Names have been changed in this story to protect the privacy of the interviewees.



While decorating the Christmas tree, Lara found a place for the special ornament she made for her family this year—a red plush picture frame decorated with little hearts and snowflakes. Displayed inside it was a photograph of a woman, a woman who is not her.

The woman has big eyes, a strong chin and, as Lara describes, a “million-dollar smile.” Lara knows her face well—there are images of her throughout the house she shares with her husband, Dave, and their four kids. Photographs placed in the rooms of the three oldest children. Snapshots tucked in binders on a bookcase in her bedroom. A giant portrait showcased in the den.

Though she never met her, Lara lives with the presence of this woman, Charlotte, who died by suicide in 2011. And she’s been trying to, as she explains, “make room” for her ever since she fell in love with Dave, the husband that Charlotte left behind.

As both the new wife and the new mother to the children the couple had together, Lara, 30, takes the family to Charlotte’s grave every month, makes sure there’s a cake on her birthday and includes her in holiday traditions, such as tree decorating. She does it for the kids, mostly, but also for herself.

“As much as it can hurt me, being allowed to participate in the grieving process to an extent by facilitating these opportunities allows me to not be ignored,” she says. “Otherwise, when grieving happens, I don’t exist.”

Lara shares her thoughts and frustrations in an online support group for women like her—the wives and girlfriends of widowers, or WOWs and GOWs as they call themselves. In this safe, private community, they’ve forged a unique sisterhood, aware that their chosen role can be a difficult one for the outside world to comprehend.

These are women who know what it’s like to experience profound love with a man who may also—maybe even always—love another woman. Women who are swimming in a massive gray area with very few resources to guide them. Women immersed in a world of grief that is not their own. Women who are constantly told to grin and bear it.

“It’s so conflicting, it makes my head spin,” says Rachel, a 42-year-old professional who has been dating a widower for three years.

As a human, you want to show compassion and sensitivity, she explains. But as a romantic partner, you don’t want to be making out on the couch while gazing at an urn filled with another woman’s ashes—an object that has been the source of many arguments in their relationship, and even a brief breakup.

“You get to a point where you say, ‘I don’t want to hear anymore,’” she shares. “I can’t listen anymore. I don’t want to know what her favorite color was. I don’t want to know what her favorite perfume was.’ I don’t want to live in the shadow of someone else.”

Members of the group spoke with Upvoted on basis of anonymity. In the community, made of women mostly in their 30s through 60s, they share stories with candor and ease. One woman was dating a man who kept his first wife’s clothing on a mannequin in the front entry of his home. Another woman married a widower who insisted on trying to relive his favorite memories with his late wife by taking her to the same restaurants they loved, dancing with her at the same nightspots and planning the same beach vacations. (She didn’t discover the eerie parallels until she was deep into the relationship.) Another new wife revealed that her widower husband sobbed through their entire wedding night, wrought with guilt that he was betraying the woman he spoke those same vows to first.

The WOWs and GOWs face many of the same complexities: unaccepting in-laws, social media drama, and a constant feeling that they’re being measured against the deified first wife (some call it the Rebecca Syndrome, after the Daphne du Maurier novel of that name). “It’s so easy for people to judge our situations without knowing our whole story,” Lara says. “You have people who are livid that you can be confused or hurt by how a person chooses to grieve. And then you’re the witch from the fairytales. You’re the evil stepmother. You’re the bad person.”

Men and women grieve differently. Psychiatrists from the San Diego Widowhood Project studied surveys from widows and widowers. They found that 25 months after the spouse’s death, 61 percent of men were either remarried or involved in a new romance, compared to only 19 percent of women.

Abel Keogh, author of Life with a Widower: Overcoming Unique Challenges and Creating a Fulfilling Relationship, along with other widowhood-focused guidebooks, explains that when a spouse dies, women are much more likely to allow themselves to fully dive into the depths of pain before putting the pieces of their lives back together—and even consider the idea of dating again.

Men, on the other hand, try to power through, or skip, this critical grieving process.

“They think their lives are broken and they have this need to go out and fix it,” Keogh says of the recent widowers he’s met or heard stories about. “In their minds, fixing it means starting to date again. You’ll see widowers who date months or even weeks after their wife dies. It’s like they go out there and say, ‘Oh, you’re pretty. Can you fix my life?’ They end up getting into relationships they aren’t ready for.”

Keogh shares this insight not just from talking to thousands of women over email and through the private Facebook group he runs, Dating a Widower, but also from personal experience. He was 26 when his first wife took her own life while she was seven months pregnant. “I started dating five months after she died,” Keogh says. “I felt awful for having this feeling that I needed to date, but it turns out this feeling is pretty normal.”

“You’ll see widowers who date months or even weeks after their wife dies. It’s like they go out there and say, ‘Oh, you’re pretty. Can you fix my life?’ They end up getting into relationships they aren’t ready for.” Author Abel Keogh

Lara met Dave online through a networking site. His profile listed him as widower and a father, but Lara was looking for friendship and nothing more—she’d been divorced for a couple of years and had recently been through a brutal breakup. When they first met, Dave had been widowed for less than a year, but he had a strikingly positive outlook, she says.

“He commented that what he had been through had shaped him,” Lara explains. “It gave him a greater appreciation for people, for relationships, for life in general.”

“We just clicked,” she adds. “It felt like we were long lost friends.”

After a few months, their friendship evolved into a romance. She met Dave’s three children, who were all under 7, and became close to them very quickly. She soon started feeling very protective of them. “There seemed to be this need by everyone around them to constantly check in and ask, ‘Are you still sad? Are you still mourning? Oh, that’s awful.’ And this would be on days when they were happy and doing great. It was almost like people were not okay with them moving forward in life and finding joy.”

Early on in the relationship, Lara felt like she was walking on eggshells. She didn’t want to say anything or do anything that would add more pain or strife to this family. But soon, she noticed herself getting annoyed at certain things.

“If I’m on a date and I bring up my ex, saying he loved this particular type of food or something—that’s not appropriate! That’s not okay. But these are things that are allowed with widowers,” Lara says. “Once, I was like, ‘Hey, can I talk about my ex now?’ I just said that to be ironic. And he said, ‘Sure.’ I felt like I was losing my mind.”

As she became more invested in the relationship, she teetered between feeling guilty for taking on a role that was intended for somebody else, and feeling completely invisible. “Mother’s Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving—every single month, there was some huge deal that would drag on for days and days and days that the late wife became the focus of,” she says. “It was hard not to be bitter.”

One day, she sat on her bed and broke down in tears. She felt she may have gotten herself in too deep with Dave, and the weight of it all was too much.

“I told him I wasn’t sure if I could do this,” she says. “I didn’t feel I was unselfish enough. I didn’t feel that I was emotionally strong or capable enough. I was worried that I would make unfair demands. I was scared of becoming the stereotype.”

At that moment, Dave just listened.

“He was just sitting there, stroking my hair, saying, ‘You are such a kind person and I’m so grateful for you because you’ve tried. You’ve tried so hard, and I hope you know that I love you and would do anything for you.’ That was comforting.”

They got married, and shortly after their honeymoon, Lara discovered she was pregnant. After she had the baby, she stepped into a web of other issues. Two years after Charlotte’s death, Lara was still living out of suitcases at Dave’s house. The closet and dresser drawers in the bedroom were filled with Charlotte’s clothes, and in-laws and family friends told her she was being “too demanding” for asking him to put them away.

“There was no space for me there,” she says. “Everyone found my concerns offensive. I thought I was being a bad person all the time. The loneliness was overwhelming.”

Depressed and in the throes of new motherhood, she started looking online for help and resources, but couldn’t find anything she really identified with. Many widowhood blogs suggest that any relationship post-bereavement will be one of “three hearts”—the third heart being the deceased spouse.

Lara believes that philosophy takes things too far.

“While it’s okay to miss and love the deceased, talking about him or her as a part of the current relationship is unfair,” she says. She compares it to a divorcee pining for an ex-lover while in a new relationship.

She finally found a few private Facebook groups and discovered that other girlfriends and wives of widowers had similar concerns. (Anecdotally, men in crisis don’t seek community as often as women, so support groups for boyfriends or husbands of widows are rare, if they exist at all.)

Many discussions centered on what do about objects that belonged to or were associated with the late wife. Rachel mentioned that one time, her boyfriend gave her a bottle of perfume, Clinique Happy. She later found a half-used bottle of the same fragrance under the sink. “It was like, ‘Oh, gosh. Is he trying to replicate her? Is he trying make me into her?’” she says. “It quickly went in the trash.”

Another topic that’s often discussed is how to deal with death in a digital age. Lara says social media has made grieving more twisted in recent years, especially when friends and family members of the widower look to him to keep his late wife’s memory alive. On days such as the late wife’s birthday or the anniversary of her death, when people tag him on Facebook in every post about how amazing she was, she says the online love fest “gets rubbed in our faces.”

Several months into their relationship, Rachel was annoyed that her boyfriend still maintained his late wife’s Facebook page. “He would publicly profess love for her on her page and then the next day, he’d post a picture of another woman—me,” she says. “That felt very strange.”

She eventually asked him to have her page “memorialized,” so nobody could administrate it. To her, that was a big step.

For all the complexities in her relationship, Rachel says she does see marriage in their future. Though first, she says, her boyfriend needs to “do the work” and move on from his past. She believes he’s trying.

“I want to know I’m number one in the present,” she says. “I need to know that his allegiance is to me rather than to honoring her memory.”

Author Abel Keogh says it’s up to the new wives and girlfriends to set their own boundaries on what is acceptable behavior—and every relationship will look different. The important thing is that there’s progress being made.

“It can be something like, ‘Hey, today he took down some photographs, and next week, maybe her voice is off the answering machine,’” he says.

It takes time. After being married to his current wife for 12 years, Keogh says his late wife will always have a special place in his heart, but “99.99 percent of my time and attention and focus” is on his present life and family.

In a Reddit discussion, widows and widowers shared what it was like to enter into a new relationship after a spouse dies. Redditor Slimpikin, who lost his wife to cancer, wrote that it can be hard for the new woman because the feelings attached to the first wife are usually all positive, in contrast to “the usual and customary practice of bitching about an ex.” But he’s in a great relationship now, writing that “a lot of the emotions are similar, things like devotion, trust, consideration, and attraction.”

“It’s a heartbreaking situation to be married to someone who continually strives to honor another woman and another life.”

Sometimes, for WOWs and GOWs, it will feel like a two-steps-forward, one-step-back process. After three years, Rachel’s boyfriend recently took the urn out of the house and laid it to rest at a cemetery. She felt a sense of gratitude and relief, but questions remain.

“Now it’s like, okay, is he going to be at the cemetery all the time? Where is his head really? How fully present is he really? Are there things that remind him of her? When he’s staring into space, is he wishing she were here? I’m not a jealous person, but there are things said and done that led my mind to go there,” Rachel explains.

And then there are some situations that end unresolved. Erin, who married a widower in 2009, is now a widow herself. Her husband passed away last month after suffering from kidney failure, heart issues, liver disease and, ultimately, a heart attack at their home.

“Talking to me one minute, and dead the next,” she says.

In the support group, Erin simply wrote the words, “He’s gone.”

He was buried next to his first wife, as was his wish. In his obituary, Erin was listed as the “second wife”—which was his wish as well. Reflecting back on her marriage, she says she always felt like she was living in adultery as the “other woman.”

“It’s a heartbreaking situation to be married to someone who continually strives to honor another woman and another life,” she says. “And worse when they die and you know you never had their heart. You never get married thinking, ‘Oh great, one day I get to go bury him next to another woman. Won’t that be nice?’”

For those in the group, there will always be more questions and gray areas, but they also talk about why they stay, what makes it worth it. “I love my husband and kids,” Lara says without hesitation. “I can’t imagine not being his wife. I can’t imagine not being their mom. I can’t picture my life without them. They are my joy, they are my everything and I would do anything for them.”

So members of the group keep supporting each other, celebrating each other’s everyday victories—perhaps it’s making peace with certain relatives or donating another bag of clothing to Goodwill.

For a while after she was married, Lara felt she couldn’t touch anything in the house as it was all too sacred. All of the curtains and throw pillows were handmade by Charlotte. When Lara would talk to Dave about changing things up, he kept brushing off the idea, saying he had to think about it.

But they ended up moving to a new house and Dave finally told Lara to decorate it however she wanted.

“He said, ‘This is your space now,’” she says. “That was very cathartic for me.”

Recently, Lara received photographs from their wedding three years ago. She says it’s taken her way too long to get the prints, but now that she has them, she can’t wait to frame them and hang them on the wall.

It will be another mark of her place in the family.