire shows up before the mourning does, and how do you stop the guilt taking it off you?
What We Cover:
Why desire often returns before grief does, and what it is doing for you when it arrives.
How three months of dating apps became the only thing that felt like being alive.
Why Feeld felt more honest than Bumble and Tinder for a woman who did not want a boyfriend.
What taking her own photographs, in proper lingerie, changed about how she saw her own body.
Six weeks on OnlyFans, about $10,000, and the reason she walked away from it.
Why grieving a man who was not her husband was how she finally grieved her husband.
How the thought “I should have kept him alive” turns into risks you would not otherwise take.
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Chapters
00:00 Sponsor: OhMiBod
02:10 Losing a Partner and Rediscovering Desire After Loss
08:00 Dating After Loss and Starting Over
13:30 Sexual Desire, Relationships and Life After 50
18:00 What We Want From Relationships Now
22:00 Widow’s Fire: When Grief and Desire Meet
26:00 Sex, Aging and Challenging Expectations
30:00 Shame, Confidence and Accepting Your Body
34:00 Dating, Boundaries and Finding What Feels Right
37:00 Pleasure, Freedom and Owning Your Desire
40:00 Closing Thoughts and Amy Gabrielle’s Book, Widow in the City
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