'I left my husband for a woman – this is what I learnt'
Last summer, I found myself in a beach bar in Skala Eressos, a village on the Greek island of Lesbos. It was the penultimate night of the annual women’s festival, an event we didn’t know existed when we’d booked the holiday. It had been an impulsive decision, driven by alcohol and an early rush of feelings that turned out – luckily for us – to be love.
The air was warm and crowds of queer women were chatting and dancing. My girlfriend came back with drinks from the bar. The sun sank lower in the sky and collapsed into a sunset so picturesque, it almost seemed like a joke.
A few years ago, I would have felt that, however much I wanted to be part of that space, it wasn’t for someone like me. Someone married to a man. Someone with two kids, a dog and a home in the London suburbs. On paper, I ticked every box that women have historically been taught we should: family, career, social life. And yet, I was still wilfully ignoring a crucial part of my identity.
Although I may not have had a word for it at first, I always knew I had an attraction to both men and women. In my teens, I sometimes confused that attraction with admiration, perhaps because I didn’t know how to embrace the fluidity that I felt; how to exist as my complete self, when only the part of me that was attracted to men seemed to be acceptable in the wider world.
This was during the nineties, the era of FHM’s ‘High Street Honeys’, when aggressive masculinity ruled and women’s magazines gave advice on how to lose weight and snag yourself a boyfriend. The idea that you didn’t neatly fit into ‘straight’ or ‘gay’ was practically unheard of, and the term ‘lesbian’ was never directed at girls like me – ‘feminine’ girls who liked wearing skirts.
As I moved into my 20s, I stepped back and forth between worlds. I got a job working in PR and hung out with gay friends, most of them men, but I always felt like I was visiting their spaces. I had boyfriends and, when I didn’t, I kissed girls, most of whom assumed they were an experiment.
I met my husband in the early days of online dating and we quickly fit comfortably into each other’s lives. Our relationship was driven by fun and a shared sense of humour – within two years, we’d moved in together and were married soon after. When my mum died suddenly, we navigated the painful aftermath together.
But after six years of marriage, there was a restlessness I couldn’t shake. We were growing apart, slowly but surely, as if we had begun speaking different languages. In my mid-30s, a mum-of-two, I felt like I was watching my life unfold day after day, a helpless observer trapped in a ‘traditional’ role where I was a mother and a wife before everything else.
Eventually, silence replaced conversation and our dynamic became stifling. The London community I lived in was full of families who looked like mine – a mother, a father, a couple of kids. On the surface I fitted right in, but inside I felt like I was lying. I knew I had a wonderful life, but it just didn’t feel like mine.
I’m often asked how I knew I had to leave. The question usually comes from others who feel they don’t really fit in and can’t quite work out why. For me, it didn’t come down to one cataclysmic event. You carry on, and on, and you try, until one day you realise you can’t do it anymore.
At first, I didn’t want to date anyone. I couldn’t bear the idea of taking a gamble or getting it wrong. Then, six months down the line, as I was scrolling through Instagram one day, I sent a book recommendation to a writer I followed but had never met. She read the book I recommended and we started talking. By the time we met in person a few weeks later, we’d talked non-stop.
This time, right from the beginning, I felt a freedom – from roles, expectations, limitations. A shared perception of what it meant to be a mother, and the multifaceted, complex feelings of love and frustration it brings. A different level of understanding, honesty and communication. We had only just met, but already the romantic in me was beginning to drown out the cynic. I think I know you. I think you might be important. I think I’m starting to believe in something again.
After a couple of months of dating, we booked a holiday for a date quite far into the future, far longer than we’d known each other. But I’d taken so many risks by then, it barely registered. And this was how, eventually, we found ourselves on that beach in Skala Eressos, where I felt like, maybe, I had finally come full circle.
There is a trope around ‘later-life lesbians’, women who have previously been married or in serious relationships with men who come to find happiness with women beyond the traditional ‘coming out’ period of teens and 20s. For many of these women, it does seem to have been a lightning bolt: a sudden realisation that they had completely repressed an entire, crucial part of themselves.
But I suspect that for some, like me, the truth is much simpler: they’re who they’ve always been and, as the decades have passed, they’ve finally become comfortable with every part of themselves, not just the part that fits the life they feel they ‘should’ be living.
My revelation was in starting to understand how we’re taught to want certain things, and the unspoken expectations that begin when we’re children and follow us at every step. And yet, the part of the puzzle that remains a work in progress is learning to feel like I belong because of who I am outside of the defining lines of my relationships. I would still be who I am if I was in a relationship with a man. And I am not who I am because I am in a relationship with a woman. This takes time to let go, because of the structures around which so much of our society is built.
In the TV series Fleabag, Kristin Scott Thomas delivers a peerless monologue about the pain of being a woman and the freedom that ageing ultimately brings: ‘You’re free, no longer a slave, no longer a machine with parts. You’re just a person.’
When I first heard it, I loved it, but perhaps didn’t fully understand. But I think I do now.
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