In this diary and in the comments, I want to discuss same-gender relationships as the messy and real things they are.
I hope we who live them can do this from the inside – meaning, from our varied perspectives and lived experiences.
I hope we can do this without focusing on or worrying about how heterosexual people might see or interpret or translate us.
Please follow me below the fold ...
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In 2009, in a diary here on dkos, I wrote:
Every time I read something that makes glowing political objects of our families and relationships, I squirm inside...
We are supposed to show how loving and caring we are in order to prove our political case.
As with various sorts of political objectification of an oppressed group, we implicitly have to prove that we are nearly perfect in order to stave off a view of us as deviant.
In that diary, I wrote that I have been in an abusive lesbian relationship. This is true, and it is an ugly lived truth that has no place in political efforts to show how wonderful our relationships are in order to win acceptance from straight people. That relationship was perfectly acceptable-looking on the outside – and horrific behind closed doors. It was my first relationship with a woman.
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It wasn't until I got away from that horrible relationship that I took a real swim in the lesbian dating pool.
I dove into that pool out of a sense of pent-up desire. I had been looking for someone before I met the woman I was with for those awful seven years. She wasn't who I had been looking for. But despite her carefully crafted violence, she didn't destroy the desire in me, the part of me that was seeking.
I suppose I should be embarrassed to admit in public that I met someone on craigslist “women seeking women.” I just … I didn't know at the time that it was supposed to be the dregs of the dating pond. I just knew it was free and seemed to have a lot of activity where I live.
I got lucky – and not just in the obvious sense. I got a response to a 4am craigslist post that led into the most passionate, sexually-spiritually-emotionally intense connection with another human being that I had had up to that point. It was love. It was desire.
It lasted a traditional, transitional, six whole weeks (This was, by the way, a tradition I was unaware of at the time).
Then one of her exes came to town to visit. And it turned out that she was deeply emotionally entangled in that relationship though they had been apart for three years. (Yes, another lesbian tradition I didn't know about.)
And so the gorgeously open connection between us where deep-level communication flowed so beautifully and so easily suddenly closed – hard. It took me more brain power than it probably should have to get what was going on. What can I say? I was naive. But I finally figured it out – and we ended that part of the relationship.
We did sleep together after we stopped being a couple, even as I explicitly resumed my search for the real connection I desired. I had no idea at the time that this, too (sleeping with the ex as “just friends”) is yet another time-honored tradition in the lesbian community. I just felt like this was the best sex I'd ever had and I didn't want to give it up just because we couldn't be together in the girlfriend sense.
And I was still seeking.
When I emerged from the deep end of the lesbian dating pool some months later, I had learned more than I'd expected to learn. I escaped some of the worst of it, I think, because I am a relatively odd duck, and the garden-variety “I am easygoing and like camping and sunsets” approach doesn't appeal to me. I was selective. But being selective didn't completely insulate me.
Between that ugly abusive 7-year relationship and then what I had experienced and heard about in the dating process afterward – it gave me a lot to try to understand.
Satire is one of the tools I use to learn and to vent. So I began writing satirical personal ads about what I had experienced, observed, and heard about in other women's relationship stories.
Here's the first one I wrote:
Am I looking for you?
I’ve been around the block a time or two and learned what I really want in a woman. Are you her? Or she?
The first thing I love in a woman is her ex. I don’t know why, but there’s something just so irresistible about a woman who can’t get over a previous relationship, but is still looking for love (or … whatever) with someone new. It just piques my interest and, I must admit, kinda turns me on.
My next favorite thing in a woman is game-playing skill. If you can’t play, you won’t win, so bring it on. Let’s mess with each other’s heads and hearts until at least one of us is too exhausted to have sex anymore and you have to sleep on the couch in the dwelling place we reluctantly share!
I also appreciate a woman who doesn’t really know what she wants or why she wants it. Self-awareness is for sissies, and I don’t like sissies (femmes are fine, though).
I’m also looking for a woman who doesn’t know how to communicate directly, or does know how but just doesn’t want to. I relish the thrill of confusion that comes from not knowing what the hell is going on half the time. That confusion is like the spice in the food you cook and leave out for me for two hours as a way to tell me you wish we could start seeing other people, or maybe that you want more sex or are feeling emotionally needy or need more space or.. I don’t know, it’s just hot. Well, the food is cold by now, but the lack of direct communication, that’s just hot.
Speaking of spice, please let me be your therapist! The more unresolvable emotional issues you have, the better as far as I’m concerned. Life would be so boring without issues. Let’s meet and compare favorites.
I’ll be obsessively checking my email after posting this!
The above is reprinted from the Honest Lesbian Personals section of ThatzEffedUp.com, which also houses the rest of the satire personals I've written.
I really don't know what I'd do at this point in my life without satire as an available tool.
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As I was searching, I had also found an online friend. She lived in a city many hundreds of miles away from me. She informed me right away that we were only going to be friends. This made sense to me – in addition to the distance, she was still getting over the effects of a relationship that had ended three years prior.
We began an intense daily email dialogue. Within ten days, we had a relatively nasty fight. Something felt off to me in the discussion and I got into fight mode. She got … irritated. She told me she needed to take some time, and withdrew to think over whether she wanted to continue the conversation. After a couple of days, she decided to go ahead with it. We resumed.
She went out of the country and out of email range for three weeks. She returned to learn that I had slept with my 6-week-ex. She tried, and largely failed, to avoid sharing her inner instinctive “WTF ARE YOU THINKING MICHELLE ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?” response. But she learned that in contrast to her past experiences, I didn't have a problem with what she called “hardball” and what I call truth telling. In fact, I liked it. A lot.
In one of the many threads of our dialogue, she asked what love is to me. I described it. She replied that such a thing seemed extraordinarily unlikely to her. She told me that what I described would require a level of vulnerability and trust that goes absolutely contrary to survival in this society. She questioned whether it would be possible to sustain such a relationship and function in this society.
I acknowledged that her questions were relevant and real. But, I told her, this is what I desire and I'm not going to settle.
My friend was glad I wasn't going to settle. And she persisted in her offers of stark truth and critical questions.
A little under three months into our email dialogue, she told me she thought she might be attracted to me. Well, actually, she didn't tell me that. She told me something that made no freaking sense, and I responded with my own garbled confusion, and we went a few rounds of “Huh??!” and “What?!” before it got clear. We were both trying very hard not to impose on each other.
Finally, we somehow managed to transcend our mutual Aquarian tendencies and get to it. Based only on email correspondence – no pictures, nothing else - we were drawn to each other beyond friendship. We decided to see where it would lead.
A few weeks later – another round of confusion between us. This time it included enough stress for me that I found myself telling my parakeet that I wanted to go live in a cave somewhere away from every other human being on the planet. That particular evening was made even more delightful when my 6-week-ex called, not sober, and suggested we sleep together again. I needed a friend; my ex, however offered a booty call (for the record, I said no).
It turned out that my email-friend-turned-relationship had realized she was in love with me, didn't understand how she could feel that way given the circumstances, and didn't want to freak me out. As it turned out, I loved her also.
We expanded to phone calls – but still no photos. We wrote and talked daily. We discovered the joys and frustrations of email and phone sex. We did the STD test thing. She was in a 6-month work contract and the distance began to wear on us. We communicated. We struggled. We fought. We communicated more.
We decided to get married before we had met in person or seen each others' pictures. Our friends understandably thought we were nuts. We knew we were right in our decision to marry. We could feel each other energetically before we had physical contact. We have whole realms of connection and communication that there are no concepts for in the dominant cultural system.
We finally exchanged photos and were delighted. She visited me three times and we didn't leave the house for each four-day stretch.
She finally came home to me and us. We were crazy with need at that point and fought for three days straight before she got here. Then we barely made it from her car to the bed when she finally got here after an all-night drive.
We married each other in a private ceremony – just us - in a physical place that we both find beautiful.
This is our marriage, on our terms; that the state doesn't recognize it has no bearing for us in what this is.
We've experienced how incredibly well we move together in all aspects of everyday life – we're amazingly compatible in a multitude of small and large ways in the day-to-day. And our sexual energy is beyond intense and goes into layers of reality that aren't visible in this cultural system.
We've also had more fights, more struggles – many quite intense. Each of us has our particular learned modes of self-protection. Each of us has our specific learned ways of surviving alone (even when in a relationship) within the horror of this society. We clash sometimes. We learn. We've started the process of learning how to move not as two individuals, but as a collective -- as a “we.”
We're still learning. We will be learning for the rest of our lives together.
Last month, there was some truly virulent homophobia on this site that came onto my radar. In response to the underneath dynamics of the situation, I decided to place the beauty of my connection with my wife in the face of the individual who was offering the ugly. The comment I posted for this purpose included this piece:
...Ours is not an unreal or fairy tale love. We struggle. We fight sometimes. We have to identify and correct the damage we've each sustained living without each other for the decades we were apart. This love is real and grounded and not always easy.
The beauty in our connection is very real and incredibly pervasive – and at the same time, it's messy and raw, and certainly not static perfection. We (my wife and I) have rough edges and uncomfortable truths in our individual histories and in our collective present.
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Of course, I'm just one person. I'm looking forward to expanding outward in the comments section. So my question to all of you is:
What have your experiences been?