“Substack widow” is one of those phrases that sounds ridiculous until you sit with it for half a second and realize it belongs in a black-bordered Victorian newspaper announcement: Beloved spouse lost at sea, presumed taken by the comments section.
There is something gloriously absurd about the domestic life of a writer. One minute you are sitting at the kitchen table like a normal citizen of the republic. The next, your spouse says something mildly interesting about the dishwasher, and somewhere behind your eyes a tiny editor in suspenders whispers, “There’s an essay here.” This is how writers become dangerous household appliances. We appear still. We appear reachable. But inside, there is a committee meeting, three metaphors, one childhood wound, and a draft title forming against everyone’s consent.
But beneath the comedy is the thing that feels most true: writing is not just self-expression. It is self-retrieval. It is the long, strange process of going back into the locked rooms of ourselves and coming out with evidence. Evidence that we were scared. Evidence that we were hiding. Evidence that we were surviving by becoming polished, competent, agreeable, productive, and emotionally laminated for public safety.
And love, real love, often notices the locked room before we do. That may be the most maddening part. Someone can stand beside us for years and sense the distance between the person we are performing and the person who is actually trapped backstage, eating crackers in the dark. Which is romantic, yes, but also deeply inconvenient. Nobody wants to be accurately perceived before breakfast. It feels unconstitutional.
That is what makes the husband in this piece so compelling to me. Not because he is perfect, not because any spouse is sitting around dressed as the patron saint of emotional maturity, polishing a halo between errands. Please.
Marriage is mostly two flawed people trying to love each other while misplacing the scissors and developing conflicting theories about thermostat morality.
But there is something profound about a person who keeps asking for the real version of you, even when the real version is harder to live with than the polished one.
And then writing arrives. That rude little miracle. That crowbar with Wi-Fi. That spiritual excavation device with a publish button. Suddenly the truth he may have been asking for all along is not arriving in one neat conversation over tea.
No, no. It is arriving serialized. With drafts. With comments. With subscribers. With the possibility that a fight from 2011 may suddenly reappear wearing italics and asking to be processed in public.
This is the strange bargain of creative honesty: the people closest to us often pay the first tax. They lose some attention. They lose some privacy. They lose the right to say something poignant in passing without the writer freezing like a hunting dog who has spotted meaning in the underbrush. But if the writing is doing its real work, they may also gain something rarer: a person who is less hidden. Less defended. Less expertly arranged to avoid being known.
That feels like the sacred comedy at the heart of this: love says, “Please let me see more of you,” and then, years later, finds itself trapped under an avalanche of vulnerability with a newsletter attached. Congratulations to all involved. The truth has arrived. It has a posting schedule, a comment thread, unresolved childhood material, and absolutely no respect for date night.
But maybe that is the miracle. Maybe the person who disappears into the page is not always leaving the marriage. Maybe, at her best, she is trying to come back to it more whole.
A terrible inconvenience, obviously. But also, inconveniently, beautiful.
Oh my friend, don't you ever tell me you're not a good writer again! This is so beautiful, every time you show up here, I feel seen, and that is its own kind of gift. And sometimes this new frame of mind I live in drives me bonkers, just like it does my husband, but I am so grateful for it, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
I wish there was a dislike button because of the compliments.
There is something almost dangerously kind about being seen by another writer, because writers are already suspicious creatures. We receive a compliment and immediately appoint a special prosecutor to investigate whether the compliment was sincere, exaggerated, accidental, or possibly meant for someone else with better sentence structure.
But that’s what makes this strange little corner of the internet feel so necessary. It reminds us that writing is not just performance. It is recognition. One person lights a match inside some private room of their life, and someone else, miles away, says, “I know that room. I thought I was the only one who had to live there.”
That is the miracle, really. Not the metrics, not the likes, not the dashboard where our self-worth goes to pace around in a blazer. The miracle is that language can take the thing we thought made us lonely and turn it into a bridge. A very unstable bridge, granted, built mostly out of caffeine, confession, and unresolved childhood material, but a bridge nonetheless.
And yes, this new frame of mind is absolutely a gift and a menace. Once the writer brain wakes up, nothing gets to remain innocent. A quiet morning becomes a meditation on longing. A grocery cart with one bad wheel becomes an allegory for American democracy. A spouse says one thoughtful thing at breakfast and suddenly the poor man is being entered into the Congressional Record of Feelings. Even the toaster is sitting there thinking, “Please don’t make me symbolize grief.”
But I understand why you wouldn’t trade it. Because to live this way means you are not just passing through your own life half-asleep. You are noticing it. Listening to it. Wrestling it into meaning. And sometimes the only way we find out what something meant is by writing toward it until the truth finally gets tired of hiding and comes out in slippers.
And in honor of your very firm and generous instruction, I will no longer say I’m not a good writer.
Oh how I resonate with this post. I don't have a partner to endow with Substack widowhood but I am sure that would be the case if I had! However my work here has impacted on the ways I relate to friends and family - in some joyful ways and others that have brought challenge and change. I too came here because of my book and have found myself engaged in growth and change in unexpected ways. Thank you for naming this so clearly. 🙏
This is one on my of favorite things you have written. Thank you. I really appreciate the vulnerability and honesty. It's incredibly relatable - how long term relationships both hold and create different versions of us and how that unfolding isn't always frictionless. I especially like how absolutely no insistence comes through in your writing on things being other than they are/were.
This is so meaningful to me, thank you for this. I've been sitting with this for a long time without even realizing it, and it's also helpful to put it on the page. Mostly I'm very grateful to my husband for helping me get to this place, even though there were many points I wanted him to do anything but along the way.
Between Substack and my discovery of acrylic paints, I have definitely left my guy in the dust on several occasions! He hasn’t called himself a Substack widower yet….too close to home at our age! He’s happy I’m engaged with life and feeling so alive about writing and painting but he doesn’t have equivalent activities that do the same for him. So I can feel guilty about enjoying my life so fully without him. And then we’re back to that dynamic where I’m emotionally caretaking him when he needs to do that for himself. Arrrrgggh. Lots of conversations about what this all means and how best to live with these changes we’re having in our lives.
Retirement hasn’t been as much fun for him as it’s been for me. He’s only just starting to understand this is because I had to put off some of my deepest heart desires for 20 years while I was tending to our children, and that I have no ability to wait any longer. He will either catch up or he won’t but I really hope he does because this is way more fun than being a grumpette.
Which leads to thinking this: why does it seem that women are more adaptable to change than men?
This is such an interesting question, and makes me want to write even more. My husband retired a few years ago, and it hasn't been easy. Of course he is also raising our little one, so it's a strange kind of retirement. But it is hard changing a different rates for sure. I feel like we could sit around my living room and probably talk about this for days.
"There were years when he was simultaneously frustrated by me and scared for me. Years when he was angry. Years when I felt misunderstood by him and years when he felt shut out by me. Like most couples who stay together long enough, we’ve spent decades bumping into each other’s blind spots, each convinced at times that the other person just wasn’t getting it."
Never heard someone articulate mental health challenges in a marriage this clearly. Thank you 🥰
I think my husband would very much relate to this, particularly from my first year on Substack when I was writing quite obsessively and every thought seemed to lead to an essay idea. It has settled though, over time, and become more of a backdrop to my life than a foreground. It's a hard balance to strike, as the platform does seem to reward that constant presence. But yes, the writing opens conversations in our home too that can lead to interesting places 😊
I love everything about this essay. And the biggest thing it showed me is I think you're just getting started as a writer. So much for your recent remark that you've "been writing here a year and haven't slowed down yet." Forget slowing down. And I think your memoir, which will certainly get published one day, will only be Book #1. You've got too much to say and you clearly say it in a way we want to read. The number and length of comments you consistently get is evidence of that. 😉
You're so welcome. And thank you for your kind words. I'm tapering now. I rode 30 yesterday and hope to get one more 30-40 mile ride in before Friday. And I'm mostly packed except for odds and ends I still need. Almost ready!
Thank you for your vaulnrability in writing this piece.. and I can relate with writing more and more about topics I would have kept to myself in the past.. I'm actually busy with a kind of personal experiment I call 'expression over repression' .. after being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease I suspect was triggered by years of of repressed anger and having to hide my true self, so alongside following the right diet I'm intentionally writing and sharing more honestly, pressing publish on poems I thought I'd never share publicly.etc. and I have a feeling it's helping me heal more than any other health measure I'm putting in place.. thank you also for your honesty, I suspect I'm not the only one borrowing courage from your honesty if I look at your comment section. 🌸
Thank you for sharing this with me. I feel grateful to you and also, weirdly (given we are internet friends), proud of you. I'm so glad we are in this together!
Yes, yes, I'll gladly be his Substack husband!! How creative of you to ask through a letter! He needs a good guy to fill the giant void you left in his heart, T.
I'm curious. Do you guys ever get into arguments about drawing too much from your life for your writing? I know anonymity helps, but do you consult with him about what and what not to mention? Because I'm wondering where to draw the line in my own writing.
Interestingly, we don't ever fight about that. I read him everything I write before I publish it. He knows if he's not comfortable I would keep it off the Internet, but so far he hasn't said no to any of it. For the most part, I do my best to ask permission from whoever I'm reading about. I'd probably haven't been 100% but I'm pretty careful about it. Today's post is an exception though. Not the Substack widow, here we go again.
This is interesting, my husband is also a little bit of a substack widow but my strongest supporter so far. Fortunately my contact is fairly neutral so far so hasn’t caused any friction.
The phrase “Substack widow” opens the door with humor, but the deeper power of this piece is the way you let the joke become a story about honesty, marriage, and repair. The line that feels central is that writing has given your husband “more of me,” because it names the paradox so beautifully: the work that sometimes pulls your attention away is also helping you practice the vulnerability he spent years hoping you could offer. I appreciate how carefully you hold the complexity here, especially the fact that truth can deepen connection while also reopening pain, memory, and conflict. Grateful for the generosity and courage in this essay, and for the way you honor your husband’s support without flattening what it has cost either of you.
There is so much in this piece, but the line we keep returning to is anorexia and shame don’t survive in the light. That sentence is true of nearly every form of suffering we have ever encountered. It is true of addiction. It is true of grief that was never witnessed. It is true of the families we walk with, who learn early that the safest place for the hardest parts of their lives is somewhere no one can see them. Shame is one of the most patient predators we have. It will wait forever for the lights to stay off.
What you have described in your husband — the quiet, decades-long refusal to settle for the version of you that was easier to live alongside but less than what you actually were — is one of the rarest gifts a person can offer another. Most of us, when we sense the gap between who someone is presenting and who they are, learn to look away. The braver thing is to stay in the room and keep gently noticing. Not pushing. Just noticing. And not stopping. That is not a small love. That is a vocation.
The fact that writing has become the place where you finally said out loud what he had been waiting to hear is beautiful in a way that does not need to be tidied up. Some of the most important conversations in a marriage happen long after both people thought the conversation was already over. Substack, in your case, has not interrupted your marriage. It has finished a conversation your marriage had already been having for twenty-five years, quietly, in the gaps between the things you could not yet say.
May he be widowed gently. And may both of you keep finding each other in the light.
This gave me goosebumps (as your words have a way of doing). There's so much emotion you're thinking about long-term relationships and how we have impacted with each other, and I really appreciate your wisdom here. That's what it felt like.
Thank you, friend. Long marriages, like long friendships, do their best work in the parts we do not narrate to anyone — and getting to read someone who narrates them so honestly is its own quiet companionship. Grateful for you, and for the way you write into rooms most people would rather keep closed.
I try so hard not to let this app consume my presence, but it does seem to demand it to be "successful" on here!
I love that that an unintentional outcome of your work here has been greater emotional intimacy with your husband. He sounds like a real keeper. 😊
He can definitely drive me crazy, but yes, he's a keeper.
“Substack widow” is one of those phrases that sounds ridiculous until you sit with it for half a second and realize it belongs in a black-bordered Victorian newspaper announcement: Beloved spouse lost at sea, presumed taken by the comments section.
There is something gloriously absurd about the domestic life of a writer. One minute you are sitting at the kitchen table like a normal citizen of the republic. The next, your spouse says something mildly interesting about the dishwasher, and somewhere behind your eyes a tiny editor in suspenders whispers, “There’s an essay here.” This is how writers become dangerous household appliances. We appear still. We appear reachable. But inside, there is a committee meeting, three metaphors, one childhood wound, and a draft title forming against everyone’s consent.
But beneath the comedy is the thing that feels most true: writing is not just self-expression. It is self-retrieval. It is the long, strange process of going back into the locked rooms of ourselves and coming out with evidence. Evidence that we were scared. Evidence that we were hiding. Evidence that we were surviving by becoming polished, competent, agreeable, productive, and emotionally laminated for public safety.
And love, real love, often notices the locked room before we do. That may be the most maddening part. Someone can stand beside us for years and sense the distance between the person we are performing and the person who is actually trapped backstage, eating crackers in the dark. Which is romantic, yes, but also deeply inconvenient. Nobody wants to be accurately perceived before breakfast. It feels unconstitutional.
That is what makes the husband in this piece so compelling to me. Not because he is perfect, not because any spouse is sitting around dressed as the patron saint of emotional maturity, polishing a halo between errands. Please.
Marriage is mostly two flawed people trying to love each other while misplacing the scissors and developing conflicting theories about thermostat morality.
But there is something profound about a person who keeps asking for the real version of you, even when the real version is harder to live with than the polished one.
And then writing arrives. That rude little miracle. That crowbar with Wi-Fi. That spiritual excavation device with a publish button. Suddenly the truth he may have been asking for all along is not arriving in one neat conversation over tea.
No, no. It is arriving serialized. With drafts. With comments. With subscribers. With the possibility that a fight from 2011 may suddenly reappear wearing italics and asking to be processed in public.
This is the strange bargain of creative honesty: the people closest to us often pay the first tax. They lose some attention. They lose some privacy. They lose the right to say something poignant in passing without the writer freezing like a hunting dog who has spotted meaning in the underbrush. But if the writing is doing its real work, they may also gain something rarer: a person who is less hidden. Less defended. Less expertly arranged to avoid being known.
That feels like the sacred comedy at the heart of this: love says, “Please let me see more of you,” and then, years later, finds itself trapped under an avalanche of vulnerability with a newsletter attached. Congratulations to all involved. The truth has arrived. It has a posting schedule, a comment thread, unresolved childhood material, and absolutely no respect for date night.
But maybe that is the miracle. Maybe the person who disappears into the page is not always leaving the marriage. Maybe, at her best, she is trying to come back to it more whole.
A terrible inconvenience, obviously. But also, inconveniently, beautiful.
Oh my friend, don't you ever tell me you're not a good writer again! This is so beautiful, every time you show up here, I feel seen, and that is its own kind of gift. And sometimes this new frame of mind I live in drives me bonkers, just like it does my husband, but I am so grateful for it, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
I wish there was a dislike button because of the compliments.
There is something almost dangerously kind about being seen by another writer, because writers are already suspicious creatures. We receive a compliment and immediately appoint a special prosecutor to investigate whether the compliment was sincere, exaggerated, accidental, or possibly meant for someone else with better sentence structure.
But that’s what makes this strange little corner of the internet feel so necessary. It reminds us that writing is not just performance. It is recognition. One person lights a match inside some private room of their life, and someone else, miles away, says, “I know that room. I thought I was the only one who had to live there.”
That is the miracle, really. Not the metrics, not the likes, not the dashboard where our self-worth goes to pace around in a blazer. The miracle is that language can take the thing we thought made us lonely and turn it into a bridge. A very unstable bridge, granted, built mostly out of caffeine, confession, and unresolved childhood material, but a bridge nonetheless.
And yes, this new frame of mind is absolutely a gift and a menace. Once the writer brain wakes up, nothing gets to remain innocent. A quiet morning becomes a meditation on longing. A grocery cart with one bad wheel becomes an allegory for American democracy. A spouse says one thoughtful thing at breakfast and suddenly the poor man is being entered into the Congressional Record of Feelings. Even the toaster is sitting there thinking, “Please don’t make me symbolize grief.”
But I understand why you wouldn’t trade it. Because to live this way means you are not just passing through your own life half-asleep. You are noticing it. Listening to it. Wrestling it into meaning. And sometimes the only way we find out what something meant is by writing toward it until the truth finally gets tired of hiding and comes out in slippers.
And in honor of your very firm and generous instruction, I will no longer say I’m not a good writer.
I’m a terrible writer.
They're also a terrible person. Just saying! Yeah, you are absolutely my Bestie.
Well, well, if it isn't my new nemesis. I think you keep forgetting to go to the article drafting window before you hit Post.
?
Your comments could be their own articles.
Oh!
This is the only way I get people to read my work these days!
Oh how I resonate with this post. I don't have a partner to endow with Substack widowhood but I am sure that would be the case if I had! However my work here has impacted on the ways I relate to friends and family - in some joyful ways and others that have brought challenge and change. I too came here because of my book and have found myself engaged in growth and change in unexpected ways. Thank you for naming this so clearly. 🙏
❤️❤️❤️
This is one on my of favorite things you have written. Thank you. I really appreciate the vulnerability and honesty. It's incredibly relatable - how long term relationships both hold and create different versions of us and how that unfolding isn't always frictionless. I especially like how absolutely no insistence comes through in your writing on things being other than they are/were.
This is so meaningful to me, thank you for this. I've been sitting with this for a long time without even realizing it, and it's also helpful to put it on the page. Mostly I'm very grateful to my husband for helping me get to this place, even though there were many points I wanted him to do anything but along the way.
how great that you could both find the path to repair. hope Husband wears his Substack Widow t-shirt with pride.
Some days more than others😉😂
I hear u
🙃
Between Substack and my discovery of acrylic paints, I have definitely left my guy in the dust on several occasions! He hasn’t called himself a Substack widower yet….too close to home at our age! He’s happy I’m engaged with life and feeling so alive about writing and painting but he doesn’t have equivalent activities that do the same for him. So I can feel guilty about enjoying my life so fully without him. And then we’re back to that dynamic where I’m emotionally caretaking him when he needs to do that for himself. Arrrrgggh. Lots of conversations about what this all means and how best to live with these changes we’re having in our lives.
Retirement hasn’t been as much fun for him as it’s been for me. He’s only just starting to understand this is because I had to put off some of my deepest heart desires for 20 years while I was tending to our children, and that I have no ability to wait any longer. He will either catch up or he won’t but I really hope he does because this is way more fun than being a grumpette.
Which leads to thinking this: why does it seem that women are more adaptable to change than men?
This is such an interesting question, and makes me want to write even more. My husband retired a few years ago, and it hasn't been easy. Of course he is also raising our little one, so it's a strange kind of retirement. But it is hard changing a different rates for sure. I feel like we could sit around my living room and probably talk about this for days.
Let’s do all that talking at the lake with a glass of wine:)
I think it's possible we are soulmates. I accept.
💞
"There were years when he was simultaneously frustrated by me and scared for me. Years when he was angry. Years when I felt misunderstood by him and years when he felt shut out by me. Like most couples who stay together long enough, we’ve spent decades bumping into each other’s blind spots, each convinced at times that the other person just wasn’t getting it."
Never heard someone articulate mental health challenges in a marriage this clearly. Thank you 🥰
That, thank you. And thank you for being here, I am genuinely so glad to be in this community with you.
Likewise!
❤️
Reading your page has been so helpful in my getting comfortable writing (and actually posting)! I appreciate your vulnerability with the process!
This makes me happy, thank you for sharing❤️. I am beyond grateful for this community.
I think my husband would very much relate to this, particularly from my first year on Substack when I was writing quite obsessively and every thought seemed to lead to an essay idea. It has settled though, over time, and become more of a backdrop to my life than a foreground. It's a hard balance to strike, as the platform does seem to reward that constant presence. But yes, the writing opens conversations in our home too that can lead to interesting places 😊
It is so good to hear your experience and it makes me hopeful I'll find that balance. I'm so grateful for all writing has giving me, but it's a lot🙃😘
I love everything about this essay. And the biggest thing it showed me is I think you're just getting started as a writer. So much for your recent remark that you've "been writing here a year and haven't slowed down yet." Forget slowing down. And I think your memoir, which will certainly get published one day, will only be Book #1. You've got too much to say and you clearly say it in a way we want to read. The number and length of comments you consistently get is evidence of that. 😉
This is the kindest (and most terrifying) think I could hope to read. Thank you. And I'm thinking of you these days.....hope you are feeling ready!
You're so welcome. And thank you for your kind words. I'm tapering now. I rode 30 yesterday and hope to get one more 30-40 mile ride in before Friday. And I'm mostly packed except for odds and ends I still need. Almost ready!
That is amazing that that counts as a taper. Crush it!
You can count on it!!!! 🚴
😁
Thank you for your vaulnrability in writing this piece.. and I can relate with writing more and more about topics I would have kept to myself in the past.. I'm actually busy with a kind of personal experiment I call 'expression over repression' .. after being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease I suspect was triggered by years of of repressed anger and having to hide my true self, so alongside following the right diet I'm intentionally writing and sharing more honestly, pressing publish on poems I thought I'd never share publicly.etc. and I have a feeling it's helping me heal more than any other health measure I'm putting in place.. thank you also for your honesty, I suspect I'm not the only one borrowing courage from your honesty if I look at your comment section. 🌸
Thank you for sharing this with me. I feel grateful to you and also, weirdly (given we are internet friends), proud of you. I'm so glad we are in this together!
Yes, yes, I'll gladly be his Substack husband!! How creative of you to ask through a letter! He needs a good guy to fill the giant void you left in his heart, T.
I'm curious. Do you guys ever get into arguments about drawing too much from your life for your writing? I know anonymity helps, but do you consult with him about what and what not to mention? Because I'm wondering where to draw the line in my own writing.
Interestingly, we don't ever fight about that. I read him everything I write before I publish it. He knows if he's not comfortable I would keep it off the Internet, but so far he hasn't said no to any of it. For the most part, I do my best to ask permission from whoever I'm reading about. I'd probably haven't been 100% but I'm pretty careful about it. Today's post is an exception though. Not the Substack widow, here we go again.
I'm kinda jealous. (In addition to the usual jealousy with which I'm trying to steal your man.) I wish I had someone to read it to other than AI.
That I totally get. And just for the record, you could always share it with me!
This is so vulnerable ❤️
Thank you for being here❤️
This is interesting, my husband is also a little bit of a substack widow but my strongest supporter so far. Fortunately my contact is fairly neutral so far so hasn’t caused any friction.
The phrase “Substack widow” opens the door with humor, but the deeper power of this piece is the way you let the joke become a story about honesty, marriage, and repair. The line that feels central is that writing has given your husband “more of me,” because it names the paradox so beautifully: the work that sometimes pulls your attention away is also helping you practice the vulnerability he spent years hoping you could offer. I appreciate how carefully you hold the complexity here, especially the fact that truth can deepen connection while also reopening pain, memory, and conflict. Grateful for the generosity and courage in this essay, and for the way you honor your husband’s support without flattening what it has cost either of you.
There is so much in this piece, but the line we keep returning to is anorexia and shame don’t survive in the light. That sentence is true of nearly every form of suffering we have ever encountered. It is true of addiction. It is true of grief that was never witnessed. It is true of the families we walk with, who learn early that the safest place for the hardest parts of their lives is somewhere no one can see them. Shame is one of the most patient predators we have. It will wait forever for the lights to stay off.
What you have described in your husband — the quiet, decades-long refusal to settle for the version of you that was easier to live alongside but less than what you actually were — is one of the rarest gifts a person can offer another. Most of us, when we sense the gap between who someone is presenting and who they are, learn to look away. The braver thing is to stay in the room and keep gently noticing. Not pushing. Just noticing. And not stopping. That is not a small love. That is a vocation.
The fact that writing has become the place where you finally said out loud what he had been waiting to hear is beautiful in a way that does not need to be tidied up. Some of the most important conversations in a marriage happen long after both people thought the conversation was already over. Substack, in your case, has not interrupted your marriage. It has finished a conversation your marriage had already been having for twenty-five years, quietly, in the gaps between the things you could not yet say.
May he be widowed gently. And may both of you keep finding each other in the light.
This gave me goosebumps (as your words have a way of doing). There's so much emotion you're thinking about long-term relationships and how we have impacted with each other, and I really appreciate your wisdom here. That's what it felt like.
Thank you, friend. Long marriages, like long friendships, do their best work in the parts we do not narrate to anyone — and getting to read someone who narrates them so honestly is its own quiet companionship. Grateful for you, and for the way you write into rooms most people would rather keep closed.
There were a lot of years where I would even let myself open those doors. Now I'm grateful for the company.