When I was growing up, death was something I heard about. It wasn’t something that touched me in any personal way. But the older I got,the more I had personal experiences with death. My brother died, my mum died, my sister died, friends died and friends of friends died. Each of their deaths left a vacuum.
But this post is not about the dead, it is about the living and how a particular gender find it easier to move on either after they lose their spouse in death. They also seem to find it easier to start having sex with someone else after a break up.
Annecdotal evidence abounds as to how quickly men move on at the end of relationships. Some have attributed this to men’s ability to not be as deeply emotional as women. But if this were the case would we not have more women with higher levels of loneliness and force more women to seek relationships faster.
You may say societal expectations force women to stay off relationships. But what is being discussed in this post is not that women are forced to remain single for longer after their relationships end but that more women than men choose to and are able to remain single than men. That is, they completely stay off relationships not even having sex by the side.
So again anecdotal evidence points to the fact that women find it easier remaining alone after the death of their spouses or a breakup or disengagement than men do. You would sooner find a widow who has not had sex for 10 years than you would find a widower. Just recently there was a story on social media about a man who remarried merely four months after his wife died. Most men would barely wait a year before remarrying.
We are left pondering these question: Why is it that women find it easier to completely abstain from or lose interests in sex than men? Why are they less likely to hook up because they are lonely? Is there some deeper explanation to this?
My friend keyed in with some religious angle. Quoting God in the Bible Book of Genesis, he postulated that the Holy Writing said, “It is not good for the man to continue by himself.” But did not say the same about the woman. He therefore came to the conclusion that God knew because created men that with way e designed them, loneliness would be a bigger problem for men than for women.
His explanation seemed to agree with findings that women merely talked more about loneliness and not necessarily felt more lonely. If this is true, it means that there is something deeper that drives men into initiating relationships, it is not just a social construct. Also, this study shows that there is an actual relationship between loneliness and age – the older people get the lonelier they becomes and that there is significant disparity leading to lonelier older men than lonelier older women
So, when a man marries quickly should we really frown or make them feel bad for not spending enough time mourning their loss? Could this be a coping mechanism? Should we in fact judge anyone that chooses to remarry because they are lonely? The answers are obvious. However, the more important point that has been made is that there just may be biological reasons why men marry quicker after they end a relationship than women do.