Essay:

https://therationalmale.com/2018/10/30/widows-warbrides/

The TL;DR version is this: Women only ‘widow’ for men that made an Alpha impression on them. If their previous Alpha was somehow ‘killed’ and replaced by a lesser man, their hindbrains resist that man’s authority over her while using her previous Alpha as the lesser man’s SMV (sexual market value) benchmark. In the most extreme examples, a woman who’s been forced to accept the authority of a lesser man who defeated her former Alpha will resist him and/or plot revenge for the idealized lover.

Historical accounts and various cultural fiction are rife with this archetypal story. The woman who is married off to a lesser man or becomes the War Bride of an undeserving rival (usually by subterfuge or sinister means) is an archetype because it reflects women’s deepest evolutionary, existential, fear – to have her Hypergamous sexual selection strategy forcibly chosen for her by a man (or men) who are undeserving or are suboptimal breeding prospects. As I mentioned, this is an existential fear for women; anything less than unilateral control over her own Hypergamous destiny is tantamount to rape. The fear is that she will spend her life raising the child(ren) of a suboptimal man.

War Brides

The premise of the War Brides dynamic is thus: Evolution selected for women who could more easily transition psychologically from one dominant male to another. In our chaotic ancestral past women and girls were a commodity to be preserved for a conquering tribe. While men or boys were either killed or enslaved, fertile age women would be preserved as spoils of conquest for superior, invading, men. Simply put, women have reproductive value – men (and often their sons) were mostly obstacles in the way of resource acquisition and those reproductive opportunities.

That may seem like a bleak proposition to a Blue Pill conditioned mind today. We want to believe in some egalitarian dream of humanism and cooperation, but our evolved, ancestral past is responsible for what we are today in terms of base biological and psychological imperatives.