I'm struggling with this one, and would be grateful for alternative views.
My mother died 10 weeks ago, it was quite traumatic and we're all a bit floored. I miss her dreadfully.
So does my father, who has been coping OK but not particularly well - they'd been married for 59 years and he'd never lifted a finger domestically, so is (as you can imagine) now struggling with things like washing machines, boiling potatoes, use-by dates, and how to turn the oven on. It suited them while it lasted, so it is what it is.
However, while he's clearly devastated by her death, he told me yesterday he'd been on dating sites for the last 2 weeks, so only 8 weeks after she died. I'm distraught. It was just me and him for Christmas Day and he spent nearly 4 hours on his own in the study on these sites and occasionally calling me in to ask my opinion of his interchanges over emails, and the pictures of women he thought looked possible. Otherwise I was sitting by myself while he browsed women 20 years younger than him (he's 80 in January).
He's not worldly wise, despite his career success, and has always been the dreamer in the marriage. I was horrified by him doing this let alone telling me some of the profiles he was engaging with. All the classic signs of fishing, with non-committal 'hey babe' type comments in reply to his conversation, missing definite and indefinite articles 'I go to pub this afternoon', and general, you know, fucking dodginess of fake profiles on the net. He bought into all of it.
He's stubborn as fuck so I didn't try and dissuade him from this, just told a few stories about friends who've been scammed via OLD, and a few generalisations about the types of tricks that are played. It's kind of sunk in, in that he's had a go at dropped the dodgier conversations. But he's still determined that this is how he will find companionship to solve the loss of my mother, and that he ideally would get lucky before his 80th birthday. Less than 28 bloody days' time.
So apologies for all that background. I don't know what to do for the best to either guide him or dissuade him, and I'm still grieving so I don't trust my own reactions at the moment. Also, because we're very different - when my husband died that was it for me, not even wanted a date for the past god know how many years. So basically:
YABU: everybody grieves their own way, the poor bastard is just desperate for a bit of comfort and you're having a catastrophic failure of imagination not to understand why he might do this, just because you wouldn't
YANBU: it's my bloody mother just 10 weeks gone, and leaving me sitting on my own while he browses replacement women on Christmas Day is somewhat beyond a grief reaction