A Conversation:

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LONG-TERM LESBIAN RELATIONSHIPS

Soon after announcing in What She Wants that we'd be planning an issue on lesbianism, we were contacted by Jan. She had been thinking about longterm lesbian relationships, of which not much has been written. She proposed that she and several others, who are themselves living in long-term relationships, gather together for an interview.

Excerpts follow from that 2-hour conversation. Everyone spent some initial time discussing feelings about being open with their identities, the conflicts they have about honesty in dealing with others who don't know their private lives, and how difficult it is to maintain two selves: one at work and in the “outside world," and one at home. That schizophrenic, divided feeling is what opens up this conversation.

The names have been changed to protect the women involved,

Jan: How does the schizophrenia in our professional life affect our personal life and our sex life in particular? If I'm feeling real closed up about being a lesbian 70 percent of my day, it's real hard to be open and sexual the other 30 percent. It's been real hard for me. I don't initiate sex very much....There's a way in which I haven't let in all the way that I'm a lesbian. There's a way in which I'm denying it.

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Pat: The whole aspect of sexuality in a long-term relationship...sometimes we pay attention to it and sometimes we don't. We don't have a very sexual relationship anymore. In fact, we have a real affectionate relationship, but it is not very often sexual. Sometimes we worry about that and sometimes we don't care. I don't know how that compares with heterosexual relationships.

Karen: It seems there too the frequency of sex decreases.

Ellen: As you add all the other things you have to take care of-jobs, houses-you have a problem of when, how are you going to have the time. When are you going to have the energy and time together uninterrupted by kids and other stuff?

Jan: I've always attributed it to the progression of relationships, but I don't mean to say that I've accepted it. That's the progression of heterosexual relationships, for one thing, and therefore, maledefined. I'm a better person when I'm all alive, sexually included, not just in work and tasks. I like being well-rounded.

Karen: For me there's a direct correlation between how hard I've been working and involved in tasks and how sexual I can be. If I'm really engrossed in something, that for me is the antithesis of the sexual energy.

Jan: When you start getting these jobs in the world, the traditional world, your time is so controlled. I am appalled at that. Ellen doesn't get any vacation-zilch!-until she's been there a year.

Jan: One of the things that has changed is that when I started to think of lesbianism, it was totally because of the women's movement. Becoming a lesbian was in part because of the women's movement. I'd never heard of it before, and the possibilities had never been posed to, me. I'd never allowed myself to get in touch with the part of me that can be responsive to women in that way. The political reasons don't exist any more [for me]. At this point, I'm a lesbian because Ellen's in my life and I want it to be that way. I think that the fading out of the political impetus is because (being political] is not so much an "in" thing to do anymore....I'm in touch with other parts of my life, other than the political. I like to garden, cross-stitch, sit home and do nothing. I don't have to change the world in my lifetime...just me alone. So that's dispersed my energies, too, that were related to being a lesbian. I, don't know what that

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means, but that's happened.

Karen: Are you saying that the political reasons for being a lesbian, the environment, has changed?

Jan: No. They haven't changed at all. There's every reason, and probably a lot more than I was ever aware of, to have a women-centered life, especially as I see the discrepancies between the things I'm comfortable with and what exists in the world....I keep learning more and more about that. I've known it for a while, but I'm starting to label parts of it now, what about the male system is foreign to who I am and how I want to be. I've also seen that there might be two men in Cleveland who are feminine enough for me to be able to live with...not that I'd choose to. It's just not so black and white and all-encompassing as it once was.

Pat: My political perspective in relationship to lesbianism has changed a lot over the last year. Like having a longer range and larger view. I don't think every woman has to be a lesbian any more, either.... Jan: To be a feminist?

Pat: Right. My period when I felt that way...one of the things that we experience as a lesbian couple is that there aren't that many other lesbian couples. In fact, we don't get very much support and recognition, even among lesbians, for being a couple. There's a lot of pressure not to be. We've been getting some support about our "couple-ness" from heterosexual couples, friends of ours. Both the men and women have pretty much got their shit together. It meets a whole need in our lives that lesbians can't. Ellen: That's true for us.

Jan: I think it is, but it blows my mind to have it stated like that. I never realized that that was what was going on.

Interviewer: In part, I think it's a function of our age. I can't name very many women of our age (30-38) in the lesbian community. I don't know what happens to them-or to our peers in general. But I

FAKURE

photo by Janet Century

think as we get older we do need or want that stability. If "cruising" is the norm, well then, we lose touch, go along with what's cool in our group, and don't pair up.

Karen: There's a lot of tension about that for me. One of Jane's (an influential woman in the feminist community] big political positions now is that couple-dom is the classic way to lose yourself. Her primary political target right now is to do away with heavy-duty primary bonding.

Jan: But Karen, she's not laying that on everybody.

Karen: No, she's not.

Pat: She's speaking for herself. Not only is the younger group of women generally not coupled, but even some of our peer group is not doing that. So there aren't very many couples. We get freaked out sometimes, wondering what we're doing. There are a lot of reasons for the stability of our relationship. It has a lot to do with the other things that we're doing in our life.

Jan: What are some of those things?

Pat: What I'm doing about work and career, getting some of the other aspects of my life together, has a lot to do with the stability of our relationship and the support I receive.

Karen: Making more long-range plans, buying a house. I'm quite sure I wouldn't have been able to take the risk to do some of those things without the anchor of the relationship.

Jan: You're real clear about what it's adding to your lives, both of you, and that not having it would be a disruption of great magnitude.

Pat: I know that when I'm not in a relationship 1 spend a lot of energy taking care of certain needs. At this point in my life I don't want to be doing that. I'm not interested in going through the incredible amount of energy that it takes for people to be constantly revolving through relationships. Nor am I at a period in my life where I want to be alone, celibate, totally self-contained. So being in a stable relationship meets a lot of my needs right now.

Karen: It keeps me more productive. With those set of needs met, I can continue externally meeting other needs that are important to me. But it's a kind of tension, too. I come home at the end of a week and say, "Who are you"?

Ellen: It's making a choice to continually spend time on a relationship instead of taking it for granted. That's how the rest of the world is. You get married and then take the relationship for granted. Then it goes downhill from there. It's hard to keep a balance between work, which is important to you, and also put enough time and energy into the relationship so that it isn't routine. That's the hard one for me. I feel that about every six months I have to stand up and scream and say, "Well, damn it that the garden doesn't get done and the roof still doesn't get fixed. You know, we need two days together."

Jan: Another piece of it is having some space for alone-time, too. I'm not able to add much if I don't know what's going on with me.

Pat: Right. You get too much shitty time and not enough quality time, even for yourself or for the relationship. We get into this sort of routine pattern that doesn't do either of us any good. Actually it sort of numbs us to each other, if we're not careful.

Jan: We still take a great deal of pleasure out of being able to do "tasky" things well together. I've never...when I was married, I did it all! I made the decisions, did the work, and spent the money. It feels real good, even if we're doing tasky things; I love doing them together.

Pat: We've considered living together by ourselves and we've always chosen not to do that for fear of getting too...being too...

Karen: Coupled!

Jan: What does that mean, being too coupled? Karen: I guess for me it goes back to former relationships when it was not structurally too coupled, like living alone together, but that our relationship was young and overly dependent on one another. I guess I fear that in living alone I could fall back into that. I know I don't ever want to get back into a relationship again where my boundaries are lost, where it