Gender differences in new partnership choices and constraints for older widows and widowers

Abstract

There is an ‘urban myth,’ nevertheless widely held, that in widowhood, women grieve and men replace. Indeed, demographic data indicate that older widowed men are more likely to remarry than older widowed women. This article reports a small-scale study of twenty-five widows and twenty-six widowers over the age of sixty-five in the UK. The study focuses on the choices and constraints in the making of new dyadic relationships and how men and women differ in their approaches to them. What emerges from the interview data is a complex picture of friendship and partnership networks which are age- and gender-specific. For most of the widows, some of whom were living by themselves for the first time, being alone was perceived as a sense of liberation. They were unwilling to relinquish it as a trade-off for companionship with caring responsibilities. For the widowers, loneliness was viewed more as a sense of deprivation after a life of being cared for by a woman in whom they had concentrated their emotional existence.