Actor Aubrey Plaza is expecting a baby with her partner, actor Christopher Abbott, according to her representative.
But instead of sharing congratulations, many people on social media are responding with judgment about how soon Plaza should be moving forward as a grieving widow. In 2025, Plaza’s husband, Jeff Baena, died by suicide.
“She should’ve at least waited a few years,” one popular X post reads, while another commenter remarked that having a new partner one year after your previous partner dies “seems a little weird.”
This backlash is all too common. There is still an outdated idea that widows should have a long, formal mourning period, even though there is no single correct or certain timeline about how a grieving person should date or find love again.
“Society thinks you shouldn’t do anything for a year. You’re supposed to mourn a full season of cycles,” grief counselor Jill Cohen told HuffPost. “What’s important to remember is that we never know what’s behind the story” of why people do or don’t want to have sex and find love again after loss, she said.
Anita Coyle, a widow and co-host of the “Widow We Do Now?” podcast, said young widows are especially damned if they date, damned if they don’t.
“People want to make it a litmus about the kind of relationship you had with your late partner. If you date too early, then it must mean that you didn’t love them. And then if you don’t date soon enough, then you’re ‘stuck’ in your grief,” Coyle said. “No matter what you do, people who aren’t in your situation are going to judge you.”
Coyle knows this firsthand. Coyle’s husband died in 2019, and she has not dated since. Coyle said she got the opposite reaction from what Plaza is experiencing, such as questions like “Are you stuck? Are you not moving on?”
In response to judgment, “I think a lot of widows probably just want to yell at the people, like, ‘It’s none of your business,’” Coyle said.
Dia Dipasupil via Getty Images
PSA: How Widows Move Forward Is Not Up To Us
How one’s partner dies also adds to the kind of judgment the surviving partner faces going forward.
Plaza and Baena had been separated for four months before Baena died by suicide, according to a report from the Los Angeles County medical examiner.
Elishia Durrett Johnson, a widow and licensed clinical counselor who specializes in grief, said people whose partners die a stigmatized death like suicide face unfair judgment about how they should move forward because their partner’s death is “not considered natural.”
“Anytime during that, I extend grace and I implore others to be quiet,” Durrett Johnson said. “You don’t know what life is going to afford you later. The very thing that you’re complaining or criticizing one person about, you have no idea how you would handle that.”
People policing other people’s grief “is the awfulness” of mourning, she added: “That’s the thing that we should not do.”
Widows also face more stigma than widowers for dating and repartnering after their partner dies. “Men get a little bit more leeway in moving forward quickly,” Coyle said. People give men more grace if they find a new partner soon after their loss because they believe “he needs a wife,” Cohen said.
But the truth is, grief is hard on everyone. “We normalize men moving forward with other women,” Durrett Johnson said. But for both widows and widowers, “it is just as hard as finding your forward.”
That’s why widows say the best answer to hearing about a grieving person falling in love again is to congratulate them. In Plaza’s case, “she’s experienced this horrendous thing in her life, and she deserves to have a next chapter that makes her happy, and whatever that looks like for her and for everybody is up to them to determine,” Coyle said.
Plaza has shared that the “awfulness” of her grief over Baena is “always there.”
“There’s, like, a giant ocean of just awfulness that’s like right there, and I can, like, see it,” she said on former co-star Amy Poehler’s “Good Hang” podcast last August. “Sometimes, I just want to just dive into it and just, like, be in it. And then sometimes, I just look at it, and then sometimes, I just try to get away from it. But it’s always there.”
Durett Johnson said Plaza’s metaphor of an ocean of awfulness is apt and is why it’s remarkable when grieving widows and widowers find new love.
“If you find someone that is going to help you in that move forward, that understands that awful ocean that you’re dealing with, that’s powerful,” Durrett Johnson said about why she congratulates Plaza on finding a partner again. “That’s just as rare as finding the love of your life.”
