SEXUALIZING LESBIANISM

Growing up in the Midwest in a homogonous heterosexual culture it never occurred to me to think of the couple’s living in our community in terms of their sexuality. My attention centered on awareness of their children and families, their farms and crops and their religious affiliations.

I remember being "put off" when my girlfriends began to flirt and date boys. I thought something must be wrong with me. (I knew something was wrong with them!) To fit in I "dated" (or more honestly, became close friends with) a boy. He was the only one in my high school of 100 students who had any interest in psychology, feelings, and esoteric spirituality.

I knew our "relationship" was only a friendship and how it looked to other people was different than it actually was. The safe part of the sham was that it was not sexual. It was the perfect arrangement for me by making me feel like a participant while keeping myself intact.

Then I muddled through the heterosexual mind field trying to find positive feelings for men in my relationships. It was no use. My identity as a lesbian couldn't contain itself any longer. Looking back on my first 30 years I can see that I always loved women. I liked their way of relating, the connectedness I felt, the emotional intimacy our friendships offered. I admired women’s strength and their beauty (inner and outer).

Realizing this made me take a different perspective on the women in my life at that time. They were all identified as heterosexual and had varying relationships with men. But I felt deep love for each of them in my heart. I never thought of our relationships as sexual, because there was no biological element to our connectedness.

I began to want to meet other lesbians to see what my feelings would reveal. I found the same warmth, inclusion and emotionally intimacy in them that I had with straight women. My sexual liaisons grew out of friendship and had a highly charged biological element to them. Still, that was only a part of these relationships. In fact, being sexual sometimes jeopardized friendship. I lost more than one “friend” after the sexual element was introduced.

I was very open with my friends and the world about my love for women and never once got a negative reaction for my choice. Everyone accepted it as a natural expression of my being. I still didn't think of myself as a lesbian, although I was definitely woman-identified gender oriented. I was simply being my true self.

It was a shock to me when I started my psychotherapy practice to find many lesbians who felt people, both straight and gay, thought of their lifestyle only in sexual terms. This was unsettling to me because of my distaste for myopic thinking and labeling. Once people have you pigeonholed, they won’t let you change your mind.

I felt it was a shame they had to divide people up, divide love and friendship into sexual and non-sexual. How could they let such an intimate, personal and spiritual choice be reduced to biology? How did it happen that homosexual desires were taken out of the realm of the ‘ordinary’ to be perceived as existing only in people who are classed as ‘other’ and ‘different’ from the rest of the population? Had our culture’s fear overtaken their perspective?

I began to do some research on this matter and found out the first use of the word ‘homosexual’ was around 1869 and the fifty years that followed was brought under the jurisdiction of the legal and medical professions, and pathologised. The first sexologists tried to explore homosexuality from what they believed to be a humanitarian perspective. They were seeking to find out the ‘truth’ about what makes a homosexual.

Sexologists and reformers from the 1890s onwards tried actively to reform both laws and public opinion. Through links they made with the medical profession they were able to translate into medical terms what had been thought to be a social problem.

This information explained the idea of thinking of lesbians only in terms of biology instead of an integral part of the culture in which we live. I kept on looking for answers and discovered there were many attempts in the late 1800s to criminalize lesbianism. This failed because there were strong feelings of not wanting the matter to be brought to the attention of women who had never heard of such a thing. Thank you Patriarchy!

By this time it was the mid-80s and we had the sexual revolution and gay liberation of the 70s shoulders to stand on. The 70s had seen the beginnings of a public unapologic and fun face of homosexuality. Within a mood of great optimism, those involved in gay liberation began for the first time to define themselves, rather than being defined by others.

Still, society tried to control people’s sexuality by boxing them into categories of acceptable or unacceptable, the same or other. Even today, mainstream society often views homosexuals in terms of sex. They see “other” gender choices from their own as either ‘wrong’ or as sad victims that cannot help their sexual orientation, and therefore deserve compassion and understanding.

I have the understanding of same-sex relationships based on many more levels than simply sexual. I know that the experience of being with women brings with it friendship, companionship, equality in love and partnership and the experience of being understood. Sexuality is only a small part of a healthy lesbian relationship. Not to minimize the importance of a good sexual component in a lesbian relationship, it is only a fraction of a mature partnership.

Maybe that is what was modeled to me when I was growing up. I saw partnerships that were mature and weathered the good times and the bad. I have known the rollercoaster ride of serial lesbian relationships based on lust and eventually not much else. Now, in my more mature years, my identity as a lesbian isn't fooled anymore by sex. I am much more focused on how I work together with my partner, how we respect our differences and similarities and the flow of our friendship and relationship.

I refuse, as a lesbian, to be identified by sexuality alone. Our culture needs to be educated about gender and the many varieties of relationships and choices there are. Perhaps through knowledge and having the experience of knowing people who have made a “different” choice from them, there will be less fear and more real understanding.

LESBIAN MERGING

All couples deal with the dynamics involving closeness and distancing. For lesbians these patterns and struggles can be different as compared to two men or a couple with one person of each gender.

The dynamics unique to the lesbian relationship comprise of both women attempting to maintain an extraordinary level of emotional intimacy while learned societal values create a situation of compelled interpersonal merging. The impact of this on the security of the couple’s formation profoundly effects, intensifies and prolongs the merger of the couple in a lesbian relationship.

Merging often occurs with characteristic frequency in lesbian couple relationships. I am using the term merge to mean a psychological state in which there is a loss of a sense of oneself as individual and separate.

It is helpful to view merging occurring in most relationships to varying degrees. In some relationships, merger is transient and mainly present during times of sexual or emotional closeness. In other relationships, it is a normative preference for intense connection that can include some loss of individuality.

In still other relationships, it is more fixed or permanent and can reach a point of excessive dependency where there is acute tension or anxiety when there is physical or emotional distance, an inability to function effectively without the presence of the other, and multiple self-other confusions in terms of who is feeling what.

It is important to contemplate the effect of sex role socialization on female dependency, negation of the self, and responsibility for the happiness and caretaking of others. From birth, girls are taught these responses to others that forms a mode of relationship functioning that becomes established as a relational style. The quality of the female sense of separation of self and other becomes fluid and not sharply defined.

This absence of clear individual boundaries creates a strong capacity for empathy or the sensing of the feeling reactions in others. It is the basis for the capabilities of nurturing, connecting, and personality blending which enables a profound and vital dimension in relationship intimacy.

Another thing girls learn from an early age and is observable in many women is an acute attunement to the needs and wishes of others as well as a vulnerability to emotional distancing and difficulty with separateness and differences in relationships. These relational capacities and characteristics, duplicated in relationships between women, shape the dynamics of the lesbian couple.

Couples proceed through relationship development. The first stage of couple formation is typically a merge-like period of intense bonding. This phase of union, loss of boundaries and individuality, with its thrilling discoveries of similarity and mutuality of sexual passion and emotional connectedness is heightened in romantic relationships between two women.

Because they each possess the female relational capacities for intimacy and empathy, each is less fearful of boundary loss compared to heterosexual couples and each is less willing to place limits on emotional closeness. The mesmerizing combination of physical similarity, duplicated softness, sexual arousal, and mutual nurturing establishes strongly connected bonding. This creates an interdependence of unmatched intensity and a quality of relatedness distinctly different than in other types of couples.

The importance of this stage in couple formation is it makes possible the continuation of the relationship through the disappointments, disillusionments, and discovery of conflict differences inherent in all relationships. The first stage of merging provides the impetus to change behaviors, to compromise, to solve incompatibilities, and to develop those relationship skills necessary to negotiate the multiple tasks involved in relationship building.

Memory of intense connectedness hopefully makes possible an eventual tolerance and comfort with separateness and difference. Lesbian couples who do not have the experience of intense merger closeness generally have a feeling that something is missing or incomplete.

As lesbian relationships continue, merger connectedness combines with power or control issues. This is typically a period of conflict that includes particular struggles over issues of differences, power, individuality, and dependency. This phase attempts to re-establish individual boundaries and tests the couple’s solidarity.

Although stressful, its potential outcome of accommodation and acceptance of differences and incompatibilities can forge new compatibilities and confidence in the possibility of an ongoing relationship commitment. When ongoing connectedness is joined to repeated experiences of resolution of conflict and difference, the internal experience or feeling of relationship trust and stability is strengthened.

Couples who have the courage to deal with the issues that arise during this period make it possible for later stages of commitment and re-commitment based on more individuality and separateness. Those who deny differences and avoid rather than resolve conflict, tend to form unhealthy relationship systems based on prolonged and entrenched merger.

For them, any change toward decrease in merging is experienced as a “wrenching apart” as if their relationship is disintegrating. Both women typically wish to spend as much time together as possible to maintain their merged connectedness.

With relationship trust and security yet to be established, couple harmony becomes primary and tends to be defined as the absence of difference and conflict. Individual interests, activities, friendships, and often values are relinquished in the service of closeness. Interactions that create distance and are disruptive to closeness, such as the asserting of differences, disagreement, and limit setting, are avoided as the couple tries to maintain stability around merger connectedness. The consequences are individual restriction and limitation and an increasingly isolated and stagnant relationship system.

Difficulty with establishing distance as well as honoring differences and conflict are often recognizable to both women in couple relationships. Attempts at change in terms of increasing individuality and separateness, more open communication, and expression of needs or negative feelings are often responded to with anxiety and fear that these new patterns and behaviors will interfere with the relationship’s connectedness equilibrium.

In order to negotiate increased separateness, both women must be able to tolerate distance and also manage anxiety. To assert individuality, differences must be conveyed in a non-threatening way and not contain meanings of personal inadequacy or threats of impending relationship loss. The couple’s struggle and resolution is rarely absolute. Instead, these themes are worked and re-worked throughout the relationship.

The disruptiveness of compelled distancing often remains a continuing stress in lesbian relationships. When couples do not accept or resign themselves to this fact of lesbian existence, it can play a sizable part in contributing to projections, misunderstandings, and frequent feelings of hurt and rejection.

Couples need to anticipate potential disrupting events. Arranging signals of reassurance before particular triggering situations, planning how each can be responsive to the other in distancing situations, and engaging in prior negotiation regarding their closeness and separateness issues are important relationship strategies.

Lesbian relationships are characterized by two women who each wish the relationship to be central in their lives, who display ongoing attentiveness to each other’s needs, and willingness to devote time and effort to working out difficulties. In spite of the lack of sanction, invisibility, and multiple disruptions by society, it is this relatedness that distinguishes romantic relationships between women—and when it is healthy, forges possibilities of extraordinary connectedness, compatibility, and happiness in a disconnected and alienating world.