My Man and the Lesbians Who Love Him

Totally Safe for Work

I’ve been partnered with my husband for nearly 30 years, married 27 of them. Historically, he’s been open enough, but he’s not the one who makes plans or friends. I am.

He is patient, sweet, funny, and well informed. He doesn’t approach with his charms, but he’ll unwind them for you even if he is particularly particular. 

People we’d socialized with for years called me after a lively interaction with him and exclaim as if they were coming to a revelation, “He is so funny!”

I tried not to be offended, after all who was it they thought I’d married? Did they imagine he sat attentively, waiting for me to animate him? If so, they’ve never been married. Or, they’re about to be divorced.

What he lacks in initiative, he makes up for in charm. Once I can coax him out the door. In our old life, it was me making friends with the wives and he and the husbands looking around for something they might have in common. We’ve found friends we love this way, but just as often we did not.

For a variety of reasons, none having to do with sexuality, my close friend, who convinced me that we would love it here in western Massachusetts, is a lesbian. Artist, wife and mother to three kids, ally and pal to whomever walks by, inciter of all manner of goodness and fun, that she is gay is the least interesting thing about her. We have menopause in common, grown children, and a need for community. Same things most of my friends and I have in common. Who any of us share our beds with is irrelevant. 

She and my husband hit it off right away, bonding over alcohol free drinks and fried snack foods.

When they hop down a rabbit hole of lawn mowers and snow plows, I stop listening. The moment someone brings up an engine in a conversation, unless it’s a search one, I am out.

While I got high in the backyard, they compared the newest fangled water bottles and appliance dealers. Men and women don’t often socialize separate from their spouse by default where I come from. It doesn’t look right. Someone gets the wrong idea. Maybe that’s just the me raised in the stone age?

Truthfully, it’s a bit of a relief when they get together. Almost everyone I love is a talker, and I am excited that they both have fresh ears to hear them and I can chomp my hunk of watermelon in peace.

When I told some people that we were moving closer to my friend and her wife, they seemed confused.

“Is there something you’re leaving out?” an acquaintance asked. What, that living in the very middle of Long Island used to feel cozy, but without my children, it felt prohibitively far from dry land? I was just being polite. I knew what they were getting at, but I didn’t bother.

More often than I’ve ever liked, my husband works late. His job is his other true love, the one that doesn’t ask him to do the dishes. It took me 20 years to accept it, but my friend’s disappointment took me off guard when I said he was stuck in the city.

“He’s not coming?” she asked.

In our earlier life, I’d let him know if his presence was required, if it was a ladies night, or a couples thing. He used to be my plus one, but unbelievably I’ve become his, even though they are my friends, too!

They ask for him all the time and appear genuinely disappointed when he’s not coming. He has no trouble speaking to the many women who’ve offered him tips on all sorts of things he didn’t feel comfortable asking husbands on Long Island. So much of that New York posturing isn’t conducive to the education of naturally agreeable men.

If I didn’t know better, or was raised into the 1950s family dream, I’d be concerned. And if I was still insecure, I’d be jealous. Of him. Not them. Inside the community that’s taken us in, our roles have become more flexible.

At the end of my teens, I became friends with a woman who happened to be gay.

“Just so you know,” I told her, parroting what I thought one should say, feeling open minded and free when I found myself sharing a room with her at a mutual friend’s house. “I don’t mind what you do, but it’s not my sort of thing. I’m not going to sleep with you. I like boys.”

She laughed at me, and not unkindly asked, “What makes you think I’m attracted to you?”

Red faced, I stopped short. Yeah, why would I assume? The answer is because back then, there were few conversations I’d had with any man that didn’t include some weird sexual subtext I often misread as genuine kindness. She and I have since fallen out of touch, but I remain grateful that she called me in and didn’t reject me for things I didn’t understand. This world could use more of that.

What was I talking about? Oh, my husband and the lesbians.

I imagine, though I’ve only vaguely discussed it with the several women I’ve become friends with, that it’s a relief for them, too.

Now that we’ve settled, my husband holds court at barbecues or on his bike. It feels like he’s found his place, making happy connections all over—not even all women. 

My friend was out of town this week, though we touched base a few times. When I told him she was coming home, he said, “Oh, I know. She texted me the other day.”

A few months back, friends drove west from Rhode Island to visit. His wife and I were chatting, and she mentioned that he has a lesbian friend that he’s super close to. I don’t think this would work for any type of man. He’s a lovely, low key and sweet guy as well. A man who enjoys a woman’s presence with her clothes on. At least out loud.

And it occurred to me while writing this, that this is just the opposite end of the gay best friend all the women I knew in college coveted, and I also happen to have—a male presence without options.

If anyone was still writing sitcoms I think this could be a good one.

In the meantime, I have to find out what plans they’ve made for the weekend.

“Hey, wait for me!”