GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

NOVEMBER 13, 1998

Evenings Out

Recipes for reinventing lesbian relationships

Therapist finds that long-term couples don't try to force the 'happily ever after' myth

by Andrea L.T. Peterson

When she set out to discover just what makes lesbian relationships work, San Francisco Bay Area psychotherapist Mary Hall could not have know what she would find, or what it would take to find it.

Hall, whose more than 20 years experience as therapist to lesbians and lesbian couples and whose own long-term relationship experience totals almost 25 years, spent ten years struggling to find the secret formula, the pattern that would emerge to explain longevity in lesbian relationships.

"No pattern emerged," says Hall. But after following four long-term lesbian couples for ten years, she found that like beauty, such things as success, failure, faithfulness, and betrayal are also in the eyes of the beholder. It might not be what you see, so much as how you see it, that most profoundly effects one's contentment meter.

The results of Hall's research on the subject are in her latest book, The Lesbian Love Companion: How to Survive Everything from Heartthrob to Heartbreak (Harper San Francisco).

The light bulb went off for Hall when, after two of the couples ended their relationships, the newly-separated women were telling very different versions of their relationship stories to Hall than they had told her when they were still contentedly coupled.

It would soon become clear to her that what matters is not what happens within a relationship, but how the partners respond to it. How they incorporate events into their lives and into their relationship is a predictor of whether or not the relationship can withstand the shocks and aftershocks of life's not-so-little surprises.

The problem, according to Hall is that the prevailing "happily-ever-after" myth of relationships (the standard against which most, if not all lesbians gauge their own relationships) is not only inadequate, it, in fact, only outlines one of many possible, equally valid plot lines.

"Telling all these [other] stories," she adds, has a healthy positive effect. Her objective: to "de-legitimize the old master epic[s], to shed light" on new alternatives, and encourage new ways of looking at the things that seem to intrude on our happy states of coupledom.

"Lesbians," says Hall, "are so invisible that we rely on those master narratives more than any other group." By way of example, she mentions the "betrayal story." Everyone has heard one, most everyone has experienced at least one—and mostly they follow the same pattern: one partner "betrays" the other and the betrayed partner views herself as a failure, the relationship as failed and over, and the partner as evil incarnate.

But, like the proverbial cat, there is more than one way to skin an indiscretion.

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The trick, says Hall, is in "managing to convert unpardonable betrayals into forgivable misdemeanors." No easy task, especially when there is no place to look for the kind of how-to support that certainly would be welat such

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"How you tell your stories, the stories within your relationship," says Hall, “is a good indicator of how your relationship will fare-whether or not it will successfully weather life's storms. Nothing is ever as easily categorized or clearly defined, argues Hall, as our culture's predominant-and often onlymyths suggest.

"You can choose your own story." she says. Hence, "you can have more control over your own life."

Hall is advocating alternatives--new ways of viewing old situations. Along with this is "preparedness training." Certain things are inevitable in any long-term relationship, she argues. One partner or the other might be distracted by someone or something new, more exciting. Hall suggests what she calls "anticipatory coping."

For example, she says, "Instead of expecting lifelong fidelity, these partners believe it is only a matter of time until the potentially disruptive outsider will show up on their doorstep."

This is not "license," she says, "it is [being] realistic. Most committed [lesbian] couples seem to have weathered non-monogaNANETTE GARTRELL mous episodes. If you have figured out ahead how to cope, you will cope better" should the situation arise.

Marny Hall

"There is no one story," she insists. By championing only one story--that master epic— "all others are wiped out, invalidated." And when couples begin to measure themselves against that master standard, they can only fall short. It's like saying all people are either "white or non-white," she says. These simplistic dichotomies around which the world seems to be organized are "ridiculous," and inadequate.

There are as many categories, “as many nuances" as there are people. And, Hall says, more stories, more categories, alter-

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native stories help all relationships. They create realistic standards for new relationships and they also alleviate the "enormous pressure" on long-term couples to live up to the image of that perfect couple. Allowing only one story confines long-term lesbian couples-"poster couples"-in what Hall describes as "the prison of respectability.

"They are so closeted," in a closet within a closet, "where they can't have fun, where they can't admit to [relationship] problems," where they can't really be fully human.

Hall is the daughter of a psychologist and writer, and the sister of the late novelist Richard Hall. She is equal parts writer and therapist, but she "rests easily in neither [world] and expects to continue to straddle both," exercising her skills through writing and her practice. Though she has written or edited several other books, she says The Lesbian Love Companion "is my life's work."

She added that she felt a need to "write a book the my brother would be proud of." Although her brother died of complications associated with AIDS several years ago, Hall is certain that he would have said 'good job' after reading her recent work. "I fulfilled my mission," she says.

While the subject of lesbian relationships is by no means exhausted in Hall's slim volume, she says of her study and the couples she studied: "I no longer need to follow them. I understand."

She has found the answers she has sought, and she has managed to take her findings and through her book, "offer ways to experience mastery over things we think we have no control over... things that will very likely befall us."

Things which, if we continue to view them from the singular dominant perspective of happily-ever-after, may well mean the end of our relationships.

"I wanted to do a cosmic overview," she explains, "to fit together all the complexities of lesbian love and sex in a way that is both original and empowering." In sharing the "recipes for relationship reinvention" found in The Lesbian Love Companion, she has done just that. ✓

Andrea L.T. Peterson is a freelance writer living in the Washington, DC. suburb of Alexandria, Virginia.