Michaela Lambert found love again after losing her first husband to cancer. Now, she helps others to do the same
WORDS: DANIELLA THEIS
Dating can be a daunting experience. No matter what age you are, having to make yourself vulnerable and speak with people who you’ve never met is scary. But it can feel especially foreign when you haven’t done it for a while.
This is something Michaela Bosquet Lambert – a love and dating coach for women in midlife and founder of Your Second Soulmate – experienced herself.
Her husband, George, with whom she lived in Mauritius with their two young children, sadly passed away from cancer in 2010.
“He got diagnosed with lung cancer at Christmas,” 50-year-old Michaela recalls. “My youngest was about eight months old.
“It was just like the rug had been pulled from under my feet, basically. There was no plan B or anything. So, that news was just like, ‘Oh, my God, what happens next?”
She and George were given a prognosis of a year, but he died only around eight months later, when Michaela was just 37.
“So, then I found myself widowed,” Michaela explains.
For a while, dating was far from her mind.
“As far as dating was concerned, I stayed two years in Mauritius and I didn’t physically date anybody,” she says. “But after the first year, I felt like there was a massive hole in my life. And I knew it was going to be really difficult for anyone to fill that hole.”
Michaela then made the tough decision to move back to the UK for “a fresh start.”
Only then, after a few months, did she first start seriously considering dating again. However she soon found that the dating world was “totally different” from what she remembered in the 1990s, making her feel “lost.”
She did meet people but, she now recalls, nothing ended up quite right.
“I was still dating for chemistry, rather than looking for that long term compatibility,” Michaela says. “And while it was fun at the time, it got to the stage where it was really empty. I was just ending up really confused.”
Ultimately, Michaela decided she wanted to change the way she was dating both for herself and her children, to find someone who could be both a partner and a father figure.
“I was like ‘well, I’ve had my fun now and I’ve got that out of my system. Now, I really want to find love’,” the dating coach explains.
Still, Michaela also sees the time before making the decisi
