Breakups & Healing

It's an uncomfortable truth: lesbians get divorced in much larger numbers than other couples who marry. Most studies show lesbians divorcing at more than twice the rate of gay men or heterosexual couples.

This is hard to face. Yet it's important to face, to really look at, because even though statistics can never predict what will happen to you, they do reflect larger cultural phenomena that we need to understand. 

As someone who teaches lesbians from all over the world, and as someone who has been having relationships with women for 42 years now, I know that our relationships have the potential to be the happiest, healthiest relationships on the planet.

Yet, potential is not enough. Neither is love and good intentions. We need more than that.

It's a safe bet that every single one of those lesbians and queer women who said "I do" thought they did. Thought they were joining in legal wedded union with the person they would spend the rest of their lives with. Hoped for that. Wanted that. Invested in that outcome, emotionally, financially, logistically. 

So, what happened?

Sometimes, the marriage may have ended amicably when the two people just grew apart. That was the case with my own lesbian marriage. Though there was pain and sadness, we stayed connected and are still good friends. 

Yet many marriages don't end so well. Often there is enormous pain and anger on both parts. And the process of dissolving the marriage can be financially and emotionally devastating. It can be enormously complicated, especially when there are children and/or assets involved.

By the way, "assets" don't just mean material belongings. The extended and chosen families we build with each other are part of our emotional wealth, too, and many lesbians lose this, too, when our marriages end. 

So what's behind this phenomenon of lesbians having much higher divorce rates than gay men or straight people -- and what can we do about it? Many of us know the old joke: What does a lesbian bring on a second date? A U-Haul!  

I'd love to see statistics about how quickly those lesbian couples got married, compared to the couples of other sexual orientations, and whether there's a correlation between speed of marriage, and likelihood of divorce. I did a lot of reading on social media about this, and while I couldn't find those statistics, I did find a lot of anecdotes of women who had said "I love you" within a week or two of knowing each other.  

Here's the thing. I believe that lesbian couples do tend to go into much faster and more intense limerence ("honeymoons") than gay male or straight couples. Biologically and hormonally, females are designed to bond, and we do! Our bonding is ecstatic, deep, and beautiful -- but sometimes we find we've bonded with sticky lesbian super-glue to the wrong person.

Unfortunately, marrying too fast, before we've gotten a realistic view of the relationship's strengths and weaknesses, does make divorce more likely. The more fully we learn to slow down and assess our compatibility, the more likely we are to not get married -- at least until we truly know we've got the right stuff for the long haul. As lesbian poet Adrienne Rich said, when we "choose to love with our full intelligence," we'll be less likely to divorce.  

Studies of heterosexual relationships show that women have higher relationship standards than men -- which is why 69-90% of heterosexual divorces are initiated by women. Lesbian relationships have two women in them -- so if both women follow the female pattern of initiating divorce, it makes sense that lesbian divorce rates are double.  

Does this mean our standards are too high? I don't think so. Instead, I believe that women know in our hearts the depth of intimacy that is possible, and we don't want to settle for less.

In the first few months or years, this intimacy feels easier to reach. But then our relationships get derailed by conflict, and hurt, anger, resentment, unexpressed needs and scar tissue set in.

This is where we need a different skill-set in order to be able to create a different outcome.  This skill-set is what we practice all year long in our Lesbian Skill-building Love, Dating & Relationship Lab and in our 9+ courses, all included with Academy Membership.

What if the first flush of limerence or new love could be just the "coming attraction" for a long-lasting beautiful love story? 

What if we could actually deepen the intimacy we tend to feel so easily in the first few months, even as we go through the attachment challenges, life challenges and ruptures of the long term?

What if, before we married, we got to take in-depth lesbian courses on assessing compatibility, creating a shared relationship vision, communicating in ways that help us hear and be heard, working with our triggers so we can quickly end our fights and go deeper -- in other words, courses like Conscious Girlfriend's 12 Week Roadmap Course that help us both choose the right partner and also be the right partner?  

What if, then, we could enter our marriages, or our relationships, with not just high standards, but the capacity to embody them and live up to them, to create and sustain trust-filled, passionate, durable love?   

This is the world I want to live in! And that's the world we are co-creating in Conscious Girlfriend.