My fiance died of cancer when I was 30. Doctors wanted me to take anti-depressants - but what made me finally feel alive again was intimacy with a handsome stranger By Lotte Bowser Published: 01:44, 20 September 2024 | Updated: 01:44, 20 September 2024 e-mail View comments On a miserable Wednesday morning in May 2021, my friend Robyn and I boarded a flight at London Luton airport bound for Lisbon. Ahead of us were a few days sunbathing by the ocean before spending a weekend in the city.
'I think I want to have some fun on this trip,' I said, turning to Robyn in the driver's seat of our hire car, her chestnut hair whipping in the wind. 'And by fun, I mean I want to meet someone.' 'Oh yeah?' she replied, her eyebrows raised.
'Yeah. Why not?' I was ready. Seven months earlier I'd lost my fiancé Ben to cancer and Covid 19.
I was 30; he only 36. I was still trying to figure out how I was supposed to go about living without the man with whom I had become inextricably woven over the past six years. But I had wants that needed tending to, corners of my body that needed to come alive again.
Lotte and a friend flew to Lisbon for a break in May 2021, seven months after she lost her fiance Ben. 'I think I want to have some fun on this trip. And by fun, I mean I want to meet someone' Widow's fire — the desire for intimacy and sex following the death of a partner — it turns out, is real.
It was one of the many things about loss that I hadn't anticipated, but then nobody tell.