Written by Rachel Wilson
Grief is a disorientating and deeply painful experience – one that never quite ends so much as becomes something that you adapt to and weave into your life. One of the challenges when recently bereaved and beyond is ‘the reveal’ conversation – choosing when to divulge to someone new in your life that someone you love has died.
More decisions follow – sharing how they died, when, and the effect it’s had on you. One of the hardest times to navigate this is on a date with someone new, particularly when you’re not yet sure where the relationship is going, or whether it will develop into something more at all.
For the non-bereaved, discovering someone you’re dating has been bereaved either recently or a long time ago can be equally hard to navigate – knowing what to say or how to react is tough. The situation is made tougher by the fact that no one person grieves in the same way. Some people will want to openly talk about their grief to establish what they’re going through on a date, while others may acknowledge it but not want to get into the details just yet.
When I was 26, my mother died and I set up The Grief Network – a community for young bereaved people, run by and for grieving twentysomethings. Running meet-ups for other young people like me, I had a supportive space in which to have conversations about dating while bereaved.
From dating app dates to friends of friends, serious relationships to casual flings, I’ve had to navigate the ‘reveal’ on multiple occasions with different people, sometimes in ways that felt completely natural and other times in ways that felt uncomfortable or even painful. But at meet-ups, I found that no two people’s experiences of dating when bereaved were the same and what some found helpful could be others’ worst nightmares. Below are some guiding tips about dating when bereaved.
If you’re grieving:
Trust your gut
Deciding when to date again after a loss can be daunting – but there’s no right or wrong time you should ‘wait’. Try to trust your gut as to whether you feel ready and whether dating is something positive for you (particularly when modern dating is so full of rejection). When going on dates, it’s easy to over-anticipate how you will reveal or not reveal your grief to the person you’re dating, but try to trust your instinct and not put too much pressure on ‘revealing’, or worry too much about how the person will react.
If someone reacts ‘badly’, it’s not a reflection on you
You may have expectations about how someone else is going to react. I’ve heard from other young bereaved people they’ve worried their date will see them as ‘too much’ or ‘not fun enough’ if they talk about their grief, and from others that they’ve been put off someone for not having the reaction they’d hoped for. At the end of the day, you can’t control someone’s reaction or whether they will be supportive, so remember it’s no reflection on you if they don’t respond in the exact way you’d wished.
It gets easier
If you’re very recently bereaved, you’re having to learn how to tell your grief story in real-time. It does get easier over time and you will begin to feel more in control of the conversation – both when you don’t want to talk about it, and signalling when you really do want to talk about it and how important it is to you.
Find a community
There are lots of new modern grief communities – like The Grief Network – that provide a space for you to talk to other young bereaved people either online or in real life. In sharing your experiences with people you know will ‘get it’, you’ll learn how other people deal with how to ‘reveal’ their grief. Articulating with and between people who’ve been through similar things will help you articulate how you feel to people who don’t.
If you’re the non-bereaved:
Listen carefully and take your cues
If someone opens up about their loss to you on a date, recognise that this is incredibly important to them – try to listen with respect and attention, even if you are dating casually. Sometimes people can think talking about grief means that that person is looking for something serious or intimate – which isn’t always the case. Don’t shut the conversation down – allow the person to speak about their grief. You can ask questions too, although take your cues from the grieving person about how long they want to talk about it and what level of detail. If you’re uncomfortable, just remember that their grief is more painful than your discomfort.
Readjust your idea of 'recent'
Grief is so taboo and many people think you should be ‘over’ it within a year or so. But I know from many other young bereaved people, even within four or five years, the death can feel incredibly recent. That means you shouldn’t dismiss a loss as something in someone’s ‘past’ that they are probably ‘over’ or have processed – it will still affect them in the present, to different degrees. Try to respond in a way that allows the grieving person to know you understand their loss is still present and relevant to their everyday life, even if it seems like it happened some time ago.
Acknowledge dates and details
If things start to get serious, make an effort to ‘onboard’ yourself with someone’s grief – making note of important dates and trying to get to know the deceased person through the bereaved. If you become significant to them, it’ll feel strange to them that their partner hasn’t met the person that died, but you can make an effort to ‘get to know’ that person even if they’re not there. The bereaved person will still have a relationship with the person who’s died, so ask them questions about it and see how their memory is woven into their life, just the same way you would get to know how someone’s relationship with their living friends, parents, or even exes, shape their lives
Rachel Wilson is a writer and the founder of The Grief Network, a community by and for young bereaved people. Her first book Losing You(ng): How to Grieve When Your Life is Just Beginning will be released by William Collins in 2022.