Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women (7 page)

But that quickly became a problem.

Because things did exist, and they were big things, and I was neglecting them. Two children. A home business. A marriage. A house. My parents. My siblings. My garden. My dogs. My own self-care. I started to feel guilty, sketchy—always hiding, sneaking, making up reasons to go out for the night, emailing her from the train on the days I commuted into the city, bringing the phone into the bathroom with me while I got ready in the morning and talking in hushed whispers under the white noise of the running water. I started to hate the feeling of always covering my tracks. I started to worry about getting caught. I started to tire of the double life. I was on an emotional rollercoaster, but not so much one with ups and downs as one with dizzying spins and inversions and sheer drops. After several months of holding on for dear life, I knew it was time to start making some choices and went about the hard work of cross-examining my sexuality and figuring out what this was: a fling, an awakening, a one-time romp in the hay, or the beginning of a whole new life. I was terrified, but ready to roll up my sleeves and unearth my truth.

So I did what any good soul-searcher does: I headed for the Internet.

I looked up everything I could find online and discovered a ton of resources: I ordered books; I read blogs, articles, and medical journals; I joined a chat room; I connected with a therapist who specializes in women coming out later in life (who herself had been through the same thing), and found a weekly group for married women coming to terms with their gayness (apparently we’re everywhere).

I arrived at my first therapy session with tears brimming in my eyes before I even knocked on the door, tears that flowed freely as I spilled my story. She sat before me, this impish mini-lesbian with silver hair cropped close to her head, wisdom and peace emanating from her like a guru, tiny quick mannerisms belying her seventy-plus years of age. She listened with rapt attention, jotted down some notes, and when I was through telling her everything, she leaned forward and said to me, with the faintest almost-wink of a smile, as if we shared a delicious and enchanting little secret:

“Startling, isn’t it?”

Indeed.

From there, we dove into my past and inspected my present (I couldn’t do future just yet). For a while I was fixated on figuring out if I had always been gay but just never acted on it, if this dalliance was an isolated incident, or if I had undergone some sort of a mid-life shift. Eventually I realized I could make a case for any of those explanations, but ultimately it didn’t matter if it had taken the train or a town car. It’s arrived, and what am I going to do about it?

Motivated by the guilt brought on by secret-keeping, my husband wondering why I was so moody, and my lover’s growing discomfort with my being married and closeted,
What am I going to do about it?
rapidly became
How do I tell my husband?

And so one night after the kids were sound asleep, I turned off the TV, turned to face him, and told him exactly what my anguish and distance had been about. I told him I was really confused because I still loved him, but not in
that way
, and had no idea what this meant for me or for us. He wasn’t mad, and he wasn’t shocked. He was understanding and kind and supportive, and instead of heading straight to blame and resentment, we talked about how to move forward from here. Was the marriage over? Or was it just redefined? If so, as what? Did we want an open marriage, or a polyamorous arrangement, or a don’t ask/don’t tell policy? Did my questioning mean we needed to file for divorce immediately? Did “sexual fluidity” mean that I had cruised over to the other side and might just as easily cruise back someday? He made it clear that he didn’t want me to deny or stifle my true self, but that he was just as committed to the non-breakup of our family as I was, and asked if it was possible for these things to exist in harmony, and if so, how? He started therapy. He found a straight-spouse support group, went every week, and created his own network of men in the same situation. We had not been physically intimate for a long time anyway; we agreed to stay that way indefinitely. We had been married nearly seventeen years by then—neither of us wanted to do anything impulsive, and both of us wanted to exhaust every possibility before calling it quits, if that was what needed to happen (which we weren’t even sure was the answer).

Meanwhile, I started comparing—not so much her to him, but my life the way it was presently versus what it would be like with her. I started examining that relationship with a critical eye, and found myself thinking: Do I really want to leave
this
for
that?
Was I willing to trade no sex and stability for great sex and instability? She was fun, but not terribly reliable. She was successful and wealthy, but not happy. She was physically attractive, but not spiritually sound. There was a demanding, controlling quality to her that made me feel resentful and rebellious. I didn’t like her all-or-nothing attitude about our relationship and she didn’t like my not coming out more fully, not leaving my marriage faster, or my need for time and space. She was jealous of my business, my dogs, my children, and my husband. She refused to come to my home because of those things; and I was tired of traveling the hour-plus to hers. Eventually we went from feeling like we had our own secret club to feeling like we were speaking different languages.

The stress and pain of living in secrecy and uncertainty was taking its toll on her and me, our trust, our sanity. When one person is waiting alone on the sidelines tapping her watch and the other has a life so full she feels like she’s going to burst, emotions go horribly awry. Over the course of the year we went from the bliss of new love to the tedium of a long, drawn-out breakup between two inherently incompatible people. As I pulled back, she held tighter, and we spiraled into a cycle of push/pull, break up/get back together, ultimatums, misunderstandings, and drama after drama after drama. Finally it ran out of steam, but instead of sadness I felt freedom.

So now I am in limbo. I am celibate, and introspective, and shell-shocked.

I would love to have waited until I had a more popular, less ambiguous ending to write my story, to be able to say, “and now I’ve left my marriage and have a girlfriend and I’m happier than ever!” or “and then I fell in love with my husband all over again and I’m happier than ever!” I would love to be able to tell you that I have all the answers, or at least a definition or a label for my sexuality. There are days I know I am a lesbian, that I always have been and always will be, but for now I am choosing not to honor that part of myself purely out of a sense of responsibility and loyalty to my family. There are flashes of doubt, when I wonder if she was just a really good seducer (she has a pattern of going after married women, and bragged about her “conversion rate”) and I was in a ready place to do some exploration. There are times I think she was the great love of my life, and other times I thank my lucky stars I didn’t leave the security of my home for the passion of her bed. There are brief moments that I still wonder if my attraction to women was something dormant that came to life, or something brand-new that showed up when she did. (Like I said, “brief.” There is too much evidence pointing more toward
dormant
than
new
, and I know that if I were to find myself single, it would be women I would seek out, not men.)

Today my inner world is a maelstrom of anger and sorrow and loss and relief and chaos as I sort out what it all means. But I don’t have any regrets. Sometimes I feel a happy bittersweet-sad, as if I had been perfectly content with my cup of Folgers every morning (really—it was fine), and then one day I was handed the most delectable, creamy Caffé Vita breve latte, granules of brown sugar melting into the thick velvety foam, served in a gorgeous Italian china mug with handmade almond biscotti on the side—a delightful gift, but one that renders the Folgers, in comparison, pretty much undrinkable. So the sadness is more of a Smokey Robinson “a taste of honey is worse than none at all” wistful, nostalgic sadness than an emptiness or a grief. It’s a feeling that brings me both gratitude and heartache.

On my more melancholy days, I long for the ignorant girl who could swig that black coffee out of a Styrofoam cup and think nothing of it. On my more hopeful days, I know there is a world of designer espresso drinks that I will make my way back to someday. On my still-confused days, I put the whole drink order far back on the shelf and let myself awaken naturally, at my own pace, without trying to decide what I want, what I can or can’t have, what I should do, what I want to do, which is better, what I’m willing to fight for, and—these have been the two most interesting questions of the year—what I can live with, and what I can’t live without.

Over the Fence

Audrey Bilger

I
was thirty-four when I jumped the fence. I didn’t put it that way at the time and only learned this phrase a few months later, when a friend told me a male colleague had used it to ask her if that’s what had happened—if I’d become a lesbian. At first it seemed like a crass expression. Were heterosexual women kept behind chain-links? Was there a line between straight and gay that could only be crossed by leaping? Having lived as a lesbian for a decade and a half now, I understand better where the metaphor comes from. Mainstream culture likes to see things in black and white, with barricades to maintain order and stability. A straight woman who leaves the fold disrupts the pattern and must chart a new course. She has to put up her own guideposts and decide which directions to take.

My adult life so far divides evenly between two marriages and two ways of being a wife. When I got married the first time, I wanted to make an honest woman of myself. I had moved in with this man, and marriage seemed like the way to get back in the good graces of my community. The second time I married, having lived with my wife-to-be for eleven years, very little in the culture supported our union; in fact, forces were conspiring to eliminate this right. The clock was ticking on Proposition 8—the ballot initiative that would amend the California constitution to ban same-sex marriage—and we had a limited amount of time to get legally hitched. Different sets of pressures at radically different moments in history.

As I’ve discovered, marriage is never a purely personal matter between two people only (regardless of their genders). It always involves external approval—a license—from the state, and there are actual barriers erected to keep people in their place. Happily ever after may be out of your control. But if you can learn to jump a fence or two, you might find, as I did, your way to a better life.

“Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?”

This is what my mother said to me on the phone when I announced, in the spring of 1981, that I was moving in with my boyfriend. It’s one thing when you hear a cliché like this as a snide piece of gossip about someone else. It’s quite another when you get it from your own mother.

I thought I had to get married. The cultural script at the time—in Oklahoma, at least, which is where I lived then—said that male/female couples ought only to cohabit after they had signed on the dotted line. That’s why when my future husband and I got an apartment together, less than a year after we first met, we told everyone we were planning to marry. Soon.

I was twenty years old. I had graduated from a rural high school. Many of my peers were already married. Only a handful went on to college. My family believed firmly in a standard script with assigned gender roles. Girls did household chores; boys did yard work. In terms of marriage, one of my friends’ mothers used to put it this way: the husband makes the living, the wife makes the living worthwhile. You got married. You had children. You lived in a house with material goods that signified your level of success. My grandfathers on both sides had been coal miners in West Virginia, and, as first-generation members of the middle class, my parents took social mores seriously.

Conventions can be unbelievably powerful, especially when you’re young. The idea that when you meet a man and form an attachment you ought to get married was so firmly entrenched in my worldview that I didn’t question it. I ignored warning signs—we failed a compatibility test we took as part of our marriage preparation classes, and we thought that was funny—and focused on the things we had in common. We were philosophy majors, and we were both passionate about music. I loved exploring his seemingly vast record collection, and we were at our best when we talked about ideas or listened to tunes.

I debated whether to keep my own name, and we considered hyphenation. In 1980s Oklahoma, all the women I knew had changed their names, and I worried that having different names might be complicated. I decided to make the change. Once you take your husband’s family name, however, you have to confront the dreaded M-R-S. Being called Mrs. made me feel stripped of an individual identity. At the same time, in some circles, I experienced a sense of privilege that accompanied the status of being a straight wife, a membership in a club with other women who had similarly found spouses and who felt proud to have done so. I would eventually come to embrace Ms. as my preferred honorific, but since I shared a name with my husband, there was really no way to enforce this, and I found that few people responded well when I corrected them on it.

The early years of this marriage involved numerous negotiations with the status quo. We liked the idea of gender parity and generally saw one another as equals. It was hard, though, to separate housework from a gendered base. I did the cooking and laundry. We agreed at a certain point that he would do dishes. Even though he was perfectly comfortable doing things like vacuuming floors or cleaning toilets, people would tell me I was lucky to have a husband who “helped out” around the house.

When you’re in a heterosexual marriage, everyone takes an interest in your reproductive life. The longer you’re married without children, the ruder the questions get about why you haven’t had any yet. Married straight couples who don’t want kids are viewed with suspicion. We had a good story for the first few years. We both started a Ph.D. program in English in the mid-1980s, and we said we wouldn’t have time or money for children until we finished up. Being in school gave us a temporary license to opt out of the baby game, and thanks to birth control, we had a choice.

In my studies, I specialized in women’s fiction and joined a faculty/ student reading group that met on late afternoons in lounges on campus to talk about feminist theory and the newly emerging field of Women’s Studies. I analyzed women’s historical oppression and reconsidered the world in relation to gender inequities and other interlocking structures of power and control. As a girl growing up in Oklahoma during the 1970s, my only contact with feminism had been my teachers’ expressed horror at the Equal Rights Amendment. (Men and women would have to share public bathrooms! Women would be drafted!) Feminists, I had been taught, were hostile, angry, unpleasant women. Now I understood that feminists were viewed that way by people who didn’t like the questions they asked.

Toward the end of graduate school, I pulled ahead of my husband. I finished my dissertation before he did, went on the job market, and took a visiting faculty position at Oberlin College. Once I became the primary earner, he and I reconfigured our domestic world. He started taking on more roles traditionally identified with women. He cleaned, cooked, and shopped for groceries. I taught full-time and went through the stress of ongoing job-hunting, conference participation, and getting articles published. We began to feel an asymmetry in our separate spheres and joked at times about his role as househusband.

In the last movement of our marriage, we moved to California, where I had accepted a tenure-track job. Gender issues loomed large in my work life because the small private college where I worked turned out to be extremely conservative, and there were relatively few female faculty members. When I received a hand-lettered invitation to a college-sponsored event addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. [His name] Bilger,” I wrote a polite note asking not to be subsumed under my husband’s name. I couldn’t believe my claim to a professional title—Professor or Doctor, I had earned them both—would be erased by my employer and that my husband would be given top billing. Imagine my surprise when I got back a petulant note from the wife of the president, who had addressed the invites herself, condescendingly explaining that on formal occasions, I’d best get used to being “Mrs.” What had initially seemed like a gauche oversight, a throwback to the pre-1970s, now became the writing on the wall. My job would entail many such unpleasant encounters—with administrators, colleagues, and even students—and this put a strain on my home life.

When I wasn’t dealing with problems at work and the demands that came with being an untenured professor, I had other things to keep me busy. While living in Ohio, for recreation, I had learned to play drums. Next to books and writing, music was still an important part of my life, so when I got out West, I helped put together an all-female blues band. Our lead guitarist was (insert drum roll here) a lesbian. She was more than that, of course, but for the purpose of my story, she was the Catalyst.

If this woman were a man, you would say she was a player. And just like the stereotypical male on the prowl, she enjoyed the challenge of seducing straight women. She didn’t necessarily want to keep them once she got them, but she loved the pursuit. I’m not saying I was helpless in the face of her prowess, but she did a number of things that made me feel desired and desirable, and at that time in my life, I wasn’t getting this kind of attention anywhere else. I fell for her. Hard. I was like an irresponsible teenager. We started seeing more of each other. We played music together. We went running on the track. Step by step, she pried me away from my marriage. I went willingly. As the pursuer, this woman had a masculine energy but she wasn’t a man. She put the moves on me, but because she was a woman, this didn’t feel like aggression.

In other words, I jumped that fence. Here’s how it felt at the time: like my eyes were opened to things I hadn’t seen before. When I began to accept to the possibility of being with a woman, I saw the advantages. The intimacy dance was less about seeking commonalities across a gulf of difference than about figuring out how to manage wavelengths and frequencies that were fundamentally similar.

I broke up my marriage. I contended (and to a certain extent believed in the moment) that this was my true nature, that I’d always been closer to women than to men, and that I was fulfilling a kind of destiny. I hadn’t felt explicit desire for women before this, but I didn’t look too closely at discordant elements in the story because it helped to justify my exit from the marriage. By focusing solely on my shift in sexuality as the barrier that came between us, my ex and I avoided examining the many other things that ought to have separated us sooner.

The day my soon-to-be-ex-husband finished loading his things—including most of the large record collection we had amassed together over the years—into a van and drove away, the woman came over to survey the damage. She said she couldn’t stick around right then because her “ex-girlfriend” needed her help. It didn’t take long before I learned that this girlfriend was still in the picture and that I was going to be the
other
woman. Suffice it to say, that didn’t work out.

In the aftermath of two almost-simultaneous painful breakups, I paused to get my bearings. At this point, I might have crawled back over that fence. Doing so would have certainly been the path of least resistance. I had been warned against being out at work before I got tenure, and it wasn’t easy being a closeted lesbian at a school that was, at that time, antifeminist and, in some corners, deeply homophobic. I had already caught the attention of my coworkers—like the one who tried to find out from my friend if I’d turned gay—and had I started dating men, they probably would have just talked about this as a passing phase. Or, I might have recast myself as bisexual—one of a group commonly identified in derogatory terms as “fence-sitters” by a culture that likes to believe there are only two sides to the sexuality story. I could have played the field(s) and taken stock of my options.

In this suspended and in-between phase, I met Cheryl and found my true compass and sense of direction. We tell the story of how we met as if it were mythic—Meant To Be. We were both playing in bands. She’s a fierce rhythm guitar player, and proficient, as she likes to say, in “things with strings.” I was still with my blues band (we were on our third guitarist at this point). We got a gig at a bookstore where we hadn’t played before, and so two of my band mates and I went there one night to see another band we had heard was good and to check out the scene. We stood in the back, trying to figure out whether we’d need to adjust our sound levels for this room and making comparisons between our band and this one.