After your partner dies, there’s many things your friends and family worry about as they watch you attempt to navigate your way through grief.  

At first, many of the check-in questions revolve around the basics of survival, and anyone who has ever lost someone fields questions like these every week:

Have you eaten?  

Are you sleeping okay?

Do you need a glass of water?

As time moves on and as healing begins to settle in, the questions naturally begin to evolve, morph, and match the shape of your new life.  People may ask how therapy is going.  If you’ve settled back into work.  What plans, if any, do you have for the future:  are you moving?  Are you traveling?  Going to write a book?   Start a foundation? 

Once again, these questions are pretty standard.  

Whether you’ve lost a parent, a partner, a sibling, or a friend, you ready yourself with prepackaged answers for people’s queries. 

The questions we are asked as we grieve, though well meaning, sometimes add an extra layer of exhaustion onto what is already an exhausting process  because each question comes with the implication that there are things you are “supposed” to either be doing or things you should start doing.  

Now obviously things like eating food or getting sleep are nonnegotiables; even in my heaviest moments of early grief, I could understand that even though I didn’t want to eat, and though I may not have in fact eaten that day…the person who was asking genuinely had my best interest at heart when asked.

No matter who you’ve lost, it’s just part and parcel of grieving: people ask you things.  

But as time marched forward and brought me with it, and after his first year death anniversary passed by, there was one question that began to pop up more and more.  It’s an unassuming one that is unique to partner loss, and  one that many of us spend too much time living under the shadow of:

It’s the question of whether we are ready to start dating or, to be more specific, if we are ready to go out and find love again.  

I’ve been asked this question by friends and family, and I’ve been asked it by men who want to take me out.  

The language of “readiness” is prevalent within the grief community as well.  

I’m about five years out from my loss, and during this past half decade,  I’ve watched countless grievers enter into new romantic relationships at various moments in their journey.  Many of them, when announcing their engagement or marriage,  end up mentioning the time or moment where they knew they were “ready” for the next person. 

And while I can understand the spirit behind the question, “are you ready to date?” I’m really beginning to wonder whether the implications behind it do more harm than good.  

It comes with the assumption that dating is a step someone must take as they move through their  healing; like it’s on the same checklist that drinking water or eating food are. The question of whether someone is ready to date or not adds, in my experience, a completely superfluous expectation onto the already loaded plate of someone as they grieve. 

The question also assumes that dating after loss, like other activities, will be the same as it was before.  Some things, like going to the gym or traveling, feel exactly like they did before he died.  

Other things, like dating, do not.  Not even close.  

I can emphatically say that dating after loss is a completely different ballgame.  That makes sense, as we are completely different people. 

And if I’m being  honest: I really have no idea what I’m meant to be doing or how people do it.  

But I do know that if a griever ends up in a new romantic relationship, it has nothing to do with the fact that they “readied” themselves in some way that myself or others have not.

And to be even more honest, it isn’t so much my own readiness that I have found lacking as much as the readiness of others:  It seems that many people know how to date and enjoy the fruits that grief has brought into my life, but when it comes to tending to the roots of those blessings…they simply don’t know how or what to do.  I end up feeling like I have to show someone flowers I’ve cut from the garden of my life, rather than the actual garden itself.  

And I’ll never be ready for a relationship like that; not after what I had with him. 

With John, I was witnessed.  I was known. And I was loved in light of my past and the wounds I carried into our relationship.  

Now that he’s dead, I see that so many people only know how to love people in spite of those things.  

And, no matter how much time goes by, even if that means there is not another “til death do us part” kind of love in the years I have left, I’ll never be ready to be loved in a way that feels less true or less good than the way he loved me when he was still here.