Agony aunt
‘I’m married to a man, but I’ve fallen for a woman. Should I follow my heart or my head?’
Our new relationships expert Anna Richardson will help solve your problems
QI’ve been happily married to a man for 20 years, but I’ve recently started having strong feelings for someone else – awoman. She’s also married, but says she feels the same way. We haven’t told anyone else how we feel, as we don’t want to hurt our husbands or kids. I don’t know what to do. My head says to cut off ties with her. My heart says the opposite.
AThis is a dilemma I have intimate lived experience of, both personally and within my family, so I’m torn about how best to advise you.
You mention your head says to cut off ties with the woman you have feelings for, but your heart is saying something quite different. So let’s start with the heart. In 1922 the author Virginia Woolf met the writer Vita Sackville-West at a dinner party… and the pair fell deeply in love, despite both being in happy marriages. The relationship lasted years, and in one charged letter to Vita, Virginia wrote, ‘Look here Vita – throw over your man, and we’ll … walk in the garden in the moonlight … and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads.’
When we fall for a woman, the intensity of it can be breathtaking. And although a same-sex relationship may be new to you and bring on unfamiliar feelings of ‘otherness’, there’s also something natural about it – some women describe a ‘knowing’ or belonging that they’ve never experienced before with a man. It can feel like coming home.
The state of our (heterosexual) marriage can also influence a woman’s same-sex desire. Girls have been socialised to follow the cultural norms of falling for a man, marriage and then child-rearing. All that focusing on others deflects our true need for mutual power,emotional intimacy, recognition and support. So if a husband falls short of this, it’s no surprise his wife may start to have an attraction towards her female friend. She understands our emotional landscape in a way only our gender can.
And then of course there’s Freud, who believed that we all go through a period of being attracted to the same sex, unconsciously or not. Sexuality, and sexual identity, can be fluid and shift, and during our lifetime it’s possible to go through radical iterations of this. But with that excitement and possibility comes the agony of choice. And that choice can have hurtful consequences on families – at least in the short term.
