When someone loses a spouse, they need to grieve, but you never know how someone will choose to do that.

What would you do if you had a friend who lost his wife, and now he quickly started dating someone new and is even bringing her around his daughter, who isn’t happy with it?

That is what happened to the friend in this story, so she called him out on it, but now she feels like she may have overstepped.

AITA for telling my friend that it’s too soon to date another person after his wife died from breast cancer?

To set the timeline, we found out 8 years ago that one of our couple besties (55m & 50f) had stage 4 breast cancer.

Having close friends is a real blessing.

There are 3 couples in the group and we are all really close. For privacy sake, I’ll name them Joe and Mary.

Their daughter was only 5 at the time Mary was diagnosed and Mary beat the odds for a long time, however, cancer is a thief and we lost her this past Jan. Their daughter (Sara) is besties with our daughter so we have been right there with her to help heal, remember and love up on her.

A small service seems nice, but Joe is having a very hard time.

Mary asked for a small intimate service this spring to spread her ashes and celebrate her life. Joe refuses to do anything or even talk about Mary.

He claims that bringing it up keeps tearing off the Band-Aid and Sara can’t heal. Of course I don’t agree, I feel that we should talk about Mary and celebrate her life all the time so that Sara knows she is not forgotten.

Joe may not be grieving in a healthy way.

Joe didn’t recognize Mary’s birthday in May and two months ago Joe brought a female friend around at our daughter’s bday party and as you can imagine his now 12 year old lost it.

The last several weekend Joe has let the daughter stay home while he brings his new girlfriend to our couples events. Then this last weekend he ditched his daughter on her bday so he could spend the weekend with his new girlfriend.

He is really trying not to think about his grief, but that is impossible.

He only spent 1.5 hours with Sara on the day before her 13th bday and stayed with his new girlfriend the whole weekend, totally ignoring Sara.

So, I lost my cool and gave him a piece of my mind and told him that he is one of the most self centered people that I have ever seen and can’t believe that he would ignore his 13 year old daughter on her bday weekend so he could spend the whole weekend with his new girlfriend.

It seems like she is concerned for both Joe and Sara.

So am I too close to this? Am I seeing it wrong?

Does he have the right to move on so quickly or is he out of line for bringing the new girl around and expecting his daughter to get on board with it? And as his friend should we call him out on it or let it go?

AITAH?

He needs to be talked to about this for sure. Maybe blowing up at him wasn’t right, but something had to be said. Even if he is ‘moving on’ so quick, he can’t force it on his daughter like that.

Read on to see what the people in the comments say about it.

I agree with this person.

This commenter went through something similar to the daughter.

This person says she may lost the friendship, but she is doing the right thing.

He really does need to put his daughter first.

This commenter thinks the dad is in the wrong.

Grief is a terrible thing, but you can’t ignore it.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.