Widowed and young: What’s it like to get back on the dating scene when you’ve lost your spouse?
Say the word “widow”, and Sophie Ransom isn’t the kind of person who springs to mind. For a start, she’s young – just 26 years old. The project manager from Cambridge is also mother to a five-month-old daughter, Poppy, having been 17 weeks’ pregnant when her husband, Paul, died suddenly in an accident last May. The couple had been married for just six months.
“We were still in newlywedded bliss, so excited for what was to come – we were the happiest we’d ever been,” she tells me.
It’s one of the most nightmarish scenarios many of us could imagine – unexpectedly losing our life partner with a baby on the way. So much so, that young widows face unique challenges and stigmatisation, according to Sophie.
“What I find really hard is that I can’t relate to most other widows – they tend to be older people,” she says. “It makes me feel like a fraud because we were only married for six months (although we were together for seven years). I can’t relate to people who’ve been married for
