“She lives in Chicago and thinks she’s a lesbian,” my friend told me before introducing me to Daria. “She’s perfect for you.” I have never actively pursued queer women who live half a continent away. But let’s just say this wasn’t the first time I’d found myself in this situation.
Suffice to say, Daria and I did hit it off, more than either of us had expected. Daria was incredibly hot—self-assured, wickedly funny, a complex and nuanced thinker with a striking face and an empathetic singing voice. She struck a precise balance of femininity and androgyny—pretty much my dream girl. She identified as bi (in Santa Cruz, where I lived, this was not rare). After a week of passionate sex and drunken late-night conversations, we dove into six months of nightly phone calls, $200 phone bills, and monthly cross-country flights. I left my band, quit my coffee-shop job, and moved in with her. Nine months later, we were engaged.
Suddenly, our lives were consumed by the wedding. Over the course of that year, Daria’s sexuality wasn’t verboten, but it was rarely discussed. Daria told me she didn’t feel the need to act on her attraction to women at the time, and we were confident we could work through it when that time came. As we finalized the guest list, scouted Big Sur venues, and enlisted my friend’s bluegrass band to play us down the aisle, the topic stayed neatly folded beneath the logistics. “I was afraid to say anything to you, that you’d think I wasn’t thrilled to become your wife,” Daria told me later. “But there was a second twinge I had to bury.”
GOOD: Dealbreaker: My Wife Is Gay
I’ve been so busy recently (ten 13-hour days in a row, missed a flight this morning because I slept through my alarm) that I have had a chance to share this here. This is a long-gestating piece I wrote for GOOD about Daria and I—our marriage, separation, and our enduring bond. I’ve long been reluctant to write publicly about such personal matters, being turned off by oversharing and reflexively private, but writing about our separation has been an exception—it’s actually been quite therapeutic and instructive to put it out there, and over the course of the past year Daria and I came to feel that writing about our experience might be helpful to others, and a staggering number of people have responded as such.
Of course, this writing has so far been on Tumblr, both my own and the one that Daria and I run together, while GOOD has a pretty huge reach, so I put this out there with a fair amount of trepidation. It turned out to be one of the toughest assignments I’ve ever finished; many thanks to @amandahess for her patience and excellent editing, and of course, Daria for her love and support.
I can’t even begin to find the right adjective to describe this piece, or how I feel when reading it, but I think you should sit down and read it.
