Dilemmas of Identity in Lesbian Relationships

Part II of II

As Hannah and I sat in our therapy sessions, the ways we were different often struck me. Hannah’s speech style was different from mine. She was direct, often using currently popular words, while I was more lost in my words sometimes. I was more an “original,” Hannah would sometimes say to me—“You are Susi generis.”

I thought about how, in our life together, Hannah liked to fit things into a limited time, and I liked to leave time open; how she was practical, and I wasn’t; how I liked to get lost, how she liked to be found. I thought about the different foods we each liked, and the different places we liked to go. I wondered how I ever could be with this person who was so unlike me. I felt so unmanageable, so often out of line, and feared not measuring up.

I would see our differences, yet see us sitting there together, with Eva, our therapist, sitting across from us on the other side of a low coffee table, determined not to let us stray too far apart.

Eva would turn to Hannah when Hannah was through speaking about an interaction between us, then ask, “What would you like to hear from Susan?”

“I’d like to know she understood what I was saying.” Then Hannah would state specifically what she would like me to understand.

And I would repeat it back to her: “That when I walk into the kitchen, you would like to feel that I see you, even if my eyesight is limited. I should take more care to know where you are so that I will walk around you and not bump into you.”

“I know that you can’t always do that,” Hannah said. “But it would be nice. What’s important to me is that you’re thinking of it, that you’ll be aware that I’m there.”

I have tried to improve, and I think the therapy helped highlight the basic theme—that I need to make clear to Hannah that I see her, that I am focused on her, that I care, that she is the center of my universe, at least for that moment in time.

But then what happens to me? I get lost. I so easily get lost. I get lost in the two of us. I get lost in her.

In my way, I think, I have a version of what Hannah has—a sense of disappearing, of being easily not seen. Maybe because we are so close, we disappear into each other. We lose ourselves into our differences—oddly not our similarities, but our differences—how she is not me, how I am not her. She goes to the university while I stay home and work in my study. She solves problems more efficiently than I do. What’s wrong with me, I feel, why am I not her? How can I listen to her—take on her world, be in it, center myself on her—and not feel bad or lacking for who I am? And how can I see her as not lacking because she is not me?

I thought about lesbianism often when faced with the dilemmas of identity raised in our therapy sessions. Maybe Hannah and I were so close because we are both women. We didn’t have those other sorts of boundaries between us—the lines that separate the genders. We are women raised to be supportive of the other person, interactive with the other, merged with the other, feeling for the other, losing oneself. We were women who cared intimately for each other. We were one, and yet not one. We had dreams of nurturance, dreams that we would each be each other’s “good mother.” It would be heavenly when we were together. It would be peaceful and comforting. It would be perfection.

I sometimes thought back on the lesbian community study I had written so many years before, back when I first met Hannah. When I was working on that research, I had to think, in detail, about what made lesbians different. What made a lesbian community different? I interviewed a therapist who saw many members of that Midwestern lesbian group. She said that it was like a “mirror dance”—the women in their relationships were opposites of each other and yet the same. It was like a dance of sameness and difference. She had observed, as did I, that the women had idealistic expectations of each other—that here there would be the ideal of perfect nurturance, perfect care, perfect acceptance—and then they felt extreme disappointment when they did not experience perfection.

I thought of some of those findings when I looked at Hannah and me. And I thought further: there was something about us that was so natural, that suggested more. Maybe it’s about the openness to each other, and about the small things, the “under the radarness” of our life together—the ways the small daily details mask so much depth of feeling, and the general invisibility of it all—the deceptiveness, the camouflage in the face of the outer world, the sense of “Now I see you. Now I don’t.”

Relationships Essential Reads

I Love You, But I’m Leaving: When Relationships Cost Too Much

Don't Be Someone's Second Potato

It was partially a mystery to me still. How are we different? How are we similar? What difference does it make that we are lesbians—two women seeking intimacy with each other, two women going to a therapist to help us be a better couple, to help us get along, to help us to accept, to value, to cherish who we each are, to feel less lonely in the world, more understood, more seen, more touched, more protected, less uncertain about who we are, and more confident in our togetherness.

I put my hand on Hannah’s shoulder as we stepped toward the door after our session with Eva.

“I love you. We’ll be okay,” she said, reassuring me in the way I most needed.

Part II of II

To find a therapist near you, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.