And is there a possibility of you pairing again?
No, no, never, never, never, never. Never. Maybe very selfish, because I say: 'Yes, I am very good alone. Now to take care of a man…!’, who would always be older than me. But well, I was very young, because I became a widow at 59 years old. But I have never, never, never, never… Ugh, no, no, no, no, no!
The 79-year-old woman who gave this answer to sociologist Juan López Doblas during field work did not know it, but she was engaging in a double tendency. Not only is she a widow, ensuring that she has no intention of having a partner again, but she denies it up to five times when she says it: “never, never, never, never. Never". There it goes a little overboard, the usual thing is three no's.
Doblas has interviewed more than one hundred seniors and seniors from different backgrounds and socioeconomic strata for a report titled Older People in Loneliness. Daily problems and improvement of their quality of life, financed by the Junta de Andalucía, and one of the many topics that were addressed in the conversations, which were very long, was the possibility of pairing again. This allowed us to corroborate something that is socially intuited, that widowers and widowers do not seek the same thing. The data corroborates this: as Maldita.es broke down, in 2020 there were 63% more widowed men who remarried than widowed women who did so. Between divorced men and women the difference is much smaller.
“From the outset, it was a question they did not shy away from. “People like to talk about this,” explains Doblas. And what we have found is an enormous heterogeneity of responses, clearly differentiated by sex. The majority response of women to the question of whether they would pair again is: no, no, no, no, no. Sometimes you have to count how many times they say 'no'. “If their marriage was good, they don't want to risk something worse coming out and if it wasn't good, widowhood has been a liberation for them,” she summarizes.
In men, however, this type of response is more common, also extracted from the study, from an interview with an 83-year-old widowed man:
If you looked like a woman, would you get married?
Man, a woman... the woman comes and cleans, makes food and does things, right? And you put on one of her... you sit there, in the living room, you watch TV, you start talking to her and you're more distracted, right? Otherwise one is not distracted.
That's what you need, right?
That's what I need.
Although it has a relative sociological value, this disparity in expectations can also be seen in the episodes of First Dates that feature older people, in many cases widows. They are looking for someone to go dancing with, they are looking for someone to make them dinner. And in the end the match does not occur. “Older women are always expected to be available, to give up all their time,” says Anna Freixas, author of the book Me, Old Woman. Survival manual for free beings (Captain Swing).
According to Freixas, it is not so much that many women do not want to have a partner, but rather that they are not looking for a traditional partner or one that they have to take care of. “The idea of love is still valid but the price they have to pay is not worth it.” In this, the author also points out, adult children can have a lot to do with it. “They don't usually make it very easy for mothers to pair up, for economic reasons, because a house may be at stake, and because their availability for care decreases.” That and that, in certain environments, a traditional and religious culture that only granted widows the role of appendage to the deceased husband can still weigh.
The weight of the children's opinion was also very present in the study carried out by Juan Dobles. This is what Francisco, a 75-year-old widower who had had a partner again after his wife died, responded:
And, Francisco, you have been a widower for a long time now, haven't you mentioned rebuilding your life with another person?
Well, I had… I have been in a relationship with a person for a long time. We have even lived together for a while. She is older, she is 85 years old, and of course, at these ages, everyone has a way of understanding life, because there are always frictions, there are always... it is very difficult... It is difficult as a young person to live together! Well, as you get older, what is difficult becomes more acute, it becomes much more acute, you know? So we had to leave it. She has eight children, seven here in Seville, and through that coexistence, with so many children, there were also many problems of arguments and things.
…
And did she want it or did you want it?
Man, there came a time when there were many discussions and a lot of this... she told her children, and the children decided: 'it is better that each of you live...'. Simply, to avoid living with personal and family problems, eh? Well, the children decided.
This disparity explains why new relationship models are consolidated among those over 65, the LAT model (Living Apart Together) or, as Doblas prefers to call it, “you in your house and I in mine.” “It's about sharing dances, going for a walk or traveling. We see that at least 6% of widowed and separated women are in this type of relationship that has a very beneficial formula. "No one takes care of anyone, they preserve autonomy and freedom and combat loneliness." “Sometimes these relationships dissolve, without much trauma,” says the sociologist, who already investigated widows in Spain in his thesis, which he delivered in 1999, and has been concerned throughout his career with sociological studies on third and fourth ages, “a very academically neglected group.”
In this time, short in historical terms, it has seen many changes. “To start, the physical aspect. In the first interviews I did, the women arrived still in mourning. For this last study, not one in black anymore. “They came with painted lips and a much younger appearance.” These women, who have opened themselves to new experiences, do not see how a new partner would fit in there. Or, how another 79-year-old woman answered Doblas: “a man for what?, to command me and govern me and tell me: 'this here, this there'?
Anna Freixas has also detected this model of “the widow who flourishes”, women who, upon becoming widowed, begin to enjoy freedom of movement, always conditioned by economic availability, and an intact capacity to “create networks” that is socially more widespread among women. “Women maintain this ability to go out with neighbors, friends, go to neighborhood associations or cultural activities,” she points out, something that, due to the socialization model of men who are now over 65, does not extend equally among them. .
In the United States, there has been talk for some time about the “epidemic of male loneliness,” a term put into circulation by a former leader of the American public health system, Vivek Murthy, and which was popularized by an article in The Boston. Globe in 2017 that claimed that “loneliness kills men more than obesity and tobacco.” Since then, the concept has been widely discussed because it puts the weight of that loneliness on women, who continue to reach old age with fewer economic resources and more obligations.
Quivinia Claveria, 74 years old, became a widow at a very young age, at 38, and now, already retired, she fits that pattern of the active woman, who lives alone but does not feel alone. “I have a lot of family and friends, and my two daughters. “I don’t need any more company,” she says. She had a group of five widowed friends and they have all looked for a partner, but she never wanted to be with anyone again after the death of her husband. “The most important thing was that no man enter this house and spoil the coexistence with my daughters,” she says.
The widowers he knows, on the other hand, starting with his own brother, “all look for a partner or get married within a year, but all of them, all of them. Maybe they need a cook and a lady to wash them, I don't. And I have not had economic dependence either.” That, apart from the legitimate “pride” she feels for having raised her daughters, who were very young when she was widowed, also weighs on her and other women of her generation, a feeling of having left men behind in social changes. “Things are changing, but people my age are still very sexist,” she says.
Also Lupe Martínez Campos, a retired psychologist and layout designer, aged 67, was widowed young, at 52, with two daughters who were barely entering adulthood. “In a very traumatic way and from one day to the next. I lost an exceptional life partner, with a common project and a half-baked business, which I had to move forward and two daughters still defining themselves,” she explains. She never thought about starting with another partner, and she doesn't think about it either now that she is more freed from day-to-day obligations. “I would never have thought this would happen but when this other life suddenly opened up to me I thought: how do I want to live now? I found myself alone and had to learn to live differently. Maybe I could have had a homosexual relationship, found the woman of my life, or another man, but it wasn't like that."
If you look at your family history, remember that your grandfather already had 15 siblings, almost all men, except two women. “Many of them became widows at a very young age and all, in less than a year, returned home. Women, no. It's curious because everything has changed a lot, especially for a part of my generation, those of us who were able to study and experienced sexual liberation, but not much has changed in this regard. I believe that women have a great capacity for resilience, to move forward with our own resources.”
It also detects that even among people supposedly freed from prejudices, the idea can weigh that to couple again would be to exercise a kind of betrayal of the deceased husband. “There is that kind of idea of respect and fidelity that affects women a lot.” He continues to think that living as a couple is a good way to organize one's existence, although not always insurance against loneliness. “Some of my friends who are still married tell me: don't you talk to anyone at home? Us neither. I prefer to make that effort to get along with other people and when I get home, I talk to my cat.”
