Until I was forty-three, I would have said with absolute certainty, “I am not, nor could I ever become, a lesbian. I know exactly who and what I am.” One year later, after 25 years of a contented heterosexual marriage, I fell in love with another woman. I experienced more passion, pain, isolation, and turmoil than I ever thought possible and I began to question who I really was. My journey from denial to self awareness, understanding and acceptance was not an easy one.
I wrote Married Women Who Love Women as a way to deal with my own discovery and to help other women deal with theirs. By interviewing more than 100 women, as well as their husbands and children, and through additional research as well, I found that this phenomenon—married women loving women—was not as uncommon as I had believed.
I also realized that no woman, single or married, is automatically exempt from the frightening possibility that she too might one day realize a dormant sexual awareness that she is lesbian or bisexual.
One of my insights is that many women, like myself, have remained married while also actively loving women. Some are out to their husbands and children, others are not. Apart from a few well-known married women who love women, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf, and Vita Sackville West, married lesbians are a large, but largely hidden, segment of the population. As far as I know, Married Women Who Love Women is the first book written about married women who discover their same-gender preference or recognize long hidden knowledge of it. This book was written for them, and their friends and families, and for all women who have wondered about their sexuality, their marriages, and whether they might be more fulfilled in same-sex relationships. I think it will also fascinate anyone interested in female sexuality and human behavior.
By revealing my personal experience, and also sharing the frank responses of the women I interviewed, women of diverse backgrounds and educations, as well as their husbands and children, I hope to answer many often asked questions such as how does a married woman realize that she is a women who loves women, how does she come out to family and friends, how does she deal with guilt and shame, how does she find acceptance and redefine or rework her marriage.
I also address issues that have never been freely discussed before: Why do women turn to other women for emotional fulfillment? What would make a married woman cross the invisible line that turns her best friend into her lover? Why do some women struggle with identity while others easily embrace their sexuality? What do married women do when they realize that a large part of themselves has been missing? What kind of men are they married to? How do these women and their spouses cope? MWLW also answers intimate questions that have crossed the minds of all women such as: What is it like for a woman who believed herself to be heterosexual to suddenly find herself enthralled with another woman? How is making love with a woman different than making love with a man? And finally, where do straight women fit in?
