Widowed and young: What’s it like to get back on the dating scene when you’ve lost your spouse?

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Helen Coffey
© UK Independent

Say the word “widow”, and Sophie Ransom isn’t the kind of person who springs to mind. For a start, she’s young – just 26 years old. The project manager from Cambridge is also mother to a five-month-old daughter, Poppy, having been 17 weeks’ pregnant when her husband, Paul, died suddenly in an accident last May. The couple had been married for just six months.

“We were still in newlywedded bliss, so excited for what was to come – we were the happiest we’d ever been,” she tells me.