In a new book, sex-educator Seema Anand suggests how to separate desire from grief

I used to be extremely happily married to the love of my life, and we have four children together. She unfortunately passed away four years ago, and I now raise the kids by myself (successfully without boasting) and they absolutely come first in every regard.

I can’t, however, allow myself to be with another woman, possibly because I don’t want the kids to go through the potential loss again and possibly because no one measures up to my romanticised version of my late wife. At my age of 50 now, every woman comes with her baggage, just like I come with my own baggage, and I’m just not that attracted to 50-year-old women either.

I still have my sexual urges, and I still don’t know exactly how but I now find myself hooking up with gay men for meaningless oral sex and just feel terrible afterwards. I don’t want a relationship with men either, but sometimes I get confused and lonely and miss the intimacy I had with my late wife. I don’t know if there is even an answer to this, or if this is just the way it will be for me now. Without fail, the gay men I hook up with tell me how many straight/married men they have sex with, and it seems to be a common taboo that no one talks about. I really don’t think that the gay lifestyle or true man-to-man love is my vibe. Younger women are beautiful but make me feel like I’m the dirty old man trying to seduce the younger generation with unwanted attention. Very confused and deflated about this chapter of my life.

Grief is complex. There is no time frame and it rarely looks the way we think it should. Grief is not always about missing someone; it often shows up as guilt. And even more than that, it can become the baseline of your identity, it starts to dictate who you are, how you see yourself and what you believe you are allowed to want.

You lost the person with whom you had built your “ideal” life, someone to share your emotional, practical and sexual self with. And with that, you lost the infrastructure within which you could be yourself without overthinking. Long-term relationships bring the comfort of routine – someone who knows your moods and cues, who shares the responsibility of family, who does not need constant explanation. That kind of comfort is not easily replicated. And because sex was part of that long-term set-up, the absence of it is not just physical; it highlights the loss of familiarity and trust that had taken years to build.

Add to that, your children have become your focus, understandably so. But in giving them a stable home, you have built up an identity of “protector” that does not have room for vulnerability or sexual need.

But desire does not work like that. It does not disappear just because the ideal circumstances no longer exist.

Often after a loss we go through what is called the “pedestal syndrome” – we start to preserve the memory of the person we lost in a very specific form. Your late wife cannot disappoint you any more – no more fights, no bad patches, no upheavals. Your marriage is now frozen in its best version, and that makes any potential new relationship a poor replacement (we look for faults) or even a betrayal, where you end up holding yourself back, not so much out of grief but out of misplaced loyalty because we believe that even wanting someone else would mean letting go of what you had.

But grief and desire can, and often do, coexist.

It is important to understand that sexual desire evolves with time, something that many people don’t understand, and so there is a tendency to stick to what you knew, even though it’s not what you want now. Desire is not “fixed”, it changes as context changes.

Perhaps you were once attracted to younger women and feel you still should be? Or perhaps younger women now represent a phase of life you miss – spontaneity and the absence of responsibility – while maybe older women seem emotionally heavier because they too have lived through difficult life events. There’s no “wrong” here, it’s just your current desires reflecting your current needs.

So instead of shaming yourself, remind yourself that you are not acting recklessly, you are trying to manage real needs in the safest way you currently know. It’s not about orientation but about finding something that works while being emotionally detached without running the risk of triggering guilt about “replacing” your wife. And being told that many straight or married men do the same thing possibly makes it feel less isolating.

What next?

The first thing is to separate your grief from your sexuality. The memory of your wife will always matter, but you can still love her and have needs and also satisfy those needs.

Second, start noticing what you feel before and after these encounters. Did you need physical release here or some kind of emotional validation? Do you enjoy the sensations enough to feel that this is your moment where you can, just for a short while, shed all other responsibility? Or does it leave you feeling that you are stuck in a pattern that is not quite yours, but you do not know what else to do? If you can name what you are really looking for, you can begin to take back some control over how you make it happen.

Finally, speak to someone who specifically deals with grief, adult sexuality and single parenting to help you make sense of your feelings and needs

Excerpted with permission from Speak Easy: A Field Guide to Love, Longing and Intimacy, Seema Anand, Bloomsbury India.