Love After Loss: How to Find Love Again After Death of a Spouse

The phrase "'til death do us part" is usually part of a couple's wedding vows. Sometimes, death comes earlier than expected. A spouse dying prematurely can be soul-crushing and shift one's perspective on love. If you happen to be a widow, you may be wondering how to find love again. While it may be a difficult and complicated road, it is possible.

Unfortunately, there are 258 million widows around the world who have experienced the death of a partner according to the United Nations. The average age of a widow is 59 years old. Cocoa Washington, Dana Frost and Tiffany Rampey are living examples and share their experiences as widows who found love again.

Moving Through the Grief

After your partner dies, grieving is a significant step in finding love again. Without finding a healthy outlet for the grief, it can be difficult to open yourself up to dating as a widow. Every widow's grieving process is different, but a common denominator is how palpable the pain is.

Dana Frost, a cancer survivor who lost her late husband, Brad Frost, to cancer in 2017 initially avoided the grief. The former couple met as seniors in college and were together for about 14 years. "I avoided life for a long time [and] people. Anything that kind of reminded me of my life with Brad felt difficult," Frost says. She adds that she moved from Detroit to Traverse City after Brad's passing to help manage the grief. " It just felt too hard to kind of exist in the life that we built without him."

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Frost eventually transmuted some of the pain that came from losing Brad into creating the Forced Joy Project, where she helps people find joy in the midst of grief.

Tiffany Rampey had a similar experience with trying to feel her way through the fog after her husband Michael Rampey suddenly died of acute pancreatitis in May of 2020. "The first couple years of grieving the loss of your spouse are a complete blur," Rampey says. "It feels like walking around your life with a heavy, heavy, heavy backpack on," she adds.

Accepting the help of others and learning to ask for help when she needed it helped her healing process. After being together for 16 years, married for 14 and having two children, Rampey also had to go through a journey of self-discovery. This comprised re-learning who she was outside of her partnership and navigating single motherhood. While on that journey, Rampey discovered her love for travel and now helps other widows travel more for less.

Coca Washington, a registered nurse in Detroit Michigan lost her late husband Dwayne to suicide in April of 2005. After going missing for over a month, his body was found in the water a day after Mother's Day. They had been together for a total of five years and married for three. Her grieving process was dark, harrowing and intense, but the sun would eventually shine again.

"To be outside and if the sun was shining, it made me sick," Washington says. "So I spent a lot of time in bed [on] medication, not eating, not sleeping. I stayed medicated for a long time. And that's pretty much how the grieving went." Washington shared that she was angry and couldn't function. Survivor support groups and talking about her experience within those safe spaces was pivotal to her healing.

How to Find Love Again After Your Spouse Dies

Once you've done some grieving, you may feel ready to pursue a new relationship or at least entertain the thought of it. Truthfully, there is no perfect formula for finding love after loss. The most important pieces are doing the healing work, putting yourself out there and allowing magic to do the rest. Dating apps and being open to people in your network are ways to meet potential partners.

Using Dating Apps

Rampey says having a partner and being in love was something that was important to her after her late husband died. After unexpectedly connecting with someone at a wedding, she realized she was capable of falling in love after the death of a spouse. "I just sort of opened up my mind to the fact that this is possible again. And that was not something long-standing, but it made me realize that I was capable of extending compassion for another man again in my life," she says.

The travel expert began to put herself out there and date until she eventually met her current husband on Hinge. The travel expert began dating her current spouse just over a year after Michael died. Three years later, they got married and blended families.

Being Open to People in Your Network

Similar to Rampey, Frost knew even in the midst of her grief that she wanted to do life with someone again because of the extraordinary love she shared with Brad. "...Just loving Brad, being married to Brad, I knew how powerful love could be. I knew how impactful it could be to truly let a person into your life, to share your world with somebody," she says. "So I knew even after he died I would be open to that possibility just because it was so magical being in love with Brad, and I didn't wanna go the rest of my life without feeling that again. And I wanted to be open to that possibility."

Frost eventually started dating again about two and a half years after Brad's passing. She's been with her current boyfriend, Nate, for four years. In terms of how they met, Nate was a long-time acquaintance and he also knew of Brad.

What if you're too hurt to imagine dating after being widowed? This was the case for Washington, but love found her. About eight months after Dwayne passed, she began dating her current husband, Damon. Washington and Damon were co-workers and he extended sympathies and kindness after Dwayne died. Early on, Damon also made his intentions to marry Washington clear but it took her some time to get on board.

It's critical to remember that although there are social rules about the average time to date after the death of a spouse, those societal rules shouldn't hold you hostage. Everyone's timeline is different and what's most important is that you're ready to move forward.

Dealing With Fears and Complex Feelings

While finding new love is possible, it may come with its own set of challenges and complex emotions. "It's okay and it's normal to hold multiple, sometimes contradicting, feelings at once because you probably do love and miss your late spouse, but you also can love somebody again," Frost says. "And you can find joy and you can also feel grief."

Something Frost battled with while dating was the fear of her new partner dying. Frost says this fear initially kept her from opening up and letting someone new in. Even after meeting a new partner, this fear still lurks in the shadows.

In terms of how she pushed past the fear, it was about looking at her life from the finish line. "For me, it's just imagining the end of my life whenever that is," she says. "Hopefully, I'm old and gray, and I have decades left to go, but I would not wanna get to the end and be like, oh, I was too afraid to let somebody else in. I was too afraid to experience love again."

She continues, "And so as scary as it is to open up to share my life, to deal with judgment whether for myself, from other people, at the end of the day, I wanna know that I lived this big, bold, maybe messy life, and that's because I've been through so much loss already and faced mortality in so many different ways that I knew it was important even if it felt scary, even if I didn't know what I was doing. Even if there was judgment, it still felt important to me."

Another complex feeling that may surface when you enter a new relationship is the feeling that you're cheating on your late partner. Both Rampey and Washington have admitted to feeling this way. Washington says those feelings have only recently subsided despite her being with her current partner for over a decade. The RN was also afraid to make her relationship with Damon official; it took her over a decade to walk down the aisle again. They got engaged in 2008 but didn't get married until 2019. "I was scared. Every time I [got] ready to try to plan a wedding, I could not do it. Every time I tried to plan a wedding, I would get so anxious. I couldn't do it," she says.

Damon eventually got tired of waiting and his restlessness was the push Washington needed to move forward. The couple ended up having a courthouse wedding with just the two of them. "It's the best decision that I made. Now I feel like something was lifted off of my shoulders because I can live again. I feel like I can live and be free," Washington says.

Keeping Your Late Partner's Memory Alive

One of the hardest things about falling in love after the death of a spouse may be feeling like you're replacing your partner. It can feel as though their memory is fading as the love with your new partner deepens. Remember that it doesn't have to be this way; it's possible for a deep new love for a new partner and a potent legacy of your late partner to coexist.

For instance, Frost keeps Brad's memory alive through storytelling with her current partner Nate. This isn't something she was always able to do in previous relationships, she says. "I think it's more of just incorporating him into part of our life and telling stories, and he [Nate] makes space for that and allows me to do that," she says. "I know that's different for every relationship of how much and how you bring your late spouse into your life and keep their memory alive."

Rampey also keeps Michael's legacy alive through storytelling, especially so her kids find keepsakes of their father in mundane musings. Like Frost's partner, Rampey's husband is also supportive of keeping her late husband's legacy through storytelling.

Washington has chosen to take a different approach, however. While she used to visit Dwayne's gravesite with her current husband, she now goes alone. Although Damon never complained, Washington also made the decision to remove her late husband's pictures from her home and place them in her mother's house. "At some point, I started feeling like that's not fair. It's not fair for him to have to do that," she says. "It was sweet but I take that time on my own now, and I don't talk about him as much as I used to."