Why do I feel jealous of their late spouse?

Most often you feel jealous of a late spouse because the feeling is guarding your place in a life that still holds someone else, and because a memory can’t be argued with the way a living rival can. After 60, many people bring their own loss into a new companionship as well, so the jealousy is often tangled up with grief, theirs and yours.

Is it wrong to feel jealous of someone who has died?

No. It is common, and it is usually kinder than it feels.

Esther is 64, a retired pharmacist. Her husband, Leonard, died four years ago. For most of a year she has been seeing Graham, 67, who taught high school chemistry, and whose wife, Maureen, died before that. Graham’s house is warm and full of Maureen: her photographs on the piano, her roses in the garden, her recipes in the kitchen drawer. When Graham says “we always went to the shore in August,” Esther knows the “we” isn’t her. She feels a jealousy she can hardly admit, because how do you resent a woman you never met, who is gone, and whom Graham loved for forty years?

It can help to separate the parts:

• What happened: Graham mentioned a summer tradition from his marriage.
• The reading: “I’ll always come second to her.”
• The fear: “There isn’t really room for me here.”
• The next step: to be decided later, by Esther, gently.

The feeling is not a flaw in Esther, and it is not a judgment on Graham. It’s pointing at something that matters to her.

What is the jealousy guarding?

Usually, your place. Not the past, which no one can take, but the present: whether there is room for you in this home, this calendar, this heart.

Research on people who remarry after losing a spouse suggests the late spouse rarely disappears, and that this need not crowd anyone out. In interviews with 29 widows in Israel who had remarried, most still kept a bond with their first husband, decades after his death.1 The new husband played a major part in how that bond was handled, and the couples drew the line between the first marriage and the second in very different places, from firm to blurred.1

Another study interviewed widows and their new husbands.2 The husbands, too, described the marriage as a relationship of three, with the late husband holding a special place in the family.2 Importantly, they did not describe that place as a threat.2

These were small studies of a particular group of widows, so they are not a promise. But they suggest that “is there room for me?” is a question couples answer together, over time, and that many find there is.

Why does it feel like competing with a memory?

Partly because a person who has died can’t be talked to, gotten to know, or seen on an ordinary bad day. With nothing to push against, the feeling tends to turn inward, toward you.

That inward turn has been studied. Jealousy can push people to reshape themselves. In a set of three studies, psychologist Erica Slotter and colleagues found that when people felt jealous of a rival, they could start to see themselves as more like that rival.3 Esther may notice she’s learning to make Maureen’s lemon cake, or wearing her hair the way she saw it in the photos. Sometimes that’s affection. Sometimes it’s the jealousy quietly trying to win.

It’s worth remembering that Graham didn’t choose a copy of Maureen. He chose Esther.

Why do certain days set it off?

Grief keeps a calendar. Research on widowed older adults, summarized by University of Florida family scientists, found that people reported more distress in the month of their late spouse’s birthday, and in January after the holidays.4 Those spikes came in the first months after the loss, and had faded by a later check-in.4

For many people the dates stay tender for longer, though more quietly. And a continuing bond can be heavy. One study that followed bereaved spouses for five years found that those with stronger ongoing bonds to the person who died tended to have more grief symptoms over that time.5 That doesn’t make the bond wrong. It means that when your companion is low around Maureen’s birthday, they are carrying grief, not choosing her over you.

What if you’re grieving too?

This is the part that often goes unsaid. If you have lost a spouse yourself, some of what feels like jealousy of their late husband or wife may be your own longing, looking for somewhere to go. Watching your companion honor their marriage can stir up questions about how, and whether, you are still honoring yours.

Esther may be jealous of Maureen’s roses partly because Leonard’s garden went to seed after he died, and she couldn’t bear to tend it. Two losses can sit in one relationship without competing. Each deserves room.

When is it more than jealousy?

Jealousy is a feeling. Monitoring someone, by going through their phone, tracking where they go or demanding their passwords, or trying to control who they see, is something else. If you are the one being watched or kept from people, or if you are afraid of how a companion behaves when they’re jealous, that is a safety matter, and it’s worth talking it over with a hotline or a professional.

If the jealousy, or the grief underneath it, is heavy most days, keeps you from sleeping, or makes ordinary life hard to manage, a licensed mental-health professional is the right help, and a doctor, a grief counselor or a grief support group can help too. There is no age limit on that kind of support.

What to notice this week

Rather than a list of tasks, try one gentle question when the feeling comes: “What is this guarding right now: my place, my picture of myself, or my own grief?” Each answer points somewhere different. The first is a conversation with your companion. The second is a conversation with yourself. The third may be time set aside for the person you lost.

What the research does not tell us

• The remarriage studies were small and focused on Israeli war and terror widows, so they describe some couples’ experiences, not a rule.12
• The jealousy studies looked at living romantic rivals, not late spouses, so applying them here is a reasonable stretch.3
• The special-dates research describes averages in the early months of widowhood.4
• The five-year bond study shows a link, not a cause, and doesn’t say a bond is unhealthy.5
• None of it can tell you what your companion feels. It can help you notice what your own feeling is protecting.