What your wife is saying could be true. Perhaps she did say it for the kids and in-laws. It would look pretty heartless if she didn’t make some sort of comment, and would leave her children feeling insecure and uncertain about their mother’s feelings towards their father. But then again, you still love your last wife, so you should understand that she will still love her previous husband. Twenty-three years is a long time to be with someone, and it would be impossible for her to move on completely; she’ll miss him for the rest of her life. But that doesn’t mean she’s still in love with him, as he’s not there to be in love with. Don’t worry about things too much. Your wife loves her old husband for who he is, but she’s in love with you for who you are.

Don’t take it personally. I was a young widow with 3 young kids when I married my current husband. I still have a hard time expressing my feelings for fear it will hurt his feelings. It is really awkward, because sometimes I feel like he wants me to say I never loved him, because my first husband suffered from a fatal depression, it somehow minimizes my feelings.
Let her process. Sometimes when you think you are all done mourning something will happen and it will come up again. I can’t hear the Lynerd Skynerd song Free Bird without getting really quiet. My current husband does not know that I’m crying inside because he just wouldn’t understand.
Missing and loving my deceased husband in no way minimizes my love for my current husband. he is the best thing that ever happened to me. It doesn’t mean there is no place left in my heart for the one I lost.

Ouch, take a deep breath and don’t do any comparison measurements here. Don’t focus on what she said about him, but focus on what she says about you. Think of it this way, even if her statements were true, the fact that she was defensive says she cares about your feelings.

Twenty three years is a long time which will be a part of her forever. That is a history and story apart from yours. Your story will grow with her as you spend years with her, I’m sure this hurt but don’t react till you have put some time in to think about it all and turn it a few times in your own head. If it is good between you all this hurt will fade fast.

Whatever your wife’s feelings, she loves you—enough to marry you. You are here and alive, and he is dead. Let it go.

The time around any hard anniversaries are fraught with emotions. I would do nothing for several weeks and see how things settle.

Your own (and her own) feelings are never wrong. They are your feelings. Don’t let this turn into an emotional snarl.

With @gailcalled‘s warning in mind, I looked at the question again. What do you think makes you feel this way about your wife’s comments? Are you afraid of loss? Are you afraid she doesn’t love you enough or doesn’t love you at all? Where do you fears come from?

I think you are really asking how you can cope with your feelings better. I think the first thing to do is to gain an intellectual understanding of them. I suspect that her behavior makes you feel like you are not fully valued. If you were fully valued, she wouldn’t be saying these things about her late husband. I think that’s a very important assumption to check.

Next, you might want to evaluate whether your feelings are appropriate in your eyes, not anyone else’s. How do those feelings help you?

If they don’t help you, then there are a number of techniques that can be used to cope with unhelpful feelings. I suggest mindfulness. It allows you to feel your feelings without feeling like you have to do anything about it. There are many books that can get you started. Learning to meditate or do yoga can also help.

Good luck.

Welcome to Fluther.

If I were you I wouldn’t take her comments the way that you have. But I’m not you. Obviously, you feel differently about your late wife than she feels about her late husband. I don’t think there is any way to quantify love, so that anyone else could say (or even you or she could say), “she loved him more than you loved your wife”, or “she loved him more than she loves you now” or that “you love her more than she loves you”. There’s no way to compare any love with any other from one person to another. So I wouldn’t even try. Who knows, or could know, who loved whom (or loves whom) more? That’s not even an avenue to pursue.

What you might want to do, after you give this anniversary a few days or weeks, is gently (you can’t do it gently enough) remind your wife that “you and she” are now a couple, and that you feel slighted, hurt, diminished, whatever when she fails to include you or to publicly consider you in statements about how she still feels about her late husband.

She can say anything in the world about what kind of man he was, how she felt about him, and his value to the world. He may very well have been the greatest man in the world, and you can’t possibly gainsay that. (You’d better not even try, or think that you could.) But to be excluded from her “now” statements is hurting you, obviously, and maybe even diminishing your apparent current importance to her to others.

In the absence of apparent bad faith on her part, I’d of course consider that she’s doing this unknowingly and without the slightest idea in the world of doing you a disservice. If you let her know that you feel like the forgotten man at this time of the year, she may find a way to make you part of the circle, which should be the best you can hope for.

One other thing to consider: Since you can’t quantify an amount or a feeling of love between individuals (you can for yourself, probably: “I love my wife more than I love my dog”, for example), then you should realize that love affairs are always going to be asymmetrical: you may always love her more than she loves you, or vice versa, or it may vary from time to time. Who knows? Who could possibly know? But expect that it’s true: your love for each other will probably never be “equal”. So what? You have what you have, and you should find a way to be happy with and grateful for what you have, or you’ll be eating out your own insides.

If you feel slighted or excluded then you should talk to her about it, and not to us.

You did jump into it too quickly if you thought being in her life makes her forget her past. Twenty-three years is too much history to forget with an I do. No doubt she married you because she loved you. You are both different people and are going to be loved for different reasons. Love doesn’t automatically get buried along with the person. I still miss my father and it has been 30 years. He too was my rock but now that I am married my husband is my new rock. My siblings and I still talk about him around his birthday anniversary and death. Sometimes even in between. There is so much I wish he could’ve been around for in my life and in my childrens lives. At the time I couldn’t imagine trusting anyone as much as I trusted him or loving anyone as much as I loved my dad. But I was wrong. I trust and love my husband as much only in a different way. I know your probably thinking its not the same but it is. Love comes in many different ways. I love my two children as much as each other but I love them in different ways because they are different. They are two different people. Almost polar opposite except for their integrity and how much they love me as well.
Your not in her life to fill his shoes. You have your own shoes to fill. I would’ve only been upset if in her statement she said that you are not living up to what a husband should be.

@Pandora, GA. Her relationship with her in-laws is through her ties to her ex-husband. It sounds like she had a good first marriage. Even though she has moved on an married you, she is still mindful of that relationship, and has kept connected to her in-laws and done what she could to keep that family connection for her children.

What’s your relationship like with your first wife’s family? Do you and the children spend time with them? What happens around the time of the anniversary of your wife’s death in terms of connectivity? It’s entirely possible that you and your wife have differences in terms of bonding and relationships with family. Very often, women are the ones who are mindful of relationships and their maintenance.