Ever heard of "widows fire"? Me neither until last weekend. What is it?
Widow's fire is a sudden, intense surge of sexual desire, physical longing, or need for intimacy that many people experience after losing a spouse or partner.
I was shocked. How common is widow's fire?
Roughly 63% of widowed individuals experience widow's fire—a sudden and intense surge in sexual desire...
Sixty-three percent?!?! Get the fuck out of town.
First, note the sources: NOT the DSM (not listed), NOT even the Wikipedia entry (there is none). "Widows Handbook", a support group (it's not the only one), and Ossiana Tepfenhart, a woman, on Medium.com, which is "a home for human stories and ideas. Here, anyone can share knowledge and wisdom with the world..." Charming. Widow's fire is not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a real thing.
But clinicians and psychologists apparently see it frequently:
Widow's fire is recognized in psychological and sociological literature primarily as a clinical, qualitative, and community-observed phenomenon rather than an official diagnostic disorder in the DSM-5.
Next, note the possessive noun: "widow's", female, not widower's, male:
...sexuality is a core piece of women’s identity, and sexual bereavement may compel widows to reconstruct their sexual identities. This existential phenomenological study seeks to illuminate the sexual loss and coping of young widows aged 45 and under. Qualitative findings from 21 women indicated three findings: a) young widows felt profound loss regarding their sexual relationships, leading to deep physical loneliness and an initial disinterest in sex; b) some subsequently experienced widows’ fire, an involuntary and often distressing intense sexual desire marked by cravings, obsessive thoughts, and a longing for connection;...
...Although women’s development of a sexual sense of self occurs as an ongoing process, scholars posit [posit: to propose, suggest, or assume something as a basic fact, principle, or starting point for further discussion or research] that women urgently experience the need to achieve sexual self-understanding and reconstruct their sexual identity during significant life transitions (de Boer, Citation2023), like widowhood.
Significant life transitions impact women’s sexual self-perception...and compel women to construct new ways of understanding and connecting with themselves sexually...
And so on. "Widows" is gender-specific to women only. On their homepages the ladies greenwash to include menz but women-only is what widow's fire means literally, that is how it is understood in support groups like widows handbook (the overwhelming majority of whose stories are told by women), in the popular press, e.g. Huff Post, and in the Taylor and Francis paper, where twenty-one (twenty-one? That's not a study, that's a focus group) women were the subject.
All of which smelled a little fishy to me and made me somewhat cynical. But then I remembered...
One of my good friends, a guy, a lawyer, were out driving around someplace when I asked him how he met his wife "Beth". "Bob" told me that his best friend ("Mike"), another guy and another lawyer was dying in hospital. Bob told me that he visited Mike in the hospital daily or almost daily. Of course, Mike's wife Beth was present, too. After Mike passed Bob and Beth starting dating, got married and had two kids. "Oh yeah?" was my laconic, non-judgmental reaction. I sat there stone still. I can still picture where we were when Bob told me. I was a little creeped out. Never heard of such a thing before. Had never heard of "widow's fire" back then, ~ 2010.
Those are the only details I ever knew and I sure didn't ask again. So I don't know how long after Mike's passing Bob and Beth got together, my distinct impression was not long but that could be wrong, and it is my understanding of the widow's fire "phenomenon" that it is sex for sex's sake only and does not, phenomenologically, lead to marriage, and that the fire burns itself out within a few months. The key to the story that I am missing, and whether it fits widow's fire, is whether Beth experienced the "sudden, intense surge in sexual desire" that is pathognomonic (my impression (but see above) is not.), or if Bob was the initiator of the relationship (my impression is he was). If my impressions are correct then the Bob-Beth coupling is not widow's fire, nor is it widower's fire. If my impressions are correct, it's just a little creepy--to me.
