DATE EXPECTATIONS

As Bridget Jones dives back into the singles scene after losing her husband, real-life widows tell Olivia Petter about guilt, apps, and the daunting prospect of searching for love again

- Olivia Petter

Everyone’s favourite chain-smoking singleton Bridget Jones is single once again. Yes, the fourth Bridget Jones film, Mad About the Boy, based on Helen Fielding’s 2013 novel of the same name, finds the chaotic comic heroine, immortalised by Renée Zellweger, struck by tragedy: her husband, Mark Darcy, has been killed in Sudan, leaving her with two young children to raise on her own.

Fortunately, Daniel Cleaver, played of course by Hugh Grant, is back on the scene, while heartthrob-of-the-moment Leo Woodall stars as the titular boy whom Bridget starts dating. The film takes place four years after Darcy’s death and gains much of its comic juice from the pressures Bridget feels to re-enter the dating scene, which looks a little different these days. There are dating apps. Social media is a thing. And she’s also a 51-year-old single mother.

It’s a daunting set of prospects. But just as the first Bridget Jones novel, published in 1996, captured the agonies of dating for many thirtysomething women in the Nineties, her predicament in the latest instalment will be familiar to many who’ve dipped their toe back into dating after losing a long-term partner. It’s a situation that invariably necessitates having to navigate the boundless depths of grief while also trying to move on with someone new. It’s no mean feat.

Jones is certainly not alone in wanting to test the waters as a newly bereaved woman: more than two-thirds (63 per cent) of widows download a dating app within the first one to five years of losing a partner, according to research conducted by Chapter 2, the UK’s only dating app dedicated to widows and widowers.