When my beloved husband died I experienced shocking feelings of sexual desire

We’re taking a look back at some of our favourite and most popular Lifestyle stories of 2024 , giving you a chance to catch up on some of the great reading you might have missed this year. This story from September explores ‘widow’s fire’ - an ‘uncontrollable and all-consuming’ href="https://www.nzherald.

co.nz/lifestyle/ask-the-experts-my-wife-and-i-have-different-desires-for-sex-what-can-we-do/SIECTYNT5NEAXF2K5P3AHCM45Y/" target="_blank"> desire for physical intimacy while grieving, which is a common but little-discussed phenomenon. When Stacey Heale’s husband Greg Gilbert died from bowel cancer in 2021, she was floored by grief.



Diagnosed at just 39, he’d finally succumbed to the disease after a five-year battle. “I was devastated,” Stacey says. “Greg was amazing.

We were together for 15 incredible years.” What Stacey didn’t expect to feel in the maelstrom of emotions such as sadness, denial, shock and anger, however, were strange and powerful feelings of sexual desire . This sudden, unbidden rise in libido she recalls as being “incredibly intense.

I can only describe it as like going through puberty all over again – that rush of physical feelings that build and wane and build ...

you don’t understand them, but they are very real.”.