Editorial policy

Bylines and pen names

Pages here are signed Hazel Renwick (Editor · the partner's side). That is a pen name for the editorial team of this site, and it is named as one on the about page rather than in small print. A byline here means exactly one thing: somebody is answerable for the page and can be written to about it. It is not a claim of qualifications. We do not attach degrees, licences or professional titles — therapist, doctor, grief counsellor, coach — to an editorial pen name, and we never attribute a sentence to a person who did not say it. The name also claims no bereavement of its own: nobody writing here has been widowed, and no page speaks in the first person about losing a husband or a wife.

The portrait that runs with this byline is an illustration generated with an AI tool, and it carries a visible label saying so wherever it appears. It is not a photograph of a living person and makes no claim about who anybody is.

Marten Elder is a different case, and the difference matters. He is a real person, a widower, and a named contributor — not a pen name, not a byline and not a reviewer. His name is used with his permission. There is no photograph and no likeness of him here, at his choice, and a generated portrait of a real person is something this site will not publish under any label. Nothing appears in his name that he has not confirmed word for word, which is why there is not yet a single quotation from him on this site; when there is, it will carry the date he confirmed it.

How content is produced

Content on Widowed Love is AI-assisted and human-edited. Drafts are produced with the help of AI tools, then reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by our editorial team before publication. The byline is an editorial pen name of that team (see above); we never invent professional credentials.

Sourcing & statistics

Every statistic we publish is verified against a primary source (the original study, government data, or the company's own reporting) and named in the same sentence it appears. The full list lives on our sources page and statistics page. Numbers we cannot trace to a primary source do not get published.

Corrections

Found an error? Email editors@widowedlove.com. We correct factual errors within a week, note the correction on the affected page, and update the page's modified date honestly — it only changes when the content substantively changes.

Ownership & funding

Widowed Love is an independent publication. Some links are affiliate links: if you sign up through them we may earn a commission at no cost to you. Affiliate status never changes a verdict, and every affiliate link is marked.

AI transparency

The images on this site are AI-generated, not photographs, and each one is labelled where it appears. Most of them are drawn illustrations — still lifes, rooms, light — and in the few that contain people nobody has a recognisable face. The single exception is the byline portrait on the about page: it is a generated photographic portrait, it is labelled “AI-generated image” on the page, and it is the face of a pen name rather than of anybody living. We publish no photograph and no likeness of our named contributor, at his choice. We allow AI crawlers to read this site (see robots.txt and llms.txt), and welcome citation of our work with attribution and a link.