Back in the olden days — before the internet, I mean — I knew of only two ways to find a girlfriend: in person (at a bar or, during the ’80s, a disco) or by mail. If you were shy — and I was very, painfully, almost self-destructively shy — the first method didn’t work so well. The second cost a lot of money, especially for someone in an entry-level job: first to place a personal ad in the back of the newspaper and second to rent a mailbox at the publisher’s offices to receive the responses.
The divorced straight man I worked for had researched the personal ad process thoroughly. Following his lead, I scraped together enough to purchase the least expensive possible ad — three lines of tiny type — in the Personals section of The Village Voice, then a still-respected weekly publication. I also started answering ads, including one that said something like “GWF 32, Southerner transplanted to NYC, seeks GWF. Yankees okay.” She meant folks from the north, not from the baseball team. And note the ‘G’ — Gay. We adopted the acronym of our brothers. And the ‘W,’ well, that’s how those ads were in the ’80s.
The thing that really caught my eye was her age: 32. Nine years older than me! I’d had a bad experience with the last woman my own age I dated. Hours after our first hookup, she fled the city for a tiny town in the Rocky Mountains. Okay, it was weeks, not hours — but it felt abrupt and, although we never said the word, final. In a world before cell phones, long-distance calls cost big bucks. We exchanged a flurry of letters for six months or so, but things fizzled out. We wouldn’t see each other again for 25 years.
In any case, this Southern GWF — let’s call her Addie, after the way we met — she was in her thirties. Clearly by that advanced age, she’d be solid, settled, not the kind of person to spend the winter alone on a mountain tending llamas. About six months after I responded to her ad, my phone rang: Addie. I didn’t inquire about the time lag; maybe she was a slow reader. We met and started dating.
She had a little barbecue at her house on Long Island, just me and one of her friends. The friend was about to meet a woman she had contacted through a personal ad as well, and she was excited about the prospect. “She’s in her forties,” the friend said. “Forty-year-olds are so much more stable than people our age.” Oh shit, I thought. Within two weeks, my thirty-something girlfriend invited me to her house — to help her pack. My heart stopped. But she was just moving farther east on Long Island. A longer commute for me, but nothing like the Rocky Mountains.
Addie had barely unpacked in her new place when I got another call: “Ah’m movin’, darlin’.”
“Again?”
“Yep. Ah’m goin’ home t’Florida.” She left so quickly I don’t think we even got to say good-bye. So much for the stability of thirty-somethings.
As I learned, you can’t measure stability by age. Yes, we older folks are more likely to have mortgages and jobs that keep us rooted in place, although as work becomes more mobile, even that’s less of an anchor. If it’s maturity you’re looking for, stability is not a good proxy, but my twenty-something llama-tender and my thirty-something serial mover did have something in common: a lack of emotional commitment, specifically to me. I didn’t notice it at the time because, well, I thought that sort of thing only happened in rom-coms. I’d be as likely to find a unicorn strewing glitter all over my backyard.
That’s on me: clueless, boundary-less, twenty-something me. I thought what I needed more than anything else was a girlfriend, but I was wrong. What I needed more than anything else was self-esteem and maybe a vibrator. Those things will never leave you.
I did manage two long-term relationships — 10 years (personal ad) and 16 years (introduced in person by a mutual friend), respectively — but a brief and ill-considered marriage (dating app) left me single again. I don’t blame the app. I thought a 95% match was pretty good — that’s at least an A, right? — and it was based on science, not just on my often-fallible radar. Still, I didn’t recognize how many dangerous tendencies a person can pack into that remaining 5%. Once I did, I had no option but to bail.
If I thought it was hard to find women in my twenties and thirties, singlehood in my late fifties to early sixties feels like trying to climb a sheer mountain cliff armed with only a bottle of lube. The good news is that vibrator technology has improved significantly. Also good: I can meet potential dates (or at least see their pictures) whenever I pick up my smartphone. I’ve got all the apps corralled into one folder, which makes serial swiping much easier.
But no matter how many dating apps I join, my daily review never takes long. Whether because I live a couple of hours from the nearest big city or because my age starts with a scary number — or perhaps because my wit and charm don’t translate well in two dimensions — I receive far fewer likes than I bestow. In three years, dating apps have yielded only three real-life meetings. Only one of those progressed into dating, but it never turned to love. Six months later, I was single again. I took a year or so to heal and then I reinstalled the apps, refreshed my photos and limbered up my swiping finger.
Maybe I’m too picky. If there’s not at least one picture of you looking squarely in the camera lens — I’m swiping left! If your only picture is cleavage — breast or butt — left! If you’re a cis dude, I throw the phone across the room in disgust — I keep an empty place on my sofa just for that purpose — and then I swipe left.
In the summer of 2020, after several years of app-fueled frustration, I even hired a matchmaking service. If I’d had that kind of money back in the 1980s, I could have bought an entire issue of The Village Voice. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and the company guaranteed matches with three different compatible women. This company mostly handles straight relationships, but my personal matchmaker — being a fan of Fiddler on the Roof, I call her Yenta Debbie — assured me that she’d be able to find me a woman, no problem. She interviewed me on Zoom for about an hour, plugging in keywords like “smart” and “butch” into her computer search. The company’s database didn’t spit out too many matches on the first try, but Debbie assured me that she would search far and wide (within my geographical boundaries), even calling around her matchmaking network to search their databases. I gave her some comps — age-appropriate versions of Abby Wambach or Hannah Gadsby — and sent her on her way.
A few weeks later, she had a prospect! Debbie made the reservations, and my date and I each traveled about an hour to meet at an outdoor restaurant last October. I sat at the table in dangly earrings, my favorite bracelet, a colorful, flowing schmatta over my black T-shirt and pants, and tried to keep breathing. Then the door opened and a woman appeared wearing a broad smile — as well as dangly earrings, bracelets, and a colorful schmatta over black clothes. I tried to steer her mentally toward another table, but she sat down at mine. We were a great fit personality-wise, but clearly Yenta Debbie had a thing or two to learn about “butch.”
COVID heated up after that, and with no vaccine in sight, I put the matchmaking on pause. My Yenta’s back on the case for me now, though, so I’m hovering on the continuum somewhere between “you create your own reality” and “don’t get your hopes up.”
At least my vibrator still works.
This essay is part of a series from Autostraddle writers about how they’re approaching dating and relationships at our current stage in the pandemic – read the rest here!
I read the first Boxcar Children book when I was eight years old, and immediately daydreamed a world where I, too, lived in an isolated little shack or tiny house or cabin, growing my own food, no one telling me what to do, or how to be, just me and the wide open world. I checked out books at the library about gardening and chopping wood and building fires. I cut out magazine photos of cottages nestled into the snowy mountains, not another living soul in sight. I love being alone. I have always loved being alone. I spent most of my life planning a future for just me and the pets I would love.
So of course it’s deeply ironic that I chose to get married and live in New York City. But my wife, Stacy, isn’t like anyone I’ve ever known, and when I met her and fell in love with her, it was like some kind of magical introvert alchemy. She is the only person I have ever known who always energizes me. I still need a lot of alone time, but being with her, even after ten years, is my favorite way to be — and so I just folded her into my daydream. Me and her together, alone, in a secluded cabin in the woods. The last year has kind of been like that, but with the option to have groceries and prescriptions and takeout delivered directly to our door. Our relationship has never been better or stronger or happier. We trip over each other in the kitchen multiple times a day, and still our affection bubbles over.
It’s impossible to know if that’s how it would have been if I hadn’t gotten Covid and Long Covid, but I did, and so every moment we have together — watching women’s basketball, cooking breakfast, playing board games, singing silly songs to our cats, lying together reading, sitting in the same room playing our own video games, or even working at our own jobs directly across from each other at the same table — is rooted in gratitude. We are both keenly aware, in ways we never have been, of how fragile everything really is, including our health and our bodies and our actual lives. We’ve stared down mortality this year. Not just me and Stacy. All of us.
I’m so happy things seem to be trending in the right direction with the pandemic. Mostly of course so we won’t continue to lose hundreds of thousands of lives, so doctors and nurses and grocery clerks and delivery people and janitors and surgeons and all our frontline workers can move through the world more safely and with less physical and emotional trauma. And also of course so people can be with people again! So I can see and hug and sit in the same room with my friends and family! So Stacy can pick up on the astronomical trajectory of her career that was skyrocketing before the world shut down! So we can stop living in constant fear of this virus and all the destruction it has caused!
But also I am afraid of emerging from this cocoon I’ve been in for a year and having to relearn to navigate the world and all my relationships as a person with multiple chronic illnesses and a disability — especially without Stacy by my side. That’s a hard thing to write because even though Stacy and I have been together for a decade, and even though we’ve built our lives around each other, there’s always been a deeply independent streak in both of us, a pride as individuals about how self-sufficient we both were. We both had very full and separate lives outside of our life as a couple, before Covid. I don’t know if either of us really understand how much that has changed in the last year.
In terms of being a person with a disability, I’m mostly self-sufficient (again: as long as delivery exists!), but sometimes I have terrible and terrifying crashes, and Stacy knows just what to do now, just what to say, just what to bring to me, and just what I’m trying to say, even when my Dysautonomia robs me of my words. She springs into action during those times and handles anything that needs to be handled: finishing up the chore I was in the middle of doing and had to abandon, taking care of our cats, making dinner and bringing it to me on a tray when I can’t get out of bed, translating my mish-mashed phrases. And all the things she does when I’m not crashed, just daily things, like preparing my Liquid IV every night and bringing it to my bedside every morning, or noticing when I’ve gotten too busy working and forgotten to pause and take my meds, or helping me keep track of everything every doctor says because she can overhear every call.
Mostly, though, her presence makes bearing it all so much easier. She makes me laugh all day, she constantly encourages me, and she’s a sounding board when I get upset that, say, someone yelled at me for crossing the street too slowly, or when I’m experiencing some kind of frustrating or demoralizing situation where I’m having to request the same accessibility accommodations over and over and over. Over the past 12 months, I have been forced to do the thing I’ve always been the worst at: be real about what I’m incapable of doing, and ask other people to do things in a way that’s not easiest or most convenient for them, so it will be accessible for me. It’s hard enough to do it once. But I’ve discovered that it’s actually never just a single ask. I have to keep asking because people keep defaulting to their normal, to my old normal, and every time I have to speak up and say, “No, actually, I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t, remember? I can’t.”, it eats away at my very limited energy and forces me to re-confront my shifting identity.
But when that happens and Stacy’s home, I can rest my forehead against her forehead, or hold her hand in my hand, or rant and growl, or even just share a look of understanding. So much of my identity is solidified in proximity to her, and in her belief in me. “That’s not a you problem; that’s a them problem,” is what she says, and I believe her every time.
I’m also just kind of sad to see our Boxcar Children time coming to an end. We probably won’t be together this much again until we’re both retired, and even though it has been, at times, harder than anything either of us could have imagined when the pandemic started, it’s also been some of our sweetest, most intimate, silliest, funnest times we’ve ever had as a couple. The playlists! The quest to cook the perfect scrambled eggs! The board games! The Great British Bake Off and Top Chef marathons! The singing and the dancing and the never-ending inside joke! We got married in our own living room, for goodness’ sake!
Over the last decade, mine and Stacy’s relationship has been through so many incarnations, and I know it will go through a zillion more over the course of our lives. One thing that hasn’t changed is my Boxcar dreams. What’s next will bring its own challenges and joys, like all the manifestations before it, and we’ll rise to meet them. I’ll sigh a big breath of relief on the days I draw the Hermit from my tarot deck. I’ll keep bookmarking photos of secluded cabins (for two). I’ll text her at work when someone honks at me because I’m baby-stepping through the crosswalk, and she’ll say, “Fuck them!” And, “I love you.” And, “Let’s play Yahtzee when I get home.”
My doctor moved to New Zealand in January. She was full of apologies, but I didn’t judge her for leaving. I just felt jealous. We were ten months into quarantine, there was still only vague news of a vaccine, and the weight of the year was equaled only by the moment-to-moment solitude. Imagine an island where everything was normal! Imagine an island where I could fuck people other than my roommates.
At this point, it had happened once. It would only happen once more. The first time was fun for its chaos and intimacy. The second time just made me feel sad. I didn’t want to be a tourist in my friends’ relationship. I wanted a relationship of my own. I wanted relationships of my own. The point of fucking a couple is being able to leave. And I couldn’t leave.
My roommates, like all my friends, had spent the year marveling at my commitment to dating. Most people had shacked up with their best option, committed to their time alone, or tried the occasional attempt with even less occasional enthusiasm. But not me. The past year I have dated with the same fervor and curiosity as I did before the pandemic. Any friend starved for gossip could send me a voice memo and I’d have a story ready. They weren’t nights out at clubs or even hook ups — mostly — but I gave my writer brain just enough material to provide some entertainment.
“I’ve been so good,” I told my new doctor. “I’ve taken zero risks during the pandemic — well, zero Covid risks.” She laughed. Probably because I’d just disclosed the whole fucking my roommates thing. But of all my questionable romantic behavior the past year, that doesn’t even rank. It’s overwhelming to think of all the people I never met. All the feelings that I had that just as quickly went away. It’s overwhelming to think of the one person I did meet, but never really knew. Or the person I know so well, but not in the ways I expected.
I collect connections like a frat boy collects conquests. A crush can become so many things — a friend, a partner, a memory. I’m not invested in outcome. I’m just invested in people. And stories — as they are, not as I want them to be. I could write about how all my experiences during the pandemic, all my self-reflection and quarantined chaos, led me to the person currently at the front of my mind. But that would make her a conclusion, when my hope is that she’s a beginning. That I’m a beginning. That we’re always beginning.
By the time this essay is published I might be on a plane to Toronto fulfilling one of the great queer woman clichés. Or maybe my assumption of that possibility will seem hilarious — or devastating. To me polyamory isn’t about being with a lot of people at once. It’s about letting myself be with every person however we’re meant to be. Am I excited for the backdrops of my stories to vary? To have more sex? To meet people in real life? To fuck a couple and leave? To fly to a new place and stay? Of course. But do I think my emotional behavior is going to be changed by my second vaccine? Unlikely.
When the pandemic began I was living in a different house with different roommates. All four of those people were in relationships. And in those early months, package after package arrived at our door — always for one of them, never for me. “I never get any packages,” I whined to one of my roommates. “You have to buy stuff online,” they chuckled. “I get packages because I buy stuff online.”
If I’ve learned anything the past year, it’s an acceptance of that simple truth. You get what you order. And what I’ve ordered for my life is curiosity over comfort, authenticity over ease. My Venus is in Sag and this is just who I am. It’s silly to envy people who can move to New Zealand. There’s so much excitement to be had right here.
This essay is part of a series from Autostraddle writers about how they’re approaching dating and relationships at our current stage in the pandemic – read the rest here!
I’m in a relationship that was long-distance before we moved in together approximately… two months before isolation, quarantine, pandemic, flatten the curve, and social distancing all became regular phrases we heard and used every day. We essentially went from long distance to lockdown. It was a major relationship shift to say the least.
At the risk of stating the obvious: The pandemic has truly tested a lot of relationships. For us, we had to learn how to not just live together but live TOGETHER together all the time. We learned a lot very quickly, and in some ways, it was a good thing. Whereas living with a new partner can sometimes require a lot of awkward growth, lessons, and drawn-out conflicts about space, needs, boundaries, etc., we had to work through those things right the fuck away. It was a crash course in cohabitation.
So from long distance to lockdown to… what now? I’m honestly not sure! And for once, uncertainty isn’t really freaking me out. I know our relationship, our home life, our social lives, and our priorities are going to shift in major ways again. We’re both passionate about our writing careers, and the world opening up means she’ll be traveling a lot again and I’ll have opportunities beyond our apartment, too. Because of the early dating stage we were in when the pandemic hit, the slowing down of our lives was actually not always the worst thing in the world. We genuinely liked spending a lot of quality time together, which is a very lucky thing, because we were each other’s only company. But we’re both absolutely looking forward to being very busy again.
I also know we’re both going to experience post-vaccine life in very different ways. My partner tends to be more extroverted for me, and I predict I’m going to struggle more with social anxiety than she will when we start hanging out with people again. But we both already know these things about each other because, again, we learned a lot about each other from spending…24/7 with each other for over a year. I won’t lie: I don’t think it’ll be a completely seamless transition, because I have to imagine being stuck in a home together for so long has had an impact on our dynamic. I usually have an anxious attachment style, and it has moved toward becoming more secure during the pandemic, but that could shift again as we start to spend more time apart. I’m anticipating having to check in with myself about those things. I’m anticipating change in general, but after a year that included a lot of monotony, I’m not scared of change. Bring it on tbh.
In this next stage, I hope to focus on friendships. I know the prompt here is specifically about dating/relationships, but I actually think this is somewhat related. My girlfriend and I are building a life together in a new city, and that has been difficult to do in a pandemic, especially because we have been doing it on our own. Because we chose to move somewhere where we know few people in the middle of a pandemic, we’ve both struggled to put down roots individually and as a couple. I have many wonderful friends who have been there for me virtually throughout this pandemic, but there are days when I feel lonely. When I moved from New York at the end of 2019, I didn’t realize I wouldn’t be able to go back for a long time. In keeping us confined to one place, the pandemic significantly restructured my relationship. So much of our time together before was spent traveling.
And then we moved to Miami. It was an exciting move but also an overwhelming one. It’s hard to get to know a city when you can’t really leave your home. But widespread vaccination is going to make it possible for us to actually explore the place where we live, put down those roots, and MAKE FRIENDS. I cannot stress enough how excited I am to make some goddamn friends in Miami!!!!!! Because we didn’t live together for long before the pandemic hit, we never got to the stage of dating where we make friends together. I hope it happens! I think in-person socializing is going to strengthen our relationship overall.
We have spent the past year+ focusing on our relationship in an inward looking way, because we became each other’s only day-to-day presence. Don’t get me wrong: That was all great relationship work! Connecting deeply, forming new routines and rituals, cracking each other up, finding ways to still have fun together in a very strange and sad and stressful year. It was all very… domestic? Which I enjoyed in some ways. I may have never mastered sourdough, but I often joke that I’ve made a very good housewife during all this.
But of course I crave more. I want our relationship to be a more expansive, more multidimensional thing again—not something that’s contained to a household. So in this next stage of the pandemic, I’m looking toward building our relationship in a more outward direction: making new friends, nurturing existing friendships, exploring Miami, supporting each other’s careers, and balancing our individual and shared lives.
This essay is part of a series from Autostraddle writers about how they’re approaching dating and relationships at our current stage in the pandemic – read the rest here!
Over the course of the last year I have been intensely careful about visits and contact. In the Before Times I worked as a freelance restaurant and events photographer, a production assistant, a prop stylist – in short, a lot of jobs that almost immediately disappeared with the awareness of Covid, jobs that are not likely to return any time soon. But given the endlessly rising cases in NYC, and given my shift to remote freelance work, I restricted my in-person visits to only two people: my husband, and my best friend. And over the course of this last year, my husband has become my ex, and my best friend has become my girlfriend.
All that to say, what began as a very small quarantine circle managed to grow even smaller. And as someone that hasn’t been on a date with a stranger since 2008, dating in many ways feels like a bit of a mystery, even as relationships feel very familiar.
My girlfriend and I have talked a lot about both joy and grief lately, the magic of realizing that we had feelings for each other partnered with the sorrow in not getting to share these early months of dating with our friends and communities. We got to tell a handful of close friends that we were together during careful outdoor visits, but most of our friends heard the news through Zoom calls, through texts, through the phone. We’ve tried to create special events for each other when we can, going on safe little getaways and making dinner dates in our homes feel fancy with candles and music. I bring her flowers, make her playlists, cook her dinner, do my best to make our time together special. But of course, it’s not quite the same as getting to help each other throw parties for our loved ones, getting to meet up at bars and restaurants and events, getting to sneak into corners at parties to make out or slip out early to be alone together. Our time with each other is planned, intentional, isolated from the rest of our community. And as wonderful as this time together has been, as close as we’ve gotten, we both know that once the world opens up a bit more, we’ll finally get to have a lot of our “firsts” — and that it may be bittersweet to finally have our first date six months into being a couple.
I think in some ways, there is a kind of magic and intimacy to what we’ve done. Our relationship likely would’ve been intense anyway, as the transition from very close friends to lovers and girlfriends is not one that many make lightly. But doing all of this in isolation has undeniably heightened our connection, deepened our bond in ways I didn’t anticipate. Starting a new relationship with so much privacy, only ever seeing each other instead of getting to gossip and gush with friends separately, has meant that we are relying on each other even more profoundly than we did before. And in the same way, we have had to be very thoughtful about boundaries, intentional about how much time we spend together, honest about how we communicate. We’ve learned a lot about how we can support each other, and about when we need to step back and turn to others for advice and encouragement. It’s not always been easy, but it’s always been worth it, and I truly believe that our relationship is stronger for having started in quarantine, for enduring in spite of everything else we are going through.
After eleven years of being married, after coming out as bisexual while in a monogamous relationship with a cis straight man, I absolutely love getting clocked as queer when my girlfriend and I walk around, masked, in the park. I’m excited to finally get to take her out on a date, to hang out with our friends together, to meet the important people in her life in person. And while I’m anticipating getting to venture out into the world again with her by my side, while I can’t wait to move into this next, more public phase of our relationship, I think I’ll always look back on these months of dating in isolation with a bit of fondness. It’s a unique experience, falling in love during a pandemic, and that makes it feel strangely sacred.