I met my ex-husband as a teenager. We got married in our late twenties, had a baby and then got divorced. Now I have a girlfriend. Admittedly, being a divorced single mum in a queer relationship wasn’t exactly how I pictured my life as I approached my 36th birthday, but there is nothing about how my life is shaping up that feels particularly shocking to me. But, from the various responses to my relationship that I’ve received over the last year, it is clear that to some, it is.
While I love the ‘late life lesbian’ trope, I am actually bisexual. And, this is not the first time I have felt compelled to explain my sexual preferences since I got a girlfriend, and it will not be the last. For people who know me well, the surprise is that I have gotten into any relationship at all, not that my chosen partner is a woman. But it seems that people are fascinated by the idea of ‘going gay’ later in life. Questions I’m sick of answering include, but are not limited to: ‘do you prefer men or women?’, ‘but men and women completely different?’, ‘how many women have you been with?’ and ‘do you still fancy men?’
From the inane to the invasive, people sell their questions as curiosity, but they are microaggressions. When I decided to get married to a man, nobody ever questioned whether I was sure that I was straight. Nobody asked for a list of people I had dated before ‘going straight’. Nobody asked if ‘maybe I just hadn’t met the right woman yet?’.
As a teen I watched Sex and the City and imagined my life perched at a laptop writing about love for a living a la Carrie Bradshaw (and just like that, here I am). Although, I couldn’t help but wonder why I always related to Miranda, not Carrie, the most. Her pragmatic approach to friendships, relationships, work and life in general always made sense to me. And while actress Cynthia Nixon’s choice of words at times, specifically that she had ‘chosen’ to be gay, wouldn’t be how I choose to phrase my later-life-lesbianism, she summed things up nicely in 2006 when she said: “I never felt like there was an unconscious part of me that woke up or that came out of the closet; there wasn’t a struggle, there wasn’t an attempt to suppress. I met this woman, I fell in love with her.” So I guess I am a Miranda, after all.
Sometime after becoming a single mother, when I was ready to start dating, I was equally interested in meeting both men and women. I set my dating profiles to ‘open to men and women’. It was as simple as that. I dated a bit, got ghosted, had my heart broken, got a little wiser, made a few more mistakes and then decided to be single again for a while.
To anyone reading this who has lived their life up to a point as ‘straight’ (whether in the closet, or simply not feeling like they have ever been restricted by one), I’m not going to pretend that your first steps onto the queer dating scene will be painless. Many dating profiles have statements such as ‘no bis’ (my favourite was a woman who had simply ‘no mums, no bis’) or comments alluding to the fact that they’re not open to first-timers. I empathise with people looking for love and not wanting to be somebody’s sexual experiment, but it’s been a sharp learning curve that biphobia and bi erasure exist not only in the straight, but gay communities, too. I was blocked by several women after revealing that I identified as bisexual and since I was also holding a ‘single mum’ trump card that I rarely got around to showing, I was seriously thinking about applying for Channel 4’s The Undateables.
But then I met my girlfriend. We met in London’s only lesbian bar, in Soho, last summer. It was an old fashioned meeting, worthy of the great love stories of old. Nobody swiped right, it was simply eyes drunkenly meeting across a sticky dance floor, a couple of sweaty dances and several hours of kissing. She gave me her number, I texted her a kiss emoji. Standard modern day dating protocol re-established. We didn’t fall in love overnight, we fell in love over weeks and months of dating, of meeting after work in wine bars, long lie-ins with coffee, evenings snatched between my busy childcare schedule, talking about politics and philosophy and parenthood and sexuality and almost everything else for hours and hours on end.
This is my first official relationship with a woman and yes, it’s different from my relationships with men. There are less challenges in some areas, there are more in others. (I love that we talk about our feelings. I hate that we never stop talking about our feelings.) It doesn’t feel right in a way that dating men felt wrong, it doesn’t feel wrong in a way that dating men felt right. The fascination from others in my choice of partner comes down to sex, and anyone who thinks that heterosexual sex is inherently more valid or satisfying than homosexual sex is wrong (or doing it with the wrong person).
I feel really lucky that I have had the chance to discover who I am again at this point in my life, when I am more open-minded, stronger, braver and more curious than I was when I was making these choices the first time around. I also feel lucky that I am blessed with a circle of queer and queer-allied friends and a beautiful family and even ex in-laws who support me and just want me to be happy. Not everyone has this privilege, and I can see that for some, ‘going gay’ later in life might feel impossibly hard, especially when navigating kids and exes.
I am a fairly private person (this article aside) and I have never felt compelled to write about the details of my romantic life before, but in less than a year as a proper part of the queer community, I have learnt that my love — exciting and intoxicating and beautiful as it feels to me — is not valid to all. Is not ‘normal’ to all. It is invalidated in the comments of Right-wing social media commentators. Of law makers slowly repealing LGBTQ+ rights across the world, that have been so hard fought for by those that came before me. It is invalidated in the microaggressions of my peers, the stares of strangers, the constant probing questions of acquaintances. It is invalidated every time someone who knows about my relationship refers to my girlfriend as my ‘friend’ because my queer partnership confuses or embarrasses them.
I have no idea how my queer love story will end, it is only at a beginning. But I know that no matter how it ends, my love for my girlfriend is no less real, and no less important than any other I have or will feel. Love is love, and if one person reading this feels like their own queer love is more valid as a result, then fielding another day of inappropriate questions and all the late-life-lesbian jokes in the world will have been worth it.
