I had threesome with another woman and my dead husband's ghost after becoming a widow – I felt his presence as we romped
Nicky's female lover also took a liking to her late husband
GHOSTED I had threesome with another woman and my dead husband's ghost after becoming a widow – I felt his presence as we romped
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window)
Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
NICKY Wake and her husband Andy had always dreamt of having a threesome.
But when Andy tragically died of Covid in 2020, the widow wanted to honour his desires, and even found a way for her late husband to be there.
6
Nicky Wake explored threesomes after losing her husband Andy
Credit: EMMA PHILLIPSON - Commissioned by The Sun
6
Andy passed away in 2020 after complications with COVID
Credit: Jam Press/Nikki Wake/Widows Fire Dating
6
She then slept with a woman for the first time and felt her husband's 'presence' join them as she left his photo on the night stand
Credit: Jam Press/Nikki Wake/Widows Fire Dating
Nicky has spoken candidly about a phenomenon known as widow's fire, which is an increase in libido that can take place following the death of a partner.
Her husband Andy, whom she married in 2002, always spoke about wanting a threesome which she also fantasised about.
But it wasn't until after his untimely death that she made it a reality, connecting with another woman who knew about her widowed status, and also found her late husband attractive.
She went on to rediscover her sexuality by sleeping with the woman with Andy's picture present in the room and said she 'felt his presence'.
LIFELONG FANTASY
'I used to joke that I'd treat him to it for his 60th birthday,' says mum-of-one Nicky, from Manchester.
'The truth is, I identify as bisexual, so it was also a fantasy of mine.
'I was always a little hesitant about introducing a third person into what was a deeply loving and fulfilling relationship, but as a one-off for a special occasion, it felt like it could be fun and memorable for both of us.'
The 53-year-old explained that she and her late husband Andy, who died aged 54, had very nearly made the fantasy a reality on a few occasions.
Once at a naturist beach in Jamaica when they got to know a flirty American couple and again at a New Year's party.
But on both occasions, they never actually went through with it.
Horrifying moment Temptation Island star cheats on girlfriend with steamy shower
She says: 'If we were going to go for it, I assumed we'd either use a specialist dating site or perhaps hire an escort.
'Tragically, Andy then suffered a series of catastrophic heart attacks that led to a severe brain injury, leaving him with no capacity.
'He was only 54. We lost him to Covid in 2020 when he was in a care home.
'Before Andy became ill, we had a passionate and satisfying sex life. I couldn't imagine never feeling that again.
'About a year after he passed, and four years after his initial diagnosis, I started dating again at 49.'
BISEXUAL DATING
Nicky, like many modern daters, looked for new connections online and said she listed herself as bisexual on a dating website.
She says: 'I'd had relationships with women in the past, and I wasn't ready to be intimate with another man.
'Andy had been the only one for 20 years. It felt less intimidating to connect with a woman.
'I was honest about being newly widowed, nervous, out of practice, and said that this would be my first experience since Andy.'
6
Nicky and Andy married in 2002 and went on to have one child together
Credit: Jam Press/Nikki Wake/Widows Fire Dating
6
She says they often spoke about having a threesome but never got round to it
Credit: Jam Press/Nikki Wake/Widows Fire Dating
What is widow's fire?
WIDOW'S - or widower's - fire is a term for a strong desire for sex following the death of a partner.
Experts say the phenomenon is normal and can be a natural part of the grieving process for many people.
There are many kinds of loss experienced when a partner dies and this includes the lack of sex and sexual intimacy, at a time when you may crave physical comfort.
The hormones released by desire and sex are also a way to ease the pain of loss, as well as a distraction from the emotional distress and a chance to feel 'alive'.
Some people report feeling all consumed by the need to have sex with someone - and that can come with feelings of guilt and shame.
It wasn't long before Nicky got lucky on the website and met an 'incredibly kind' woman.
Nicky says: 'We arranged a dinner date where I invited her back to mine for coffee and one thing led to another.
'She thanked me for being open, and told me she'd be honoured to help me feel something other than grief.
'She also reassured me that Andy would want me to rediscover my sexuality.
'As we moved to the bedroom, she noticed his picture and said what a beautiful photo it was.
I felt his presence as we had sex
Nicky Wake
'She added, 'If he were here, I'd have happily slept with you both.'
'She gently reassured me again not to feel guilty.
SEXUAL PRESENCE
'I don't believe in a literal afterlife, but I felt his presence as we had sex. I often do, especially in moments of transition.
'This felt like a step into a future I hadn't imagined, one he'd absolutely support.
'I could almost hear him say, 'You deserve joy. Just don't forget me.'
'I never will. He was my soulmate.'
Nicky now identifies as a polyamorous bisexual and said she has a few ongoing relationships with multiple people.
She advises any other widowers to not live the remainder of their lives with regrets as 'life is short and precious'.
Nicky, who has founded a dating website specifically for widowers called Widows Fire, added: 'Above all, be open about your situation and your desires.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
Bruce Springsteen faces the end of America
Photo montage by Gaetan Mariage / Alamy When I met Patti Smith soon after Donald Trump's first victory, she said she'd ended up next to him at various New York dinners over the years, back in the Seventies, when he was pitching Trump Towers. 'We were born in the same year, and I have to look at this person and think: all our hopes and dreams from childhood, going through the Sixties, everything we went through – and that's what came out of our generation. Him.' Smith's sing-song voice was in my head at Anfield Stadium in Liverpool on one of the final nights of Bruce Springsteen's Land of Hope and Dreams tour. Springsteen was born three years after Trump and will also have sat at many New York dinners with him. Those with half an eye on the news would be forgiven for thinking that Bruce has been lobbing disses at the president from the stage between his hits, but his latest show is heavier than that: a conscious recasting of two decades of his more politicised music, with a four-minute incitement to revolution in the middle. Here is a bit of what he says: 'The America I love and have sung to you about for so long, a beacon of hope for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration. Tonight we ask all of you who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices, stand with us against authoritarianism and let freedom ring. In America right now we have to organise at home, at work, peacefully in the street. We thank the British people for their support…' Clearly few in the US are speaking out like this on stage, and Trump has responded by calling Springsteen a 'dried-out prune of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!)' and threatening some kind of mysterious action upon his return. Springsteen, the heartland rocker, was never exactly part of the counter-culture, though he did avoid Vietnam by doing the 'basic Sixties rag', as he put it, and acting crazy in his army induction. Yet he has become a true protest singer in his final act. He wears tweed and a tie these days, partly because he's 75 and partly, you suspect, to convey a moral seriousness. When I last saw him, two years ago, I thought I saw some of Joe Biden's easy energy. Well, Bruce still has his faculties. The feeling is: listen to the old man, he has something to say. Springsteen's late years have been something to behold. At some point in the last decade he stopped dyeing his hair and started to talk in a stylised, reedy, story-book voice. The image of the America he seemed to represent shifted back from Seventies Pittsburgh to Thirties California: the bare-armed steelworker became the Marlboro Man, and in 2019 there was a Cowboy album, Western Skies, with an accompanying film in which he was seen on horseback. His autobiography Born to Run revealed recent battles with depression. And it is depression you see tonight in Liverpool – in the wince, the twisted mouth, the accusing index finger; in his entreaty to Liverpool's fans to 'indulge' his sermon against the American administration, delivered night after night, to scatterings of applause. It is a depression I recognise in older American friends who fear they're going to the grave with everything they knew and loved about their country disappearing. But depression is also the stuff of life, of energy. Springsteen has been particularly angry since the early Noughties, since the second Bush administration, but this is his moment somehow, and his song of greedy bankers – 'Death to My Hometown' – is spat out with new meaning in 2025, an ominous abstraction. The father-to-son speech in 'Long Walk Home' feels different in this politically charged world: 'Your flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone/Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't'). A furious version of 'Rainmaker' ('Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad, so bad, they'll hire a rainmaker') is dedicated to 'our dear leader'. As much as I admire Springsteen and seem to have followed him around and written about him for years, the Land of Hope and Dreams tour made me realise I hadn't fully known what he was for. When I saw him in Hyde Park in 2023, the first 200 yards of the crowd were given over to media wankers like me, with the paying fans at the back: every single person I had ever met in London was there, mildly pissed up and whirling about with looks of mutual congratulation. Springsteen had become, to the middle classes and above, a global symbol of right-thinking, summed up by his long stint on Broadway at $800 a ticket. His dull podcast with Barack Obama was the American version of The Rest Is Politics with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell: men saying stuff you want them to say, to confirm what you already think about stuff (Obama was in awe of Bruce). Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Politics was easy for Springsteen when politics consisted of external events happening to innocent people, rather than something taking place on the level of psychology, in a movement of masses towards a demagogue. The job he adopted, back in the Seventies, was to set a particular kind of American life in its political and historical context: to tell people who they were, and why they mattered. His appeal as a rock star always lay less in his words than in how sincerely he embodied them: his extraordinary outward energy, his mirroring of his audience, his apparent concern with others over himself. After 9/11, someone apparently rolled down a window and told him, 'We need you now,' so he wrote his song 'The Rising' from the viewpoint of a doomed New York fireman ascending the tower. A recent BBC documentary revealed he'd donated £20,000 to the Northumberland and Durham Miners Support Group during the strikes of 1984 – rather as he donated ten grand to unemployed steelworkers in Pittsburgh the previous year. His self-made success and songs about freedom were the Republican dream, but when Reagan tapped him up for endorsements it was a right of passage for Springsteen as a Democrat rocker to rebuff them (I'm pretty sure they tried to play 'Born in the USA' at Trump rallies too). He is quoted as saying that the working-class American was facing a spiritual crisis, years ago: 'It's like he has nothing left to tie him into society any more. He's isolated from the government. Isolated from his job. Isolated from his family… to the point where nothing makes sense.' Now, Trump has taken Springsteen's people (the Republicans were doing so long before Trump), and the interior life of the working man that Springsteen made it his job to portray has been exploited by someone else. 'For 50 years, I've been an ambassador for this country and let me tell you that the America I was singing about is real,' he says, possessively, on stage. Springsteen, like Jon Bon Jovi, sees his fans as workers. The distances travelled, the money spent, the babysitters paid for: that's what the three-hour gigs are all about. It is part of the psyche of a certain generation of working-class American musician to consider themselves in a contract with the people who buy their records. It is not a particularly British thing – though time and again I am impressed by the commitment required to see these big shows, especially when so many punters are of an age where they would not longer, say, sleep in a tent: £250 a night for a hotel, no taxis to the stadium, a huge Ticketmaster crash that leaves hundreds of fans outside the venue fiddling with their QR codes while Bruce can be heard inside singing the opening lines of 'My Love Will Not Let You Down'. Yet the relationship between a rock star and his fan is not a co-dependency: the fan is having a night out, but the rock star needs the fan to survive. It is hard to underestimate the psychological shift Springsteen might be undergoing, in seeing the working men and women of America moving to a politics that is repellent to him. He has not played on American soil since Trump's re-election and it is likely that this kind of political commentary there will turn the 'Bruuuuuce' into the boo. A Springsteen tribute act in his native New Jersey was recently cancelled (the band offered to play other songs, and the venue said no). Last week, a young American band told me they won't speak out about the administration on stage because they're not all white and they're afraid of getting deported. It is the job of the powerful to do the protesting, and, like Pope Leo, Springsteen's previous good works will mean nothing if he doesn't call out the big nude emperor now. The Maga crowd will still come to see him, of course, and yell the 'woah' in 'Born to Run' just as loud as everyone else does – perhaps because music is bigger than politics, or perhaps because politics is now bigger than Bruce. Though his political speeches in Liverpool (it's UK 'heartland' only this tour: no London gigs) feel slightly out of step with a city that has its own problems, it seems fair enough for Springsteen to be telling the truth about America to a crowd who's enjoyed their romantic visions of the country via his music for 50 years. But their own personal communion is suspended tonight, and the song 'My City of Ruins' has nothing to do with 9/11 any more: 'Come on… rise up…' In the crowd, a very old man is sitting on someone's shoulders. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play Anfield stadium, Liverpool, on 7 June 2025 [See also: Wes Anderson's sense of an ending] Related
Daily Mirror
an hour ago
- Daily Mirror
50p with unusual error making it worth 80 times its face value
An expert explained how to spot the specific error that makes it so valuable Brits have been told to look out for a 50p coin that could be worth more than 80 times its face value. This coin, from 2017, has sold in the past for as much as £40. But why is it so valuable? It's all to do with a specific error that could be hard to spot. In a video uploaded to social media platform TikTok, an expert called the Coin Collecting Wizard told his followers about the Benjamin Bunny 50 pence piece. The coin was part of a set of four released in 2017 to honour Beatrix Potter's legacy, which also includes Peter Rabbit, Tom Kitten, and Jeremy Fisher. But the Benjamin Bunny coin stands out due to a minting mishap. This error results in Queen Elizabeth II appearing to face the wrong direction. The coin expert said: "Did you know if your Benjamin Bunny 50p has a rotation error, then it's worth a lot more than 50 pence? "So you know what to look for, this 50p error coin is rare all because a part of the design is facing the wrong way." He explained: "The error that's left the Queen's head in a different direction, on the obverse, to the design of Benjamin Bunny on the reverse will have happened in the minting process. "When you flip it round, the Queen should be facing up the same way as Benjamin Bunny. If the Queen is facing any other way, then you have found a very rare rotation error worth money." This coin is still in circulation so it could be hiding in your change. "Error coins are still legal tender, so long as the original coin is still in circulation too," he continued. "That means you could easily come across one in your change. Oftentimes, error coins will sell for a lot more than their face value. "So this is definitely something you need to be looking for as it can be easily missed. So next time you come across the Benjamin Bunny 50p, flip that rabbit over and check the Queen. Good luck." Last year, The Sun highlighted a case where one of these coins fetched £40 - a whopping 80 times its face value of 50p. And in 2021, another coin from the same batch was reportedly snapped up for an eye-watering £255 on eBay. At the time of reporting, a graded edition of this coin was listed on eBay for £312.72.
Daily Mail
8 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Ulrika Jonsson admits 'crippling anxiety, fears and self-loathing' led her to alcohol as she marks one year of sobriety
has opened up about her journey to sobriety in a powerful open letter, revealing that she has now been alcohol-free for over a year and it has transformed her life in ways she never imagined. The TV presenter, 57, made the shocking admission that 'I can't do this any more,' was the life-saving message she sent to a friend on June 5 last year - a moment she now credits with rescuing her from the depths of addiction. She wrote in The Sun: 'It was a hangover day, much like any other, really. I sat on the sofa with my liver and brain pickled in equal measure, wrapped up in the blanket of shame, and something made me reach out for help.' The star, described herself as a 'binge drinker who drank to black out,' and detailed how her addiction crept in slowly. Although she didn't drink daily, lose her job, children, or end up in prison or get arrested, the toll it took was significant. From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the DailyMail's new Showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop. The TV presenter, 57, made the shocking admission that 'I can't do this any more,' was the life-saving message she sent to a friend on June 5 last year - a moment she now credits with rescuing her from the depths of addiction Ulrika admitted to drinking for the wrong reasons - to numb her 'crippling anxiety, to escape, to disappear and extinguish my self-loathing'. She also spoke openly about the shame and secrecy that surrounded her behaviour. From drinking neat rum in a cupboard at 11am to waking up with no memory of the night before, she revealed that her drinking quickly spiralled out of control, but remained hidden behind a polished exterior. Despite having a 'quite unremarkable' drinking history on paper, Ulrika revealed the emotional damage was profound. 'Alcoholics come in all shapes and sizes and many live among us in plain sight,' she wrote, adding that her family history made her vulnerable. 'I wasn't cut out for life,' she confessed, recalling how alcohol became her coping mechanism. 'I wanted the full anaesthetic effect… I just wanted the feelings to stop.' Since giving up alcohol, Ulrika says she has learned more about herself in the past year than in the previous five decades and added how she has had a 'spiritual awakening' and found an 'inner peace'. While family and friends have celebrated the milestone, with her daughter even offering to take her out for a meal, Ulrika admitted the lead-up to her one-year anniversary was filled with anxiety. She now lives one day at a time and accepts that recovery is a lifelong journey. It comes after Ulrika marked one year sober, sharing an emotional Instagram post about the milestone on Thursday. The TV star shared before and after photos, captioned 'sober' and 'drunk' as she told her 204k followers that 'the journey goes on.' 'Today I'm marking 1yr of sobriety,' Ulrika wrote. 'No fanfare, no medal, no trophy. The journey goes on. 'A huge thanks to all those beautiful people who have supported me; understood me; scooped me up and handled me tenderly and without judgement; who nudged me in the right direction; who made me laugh and helped me shed the crippling shame.' She paid tribute to her four children Cameron, 30, Bo, 25, Martha, 20, and Malcolm, 16, and apologised for the concern she has caused them over the years: 'Thank you to my kids for their support; for having faith in me after I must have worried them so.' 'For close friends for their patience and belief. My sobriety will continue to be my priority. Turns out it IS possible to teach old dogs new tricks. Alongside the before and after snaps, Ulrika shared a childhood photo of herself as well a poignant reminder of 'this day last year'. In December Ulrika marked her six months sober milestone, as she credited her loved ones for helping her get this far. In her post, the former Gladiators star shared a picture of herself presently as well as an older snap of herself 'under the influence of alcohol', which she admitted that she previously 'couldn't bear' to look at. 'A huge thanks to all those beautiful people who have supported me; understood me; scooped me up and handled me tenderly and without judgement, she captioned the post Alongside the before and after snaps, Ulrika shared a childhood photo of herself as well a poignant reminder of 'this day last year' Detailing her road to sobriety, Ulrika penned: 'Today I am 6 months sober. On the 5th June 2024, I had the gift of desperation and reached out for help. I no longer recognised myself and I surrendered. Referring to the image where she was 'drunk', Ulrika added: 'Pic. 2: is of me in the midst of the madness. Another drunk moment. At first I couldn't bear to look back at pictures of myself under the influence of alcohol. The cloak of shame was too heavy a burden. 'But now I look at those images and feel pity and sympathy for that girl - she desperately needed to be scooped up; held tightly and helped. Not shamed or judged. She was quite, quite broken and had no idea there was another way.' Concluding her post, she shared: 'There is so much more to say - and I will say it in time. I'm still very much at the beginning of my journey but my life has changed in a beautiful way. It's a spiritual thing. One day at a time….
