Am I Ready to Date Again?

"How do I know when I'm over my wife's death and ready to date again?" was the question from the 70-something man at my recent "Dating in Midlife" seminar. My answer: "You'll know when you're ready because it won't feel strange to think about being emotionally intimate with someone new. And you will have completed all 5 stages of the grieving process."

Those are the stages outlined by Elizabeth Kubler Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, written to help terminally ill patients and their loved ones cope emotionally with their prognosis (more info on the stages is at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model). Over the ensuing 40+ years, the book has been used by therapists and grief counselors worldwide to help people move on after widowhood, divorce, relationship breakup, and even job layoff. Yet many grieving individuals are unaware of the 5 stages and/or have skipped one or more. Their head says they're over the loss, but their heart is still healing. 

As anyone who's gone through a heartbreak can attest, the heart takes much longer to heal than the head does. I know...because I've experienced the struggle of trying to stop thinking about a man I still loved even though I broke up with him. The head knew he wasn't right for me, but the heart wanted to hold on. I've also seen this with widowed friends. Two years after her husband's death from cancer, unstoppable tears are still triggered on his birthday or their anniversary. Nine years after his wife's sudden death, he still has everything in the house just as it was the day she died.

The elderly man at my seminar (just 9 months after the loss of his wife of 44 years) was possibly ready to meet some new people and date casually, but he probably wasn't yet ready to pledge his heart and soul to another woman. As dating coach Roy Biancanala of www.coachingwithroy.com says, a person is ready for commitment when he's "not attached to someone else in any emotional, physical, legal, or logistical way." And, according to Biancanala, there are 3 signs a person is definitely not ready to commit:
1. He is not yet officially divorced.
2. He was divorced or widowed (or experienced a major breakup of a long-term relationship) less than a year ago.
3. He is still bitter, angry, or in drama with an ex-partner.

How about you? Are you struggling to finish grieving a relationship loss? Or are you truly ready to move forward and start fresh with someone new? If you think you might benefit from help from a grief counselor, I can refer you to one. Only when we clear out the past are we able we make way for the new.