What learning about things like romantic friendships does is show how thinking about intimacy and sexuality changes over time. So even though she is now married to a man and I am celebrating 40 years together with my partner, Verta, I don’t take that to mean that those were the only possible outcomes. I might have stayed married and thought of myself as bisexual. The woman I fell in love with and I didn’t know where we would end up. Now, we talk about sexual fluidity, girl crushes, heteroflexibility, bi-curiosity, men who have sex with men.īut in 1975, these were not familiar concepts. The vision of a world in which love and sexuality could have a variety of complicated relations to sexual identity made sense to me. Rather, it was that our modern categories of heterosexuality, homosexuality and even bisexuality were not complex enough to capture the slippery reality of love and desire. These stories meant a great deal to me, but it wasn’t that they made me feel all right about being a lesbian because there had been lesbians in the past, nor was it that what I was feeling was all right because it wasn’t lesbian desire.
The supposedly repressive Victorian sexual system in fact allowed a great deal of latitude in moving along a spectrum of what came to be called heterosexuality and homosexuality. What is important about these friendships is that they were widely accepted, even admired, and often lasted from adolescence through marriage and into old age.
I love you with my whole soul.” Jeanie finally married when she was 37, provoking anxiety on Sarah’s part about the impact on their relationship, but their love lived on.Īnd this was only one of dozens of examples of passionate, intense, loving, physically affectionate relationships that have come to be called “romantic friendships.” Smith-Rosenberg uncovered these stories in the correspondence of a wide range of white American middle-class families between the 1760s and the 1880s. “Dear darling Sarah, how I love you and how happy I have been, you are the joy of my life.” She urged Sarah to “just fill a quarter page with caresses and expressions of endearment,” and ended her letters with such expressions as “Goodbye, my dearest, dearest lover,” or, “A thousand kisses. The intensity of their friendship continued uninterrupted by Sarah’s marriage.Īt the age of 29, Sarah wrote to Jeannie, “I can give you no idea how desperately I shall want you.” And after one precious visit, Jeanie poured out her love. Sarah kept flowers in front of Jeannie’s portrait when they were in school together. In it, she shared a correspondence between Sarah Butler Wister and Jeannie Field Musgrave, who met in school in Massachusetts in 1849. In the back of my mind, I worried that our relationship might be doomed because how could she love me if she weren’t really a lesbian?Īnd then I found an article called “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” It was written by historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and it’s now a classic. The way we all understood what was going on was that I was really a lesbian and in the process of coming out, but that she was really heterosexual and had just happened to fall in love with me. In the early stages, my new relationship was purely romantic. Leila Rupp: When I was in my 20s while married to a man, I fell in love with a woman. Author, Sex Goes to School: Girls and Sex Education before the 1960s.Gender and Women’s Studies, Western Michigan University.
Rupp, Sapphistries: A Global History of Love between Women Farah Jasmine Griffin, Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, 1854-1868.