Dear John, I Love Jane

by Candace Walsh;Laura Andre

  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 separ
ated 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.

  The female lead singer held center stage, but I found my gaze moving to the left, where the real force behind the band pounded out chords. Cheryl was dynamic; she played and sang with such passion and intensity, I couldn’t look away. There were two other players: a male drummer, and a guy who played violin and mandolin. I kept my eye on the guitarist. At the break, I went up and talked to her. I told her we’d be playing there next weekend. I was trying to figure out if she was gay or straight. It seemed like we were flirting, but I couldn’t be sure. She laughed at the idea of playing loud music in a bookstore and said something about being careful not to disturb the dictionary-browsers that made me laugh right back. I stayed for the whole show but didn’t have the nerve to approach her again after they were done.

  The following Saturday, when I saw her from the stage as I played my drums, I was elated. I kept asking my band mates if they thought she might be attracted to me. They were pretty sure she was. Cheryl played it cool and said she was just coming to check out the music, but it wasn’t long before I knew—and she will occasionally confess when we recount this tale—she came back for me.

  I probably would have married Cheryl right away had that been an option. We started building a life together from our first date on. One thing that works for us as a couple, I think, is that we’re in different fields—so we each bring something of our own to the table—but we complement each other and share a set of core values. At my house, when I showed her what was left of the record collection and told her there was much I missed, she assured me I would get back everything I had lost. As luck would have it, she’s a collector by vocation, a record producer in the music business, and her collection even then was by far much bigger than the one my ex carted off—and it’s grown exponentially over the years. She, in turn, couldn’t believe her good fortune in meeting a woman who actually cared so much about records. To make things even sweeter, we found that we had remarkably similar taste in music. She’s a whip-smart historian of tunes—a walking encyclopedia with a detailed knowledge of artists, bands, and records across all genres. The preservation and archive work that she engages in is actually quite similar to academic endeavors. I learn from her, and she opens my ears to new sounds. She’s also a talented writer, with a regard for the written word that matches my own. We both have deep respect for what the other person does, and we always root for one another to be as creative, motivated, and energized as possible.

  In terms of gender roles, I’m definitely more of a femme, whereas she inclines toward masculine qualities—in a rock ’n’ roll kind of way. I like dresses, makeup, and heels. She prefers jeans, tour T-shirts, and sneakers. She’s athletic. I throw like a girl. We tease each other about our differences, but they don’t become barriers between us. At first it troubled her that my name hearkens back to my failed marriage, but I believe I’ve made it my own, and she understands. She doesn’t want me to take her name, something she might very well ask if she were a he.

  Quite frequently I forget we’re in a socially stigmatized group. We live in greater Los Angeles, a place where same-sex couples don’t stand out as much as they do in other parts of the country. When we’re out in public, though—whether for a walk in our neighborhood or on a city street—if we hold hands or show affection, we have to be aware of our surroundings. An approaching car or stranger can feel hostile. Because I spent so much of my life unconsciously benefiting from heterosexual privilege—and because when I’m out on my own I am probably perceived as straight, as femmes often are—I continue to be surprised and deeply wounded by disgusted looks and the occasional comments when they occur. Straight couples, when they attract attention at all, tend to be applauded and celebrated. Mostly, they’re invisible, just part of the way things are.

  Same-sex couples like us have to fight to claim the privileges straight ones typically take for granted. Just getting people to take you seriously as a couple can be a challenge. On more than one occasion, Cheryl has had to deal with men who want to know if I have a boyfriend because they think I’m straight—I’m not with a man, so I must be single. The labels available to us when we first got together didn’t help. Acquaintances might identify us as roommates or friends, and it was often hard to tell whether people fully got the reality of our connection. Even those who said girlfriend, partner, or life partner often seemed to do so in scare quotes. Coming out was a seemingly endless process.

  We’ve committed to one another in a variety of ways. The year after we met, we exchanged wedding bands we’ve worn ever since. We contemplated a ceremony but couldn’t decide what such an event would add to our relationship. When San Francisco issued same-sex marriage licenses in 2004, we decided against taking the plunge because it seemed improbable that these unions would withstand dissolution—they didn’t—and we didn’t want to ride that roller coaster. The next year, the state of California granted virtually all the legal rights of marriage to domestic partners, and we registered as such. This gave us tax benefits, and required a bit of paperwork, but otherwise, it wasn’t such a big deal. It seemed like a separate-and-partially-equal category.

  In 2008, during that brief window when same-sex marriage was declared legal here in California, we finally tied the knot. We were too busy doing what we do best to put time into wedding planning; and with our large circle of friends, there was no way to imagine a simple ceremony. Having gone through that drill once before, and having given much thought to the way the Wedding Industrial Complex puts couples through their paces, I didn’t see the point in making too big a fuss over the display. Marriage, I knew from long experience, takes place in the details of everyday life. We signed papers across the table from our minister friend and his husband, and then went to see the movie Mamma Mia.

  Among the many perks of being a married couple, getting to claim the word “wife” is a daily source of pride. Not only is it far preferable to labels like “partner,” “girlfriend,” and “lover,” it instantly clarifies our status when we refer to one another out in the world. When I say “my wife” t
o someone I’ve just met, it’s like coming out on speed—they have to get it right away. I’ve also noticed a profound shift in how I think of the meaning of “wife.” Whereas when I was married to a man, the word seemed like the necessarily subordinate half of a male/female-oriented binary, now it is much more powerful—not genderless, but unmoored from a system that privileges men—and, on a day-to-day basis, it’s a cause for celebration. In many ways, I’m more of a wife to Cheryl than I was to my ex-husband, and she’s more of a husband to me than he was (although I don’t use that word to describe her). I do most of the cooking and take pleasure in tending to and nurturing her. She manages our budget and keeps the house in check. She has a job that puts her out in the world more than mine; I’m happiest when I’m working at home. She makes more money and gets greater recognition for her work than I do (she’s a two-time Grammy nominee), and she moves in circles of powerful and influential people, where I’m often identified as a “plus one.” Yet I don’t feel diminished by such things that in a heterosexual marriage might be viewed as just par for the course if she were in fact a man. Her power and status aren’t the by-product of gender—the music business is still an old boy’s club—and our household interactions revolve around decided preferences and skill sets, rather than prescribed traditional roles.

  In an interview I conducted with the English novelist Jeanette Winterson for The Paris Review in the late ’90s, I asked her to talk about heterosexuality versus lesbianism. “Men,” she said, “can really get in the way when you are trying to sort out your life and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space.” She continued, “There was a part of me which instinctively knew that in order to be able to pursue my life, which was going to be hard anyway, I would be much better off, either on my own or with a woman. A man would simply get in the way, and I would have to use up energy that I didn’t have to spare.” In my experience, being with a woman does create more space for my life’s adventure, and gives me more energy than I felt when I lived with a man. Even though men are the ones with cultural power and prestige, women are expected to support and protect the male ego in the home. Cheryl and I don’t follow that script. We’re more fully partners. We run alongside one another.