I met the love of my life on a dating site… but after my husband’s death to cancer all I get on the apps now are sex pests and married men who want to boost their ego with a sleazy affair

Perched by the window of her cosy Cumbrian home, widowed mother-of-two Karen Whybrow tries to spark up a conversation with a man she’s just matched with on Hinge.

The 45-year-old gazes out at the rolling waves of the Irish Sea from her living room as she waits patiently for his reply on the popular dating app. 

Then it comes – but it’s not what she hoped for; it’s another one-worded answer. Karen’s heart sinks as she tries in vain to get her match to open up before he then ‘ghosts her’ completely, ignoring her messages. 

It’s not the first time this has happened to Karen, who’s been trying for the past three years to find love on apps like Bumble, Hinge and website Match.com since her husband Ben lost his battle with bowel cancer in 2017.

‘Dating apps are dying. It’s a numbers game. You have to wade through so much s*** to get anybody who is kind of worthwhile,’ says Karen. ‘You’re leading with open questions and trying to build that rapport and get the conversation going but you’re just getting a “hi” back. It‘s just disheartening.’

Widowed mother-of-two Karen Whybrow is pictured with her children. Karen has been trying for the past three years to find love on apps like Bumble, Hinge and website Match.com since her husband Ben lost his battle with bowel cancer in 2017

Karen Whybrow with her daughters Georgia, 11 (left), and Harriet, 7 (right). The widowed mother has been opening up about her nightmare dating app experience after the loss of her husband, Ben

Karen Whybrow pictured on her wedding day with her late husband Ben Whybrow, at Lake Windemere in Cumbria

Even when the chat does flow, it’s ended in disaster. Much to Karen’s dismay, some turn out to be married men ‘trying to boost their ego’ with a sleazy affair. While others she’s paired with are lecherous sex pests. Some have even pretended to be widows in a desperate attempt to win her over. 

‘One guy I exchanged numbers with rang me up one evening blatantly drunk and started with crude, inappropriate sex chat telling me what he’d “do to me”. This was on a Sunday evening while I was trying to put the kids to bed. It was f***ing ridiculous,’ she adds.

But Karen knows online dating can work. She found the love of her life, Ben, back in 2008 after returning from a riotous weekend at Glastonbury. The pair came together on the MySingleFriend website founded by TV presenter Sarah Beeny, emailing one another late into the night before meeting and falling in love.

They married three years later and went onto to have two girls together, Georgina, 11, and Harriet, seven, But tragically their love story was cut brutally short after Ben was diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer in April 2016.  He died in August 2017.

Karen, who lives with her two girls at their coastal home in Seacale, Cumbria, says returning to the dating scene has been tough and left her with mixed emotions.  

‘I was trying to put myself out there but you have all those feelings of guilt before you’ve met anyone because you feel like you’re betraying your dead person,’ says Karen.

‘Then you have also got to bloody tell these morons that your husband is dead. You’ve got to go through that process of saying my husband died and then people have ghosted me after I told them my husband is dead.

‘It’s tough. It makes you more vulnerable because you are a widow. People have images of who a widow is. It’s just an extra vulnerability… [But] it has made me more resilient. I can do this. I am worthy of finding that person.’ 

Karen is pictured with her husband Ben a month before he was diagnosed with cancer and their daughter, Georgia

Karen knows online dating can work. She found the love of her life, Ben, back in 2008 after returning from a riotous weekend at Glastonbury. The pair came together on the MySingleFriend website founded by TV presenter Sarah Beeny, emailing one another late into the night before meeting and falling in love

Karen was six months pregnant with her second child, Harriet, when Ben started to feel ill and noticed blood in his poo. It was during a visit to their GP that doctors broke the devastating news about his cancer.

Then aged 38, Ben was rushed into treatment, enduring fortnightly chemotherapy with ‘hideous’ side effects.  A heavily-pregnant Karen would dash across the hospital from oncology to maternity, often in a chaotic daze.

Then, in July 2016, Karen gave birth to Harriet by emergency caesarean before her little girl was rushed into neonatal care. A few hours later, Ben was forced to go to the other side of the hospital to have chemotherapy.

‘Harriet was in intensive care and she wasn’t breathing properly when she came out. She was in neo-natal and Ben went across the other side of the hospital to have chemo. It was awful,’ says Karen. 

Ben remained determined throughout his treatment, refusing to believe he would be beaten by his cancer. 

‘Ben always believed he would be the one exception. It’s how he processed it all. That wasn’t going to happen to him, that’s what he thought,’ adds Karen. 

But after running into problems and delays with his chemo in Christmas of 2016, his cancer came back ‘with a vengeance’ in January. 

It led to him undergoing 12 weeks of aggressive radiotherapy treatment which left him weak and a former shell of the once-proud rugby player he used to be.  

‘It was horrendous in its brutality. I watched the person I loved, the father of my children, disappear before my eyes. He became a shadow of himself in a matter of weeks,’ Karen says. 

Karen Whybrow, 45, of Seascale, Cumbria has been looking for a new start following the tragic death of her husband, Ben, in 2017

Karen, who lives with her two girls at their coastal home in Seacale, Cumbria, says returning to the dating scene has been tough and left her with mixed emotions

Karen retrained as a life coach and now helps others cope with the grief and the trauma of losing a loved one. But there are still moments that Ben’s death catches her off-guard, even now six years on. She is pictured enjoying a swim

‘During this whole process the radiotherapy was doing bugger all. The tumour was just taking over. Ben was in severe amounts of pain. It was a complete bloody nightmare.’

Tumours had already spread from Ben’s bowel to his lungs and live. 

In a last-ditch effort to try and stop the cancer from spreading further, Ben was placed on another bout of emergency chemotherapy. 

‘I rocked up wheeling my dying husband with a baby strapped to me to the chemo ward to then be told I wasn’t allowed my baby in there,’ recounts Karen. 

‘I just completely lost my s*** and went crazy at them. I wasn’t going to stay there all f***ing day with them. I just wanted to stay and make sure he was comfortable.

‘I wasn’t going to set up a nursery or anything. But they wouldn’t give him anymore chemo because at that point it would potentially kill him.’

Days later, Ben suffered a catastrophic bleed and was taken to hospital where Karen was told he would die. 

In a desperate situation, Karen – cradling baby Harriet – was asked by a paramedic whether she would like them to resuscitate her husband if he went into cardiac arrest.  

‘My whole being is screaming at me: “say yes, say yes”. The reality is he is dying and it is happening much quicker than either of us are prepared for. “It’s not like it is in the movies and he is in a bad way,” the paramedic explains, as tears fall from my cheeks onto our daughter’s face,’ Karen says. 

Arriving in hospital, Karen says she and Ben ‘argued’ over the ‘do not resuscitate’ rule. The tearful mother-of-two knew it would mean even more excruciating pain if he was resuscitated which she simply didn’t want her husband to endure. 

‘All while this was going on, there was a woman in the bed opposite who had tried to kill herself – she was there wanting to take her life and there’s me having an argument about not resuscitating my husband… It was hideous,’ Karen adds.  

On August 3, 2017 Ben finally succumbed and died – less than a month before his 40th birthday. It was a devastating hammer blow to Karen, who now had two young girls to bring up alone. 

Karen has opened up about the tragic loss of her husband who died from bowel cancer after a year battling the illness

As a way of processing her loss, Karen went through counselling – which failed to help – before then finding herself a grief coach who helped turn her life around

‘I struggled the most when the girls were in bed. Nighttimes became my nemesis. The evenings would stretch out ahead of me and I was taunted by memories of what I would be doing with Ben if he were still alive. I tried to lose myself in glasses of red wine. Everything becoming uniform – no peaks and troughs, just flat,’ she says.

‘I came to realise this half-life of survival was not how Ben would want me to be living. He would want me to be thriving and enabling our girls to do the same. Something had to give and that was me. I had to face my fears, my feelings and rebuild our life.’

As a way of processing her loss, Karen went through counselling – which failed to help – before then finding herself a grief coach who helped turn her life around. 

Karen retrained as a life coach and now helps others cope with the grief and the trauma of losing a loved one.

But there are still moments that Ben’s death catches her off-guard, even now six years on. 

‘I carry my grief with me just like I carry my love for Ben with me. I have seen with my own eyes how fleeting life really is, and it gives me the strength and desire to be better. I grieve for what I’m missing, but I’m so grateful for the love and life I had with Ben,’ she says. 

On Sunday, Karen launched her new book, the Luna Manifesting Journal, which helps other people cope with loss. She is also setting up her new life coaching website, www.karenwhybrow.com

She adds that her memory of Ben – and their dream wedding at the shore of Lake Windemere in 2011 – are things she’ll forever cherish. 

‘Ben was awesome. He was amazing. He had a really good sense of humour and was so funny. He would do anything for anyone. He was really kind and generous,’ she says.

Asked what Ben would think about her nightmare experience in the dating app world, Karen chuckles and says: ‘He’d say it doesn’t matter – none of them are good enough for you anyway. You’ve already had me!’

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