A viewer wants to know what she should do when she finds a stack of love letters from the late wife to the widower she’s dating. Give them to him? Throw them away? Something else? This video has your answer.
Hi, it's Wednesday, and that means it's time for another video edition of Widower Wednesday.
I'm Abel Keogh, author of the book Dating a Widower, and today we're answering a question from a reader who asks what to do when you find love letters from the late wife to the widower.
So I'm going to read this email, and again, I share this with the person's permission.
It says, abel, I've been dating a widower for three and a half years, engaged for a little over a year.
I stay at his house, but won't move in or get married until I know I can be comfortable there.
He's recently expressed wanting me to move in and set a wedding date, and he's been doing wonderful lately with getting rid of all the excess stuff and decorations in the house, despite pushback from his adult daughter.
So we can combine two households without being overwhelmed with too much crap.
So, so far, so good.
Good for him.
The letter continues.
I've been going through cupboards and drawers getting rid of stuff that that is old and that we don't need or won't use.
The other day I was cleaning out the phone book drawer and underneath all the books and tables I found my notebook.
Or I found a notebook with many personal, detailed love letters that she had written to him each day while he was away on a long hunting trip.
My question is, is when we find stuff like that, should I just throw it away or should I give it to him?
I feel that if he reads all that, it'll just send him back to missing her, but at the same time, I don't feel right throwing it out and I don't want to give it to his daughter because she's having a hard enough time with everything and is keeping most of the stuff we are getting rid of because she can't part with it.
I'm not sure what to do in good conscious and I wonder what others in this situation have done when they find things like that when we are going through Christmas stuff.
I did find a box of their personal ornaments from when they got married and such, and he threw them all away to my surprise.
Thank you for your consideration.
I value your input on this question.
So a great question.
And again, it's something I think most people who at least are serious about living with a widower when they're going through stuff you're always going to.
And this is why, again, I caution about going through a widower's house without him there or having you doing it by yourself because you're bound to find things like this.
I can't think of a time where someone hasn't gone through the house and found something that was kind of private or intimate or something that was very personal anyway to their relationship.
Not always fun to find.
So I guess, first of all, I hope that the widower is okay with you going through and cleaning things up.
You said he was.
But again, generally my advice is to let the widower go through and do it.
Or if you want to stand there holding a trash bag, letting him do it, because again, there may be things he wants to keep, maybe things he's not happy throwing away or that he doesn't want to get rid of.
And the last thing you really want in a relationship is to find out that you've disposed of something or thrown something away that was very meaningful to him or his kids or something like that.
So proceed with caution.
That's kind of my first piece of advice here.
But to your question, what do you do when you find something like love letters?
What do you do with that?
Do you throw it away?
Do you give it to the widower?
And you have to give it to the widower.
You can't throw it away.
You do not dispose of it.
There's a reason that you said in good conscious you don't feel good about throwing it away.
Well, there's a reason you don't feel good about it.
It's because you shouldn't do it.
So you got to trust your gut there.
But it's wrong to actually just throw something like, especially something that personal away.
Now, I know that the concern is, will I give these to the widower?
Is that going to set him back?
Is that going to cause a cry fest or whatever it is? You got to understand that you can't control how the widower is going to react to these letters, but it is a good opportunity to see where he's at in the grieving process and moving on.
And I would say it's okay.
Like, you give him these letters, maybe he has an emotional reaction to them, maybe something that personal, you would have an emotional reaction to that kind of stuff.
But the question isn't whether he has what kind of emotional reaction he has.
The question is it just a temporary emotional reaction or is it something that sends him into a tailspin?
Because, again, something that personal might bring up a lot of memories.
Maybe it causes them just to, maybe he wants to go read them, or maybe it causes a tear or two.
This isn't personal.
You have found something and given him something quite personal as it relates to his late wife.
But in my opinion, it's not his necessarily initial reaction that's important.
It is.
How fast can he rebound from that?
Now, if giving him those letters sends him into a tailspin and he's moody for days and days after or something, or sad for days after, that's kind of a red flag that maybe he's not ready, emotionally ready to move on.
But if he can rebound from it quick and maybe in a matter of minutes or hours or at least less than a day, that he's back to his normal self, don't worry about it.
It just is what it is.
So as long as he can pull himself out of it quickly and things get back to normal, that's a good sign that he's dealing with his grief well and moving forward and ready to open his heart, that's when he goes into that kind of tailspin.
If something like that causes him to go into a tailspin, that's more of a red flag.
So another concern might be, well, what is he going to do with these letters?
Is he going to keep them?
Is he going to give them away?
And if he chooses to, in this case, give them to his daughter, is he going to throw them away?
Again, it's up to the widower if he wants to keep these love letters.
I personally don't have a problem with it.
As I say in my book, dating a widower, he's fine.
If he wants to have a couple of boxes of stuff that it's out in the garage or an attic or the basement or somewhere, somewhere that's stored out of sight, out of mind.
If he wants to add those to the box that he has, I personally don't have a problem with it.
If he wants to give them to his daughter, I don't have a problem with it.
If he wants to throw them away and dispose of them, I don't have a problem with that either.
But what I don't want him to do is put them somewhere, like in a drawer where he's just going to access them all the time or read through them and keep going there.
That's not a healthy or in my way.
If he's in a serious relationship, that's not a healthy way to deal with them.
But if he wants to put him, again, put him in a box in the closet or something like that, where he's kind of had these things, that's fine.
Again, wants to give them to the daughter, don't have a problem with that.
But again, it's what is his reaction to what does he want to do with the letters?
As long as he's not like putting them on the coffee table or maybe on his desk where he can read them all the time, that to me would be a red flag.
But if he wants to again put them in a box, give them to his daughter, even throw them away, it's up to him.
Again, I think you can learn a lot by watching what he does with the letters as opposed and his reaction to them.
But again, it's not your place to dispose of these letters.
You need to give them to the widower because I guarantee if you dispose of them and he finds out you disposed of them, that is going to come back and bite you in the butt extremely hard.
And really, that's the last thing you want.
Again, relationships are built on trust and I hope that if he's trusting you enough to go through his house and clean things up, he's trusting you enough that if you find something that's personal and that's important to him, that you would give it to him and let him decide what to do with it. Thoughts?
Comments?
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And if you have like a personal issue like this that you want to discuss, I have coaching sessions.
There's a link down in the description where you can schedule a coaching session with me. I'm Abel Keogh, author of the book Dating a Widower, and I'll see you next Wednesday.