Married to a Man, in Love With a Woman (Part II)

By Celina R. De Leon, WireTap. Posted May 25, 2006.

Over the past 15 years, Joanne Fleisher has been very public about the personal dilemma she faced in 1979 when, while being married and raising two kids, she fell in love with a woman. She found that there was no support for married women that struggle with their sexuality. Fleisher now offers support groups and workshops for married women who are dealing with "coming out." She has worked in person with women and couples from as far away as the United Kingdom and continues to conduct telephone consultations for women who can't make the trip to her office in Philadelphia, Penn.

Fleisher is also the author of "Living Two Lives: Married to a Man and In Love With a Woman," and runs the "Ask Joanne" message board on her website, LavenderVisions.com.

WireTap Magazine spoke with Fleisher over the phone about her work and her own "coming out."

WireTap: Can you describe your experience with being married to a man but in love with a woman?

Joanne Fleisher: Yes, but one of the things I want to clarify first is that there's a whole range of differences as far as whether women have had prior inklings of having these attractions or not. There are certainly other women, like myself, who have never had any awareness of being attracted to women. But I have found that the majority have had some little sense of knowing that in their life. So I wouldn't say I represent the majority.

In my situation, I had been married for 12 years, living the average life of a married woman in the suburbs with two kids. I would say that my marriage had been pretty happy for at least half of the marriage. But when I got into my later '20s I began to feel unhappy and that there was something missing. My husband and I had done some marriage counseling, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly what was making me so unsatisfied.

I had become friends with a woman who had identified as a lesbian, and as I got to know her better, I began to experience an attraction to her. I ended up falling in love with this woman and getting involved with her. And I think once I had this experience, it was an "Aha!"moment. I had no idea that a relationship or experience could be the way it was -- and that seemed to be the answer to what was missing.

However, I know I didn't think I was gay. I just knew that this feeling just felt so right for me. And I also didn't think I was going to divorce my husband. I didn't want to divorce my husband. I didn't even consider that.

WT: Did your husband know that you had fallen in love with a woman?

JF: He didn't initially. But I found it very difficult to keep it a secret. It might have been three or four months before I talked to him about it. And I continued to try to figure out what I wanted to do. I did a lot of vacillating -- like a lot of the women that I work with. One day I couldn't imagine leaving the marriage, the next day I couldn't imagine spending one more day in the marriage. I was extremely worried about the kids and what effect this would have on them. And eventually, over the course of about a year, I decided that even though I didn't really know that I was a lesbian, I needed to explore that side of myself, and I couldn't do it being married.

WT: Was there an event or an incident that made you realize that you needed to focus on your sexuality?

JF: It wasn't one event, because the relationship with the woman I had got involved with ended. She left town, and in some ways that was a really positive thing for me because the questions I was asking myself weren't just about this woman. I knew that I had had an experience I had never had before and stopped having sex with my husband altogether as a result. I knew that something about my experience was so right, that I couldn't go back. And it was not just the sexual thing -- it was also the intimacy.

I guess the reason I say it was so hard to make a decision, and I want to say this is true for most women, is that I didn't know what my future was going to look like. I only knew what my past looked like, and what I was leaving. I was leaving a good man, a great person, a nice provider and a good father. But I needed to have this experience I had had with a woman. So the big unknown for me was, was this experience going to happen again with another woman? Any woman? And I really didn't know the answer to that.

I think everybody is afraid of change. And I think some people are so terrified of going into the unknown that they take a lot longer to figure out if that's their ultimate decision.

But not all women feel the need to leave their husbands. I wanted to have a committed monogamous relationship with someone, and I didn't feel like I wanted to have affairs or two relationships going simultaneously. That was very conflictive for me.

Celina R. De Leon is a social justice journalist based in Brooklyn, NY.

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