Becoming a young widow can entail multiple challenges. It is harder to find peers, since I have a young daughter and there is a social stigma to cope with.
When one thinks of a widow, the image that comes to mind is someone who is old. One imagines a woman with gray hair dressed in black whose husband has likely died of cancer or a heart ailment following a long marriage, the children grown, the property paid off. However, I am a twenty four year old widow and my husband didn’t die by such ailments but by a tragic death...He was murdered.
While one's youth can make it easier to start to rebuild one's life again, being a young widow, that I am, is complicated by the fact that I rarely have a peer group of other widows for support, and I have school age child to support, and there is a stigma attached to being widowed in the singles community.
While people don't necessarily, and perhaps unfairly, expect an older widow to remarry or have intimate relationships anymore, people often expect a young widow, like myself, to bounce back into the dating scene quickly. This can be a mistake. It is wrong in some point. I should take all the time I needs to feel the emotions of my loss and not rebound into another relationship from fear, anxiety, loneliness or the desire to obtain a father for my daughter.
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