Interview With My Fiancé: Kristen

As you read this installment of Interview With My Significant Other, Kristen and I are away on our annual anniversary trip, which doubles as a joint writing retreat, in the woods. In fact, today is our anniversary, or the day we chose to celebrate as our anniversary. It was the day that Kristen first DM’d me on Twitter. Yes, it is Valentine’s Day. Her choice remains chaotic in my mind to this day. But oh how happy I am that this stranger many states away decided to get wine drunk after work and then fire off a message to the girl whose thirst traps she’d been hearting on Instagram for many weeks. This is a particularly fun anniversary year, because four is Kristen’s lucky number, and because it’s our first one as an engaged couple. We’re getting married!!!!!

In this very long interview, we talk about everything from the financial realities of being in a writer4writer relationship, laundry for a weirdly long time, the fact that I’d never used sex toys (none! ever!) before we started dating, top/bottom dynamics and our sexual compatibility, staying up to watch Yellowjackets until four in the morning, our 12-year age gap, having kids together, Bravo, the time Kristen made the worst rules ever for a Twilight drinking game, and making space for art.

Could I have cut down the part where we talk about laundry extensively? Probably. And yet, I did not. Enjoy!

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How do you identify?

Kayla: I identify as a lesbian.

Kristen: I would say that I identify as a lesbian and queer.

Kayla: Yes. And you use all pronouns.

Kristen: I do.

Kayla: And I use she/her. And I’m a bottom, and you’re a top, which we talk about a lot in this.

How did we meet and get together?

Kayla: So how do we meet? How long did we know each other before becoming romantically involved.

Kristen: We did not know each other at all before becoming romantically involved.

Kayla: No.

Kristen: You were a stranger.

Kayla: Yes. And this is a story that we’ve told on Autostraddle before. You tell the shortish version.

Kristen: I came home from work at my full-time library job on Valentine’s Day. And this is when I was just indiscriminately fucking around and seeing randos locally. And I had been looking at your thirst traps; you had been posting a lot at the time. And I had a bottle of wine, basically, and decided to slide into your DMs to tell you I thought you were good looking. Because that seemed like an appropriate time.

I remember I was in a recliner in my house with the wine next to me in a plastic cup. And the plastic cup, I vividly remember, was an old plastic Slurpee cup from the movie The X-Men. So it had Halle Berry on the side of it. And it was in my cup holder of my recliner. And I decided to send you a message and I was like, “This is a real move.”

Kayla: I remember receiving the message. I was in bed, but that was just because I lived in New York in a really small apartment with roommates, and so I was, most of the time, in my bed. I believe I was drinking orange wine.

Kristen: That sounds a little classier.

Kayla: Yeah, orange wine in bed, compared to whatever shitty 7-Eleven wine.

Kristen: Oh, it was 7-Eleven wine out of a very old plastic Slurpee cup of one of the X-Men movies. I think it was X-Men II.

Kayla: I do remember that you did not say I was “good looking.” You said I was cute. Because I remember being a little bit in my head at the time of, “Is this kind of friendly? Is it hitting on me?” Which obviously, yes, a random stranger isn’t going to call you cute and not be hitting on you.

Kristen: Oh, that is very funny.

Kayla: But yeah, you said cute, which to me was such a safe word, in a way.

Kristen: I truly think it’s because… I wasn’t going to say, “I like your titties, girl.”

Kayla: But then fast forward, how did we meet in person?

Kristen: I was not on book tour yet, but my publisher at the time asked if I would fly to Scranton, Pennsylvania to go to the distributor of my first novel, my debut novel, to sign 2000 copies of the book, because it got picked as a book pick for the Powell’s book club.

And they were going to fly me out there and I was like, “Could you…” I had this aha moment, galaxy brain, where I was like, “Well, instead of flying me home, could you get me to New York?” Because you and I had been-

Kayla: Sexting.

Kristen: Sexting.

Kayla: You were going to say talking.

Kristen: I was deciding what I want to say.

Kayla: Sexting, yeah.

Kristen: We had been sexting a lot, and we had not fucked. So I was like, “I can get a hotel room.” I didn’t say this to my publisher. I said like, “Hey, could you just get me there and I’ll get myself home?” And so Tony, who was my editor at the time, who is cool, said, “Yes.”

And so I messaged you and said, “Hey, I’m going to be in New York. I got a hotel room at the Ace. I’ll be here for this many nights. I’d love for you to come stay with me. If you want to come stay, you are more than welcome.”

Kayla: And prior to that, you had invited me out to Portland to go to AWP with you, which I had very seriously considered. But a couple different friends had talked me down. My straight best friend, her husband was like, “Don’t go meet a stranger across the country. Just because you’re queer doesn’t mean you can’t get murdered.”

Kristen: And you know what, he is right, and we are good friends now. I love him. And I would give the same advice.

Kayla: Yeah, he’s a big reason why I did not go to Portland.

Kristen: The Pacific Northwest is where a lot of murders happen.

Kayla: It’s true. You watch a lot of Criminal Minds, so you would know.

Kristen: I watch a lot of murder shows.

Kayla: But yeah. So I had had my chance to meet you. I’d passed on it.

Kristen: This I thought was a safer bet, because it’s where you live.

Kayla: Well, in my mind, too, it was the same, because part of why I didn’t want to go to Portland was not even necessarily the murder thing, but more so I was like, “I don’t really-

Kristen: Not even necessarily the murder thing.

Kayla: Not necessarily the murderer thing, but I was like, “I don’t know that many people here. What if I get there and we don’t have chemistry, or you’re boring?” And then I have nowhere to go. Whereas, in New York, it was my turf.

Kristen: Well, and for me, I was like, “I know people that live in New York.”

Kayla: Right. Same for you.

Kristen: And I was like, “If you don’t show up or if it’s not a good time, I’ll just spend the weekend hanging out with buddies, and it’ll be fun.”

Kayla: Yeah. So you invited me to a hotel. I had never met a stranger at a hotel before. That was a first for me.

Kristen: That was not a first for me.

Kayla: No, I know. And also, arguably, we weren’t even that much of strangers to each other. We had been sexting. We’d been talking.

Kristen: We had never met in person. We’d also never FaceTimed or anything like that.

Kayla: No. I think you had suggested it, actually, before we met in person, and I got nervous about it. I thought I was going to be too nervous to do it. Which is interesting because I’d always had internet friends and people that I had FaceTimed with. You did try to say, “Let’s do a FaceTime happy hour,” before we’d ever met in person. And I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I was too nervous, too shy almost. Which now in retrospect, I’m like, “Oh, you’re actually so extroverted that it just would’ve been fine.”

Kristen: But you didn’t know me.

Kayla: I didn’t know you. Just because you’re a certain way on Twitter or whatever, I was like, “That doesn’t mean that she’s necessarily extroverted FaceTiming.”

Kristen: I would’ve never offered FaceTime before to somebody. And I think I wasn’t thinking about stuff like that.

The week before I was going to New York and that I would see you, I had brunch with my best friend, Maria, and her brother, and our good friend Kristopher. And I was making a lot of jokes, which I do, just in any situation. But especially if I’m uncomfortable, because it’s easier for me to make a joke about something. And I was joking about our age difference. And I went to go to the bathroom, and Maria told me this later, but James, her brother, was like, “Why is Kristen joking around about this so much?” And Maria was like, “Oh, because she actually likes this person,” which is not something I had done or felt like in a while.

Kayla: And then, yeah, we met. One night turned into a whole weekend. And then we kind of right away made plans to see each other again. Which I think surprised us both, because I think we both went into that weekend being like, “We are going to have a fun weekend. Or even just a fun night.”

Kristen: Sure. I was like, “Okay, we’ve had a lot of fun talking, sexting. Let’s see how this goes in person.” I mean, also too, sometimes… I mean, we both know this. You can’t tell how sexual chemistry is going to be like until you actually are with another person.

Also, we had really good sex. But it’s one of those things, too, where it’s like, “Maybe I’m more toppy and aggressive, but I’m not going to be that aggressive with somebody I’m just having sex with for the first time.” But since sex was so good and we had such a nice time with each other, I was like, “I will go ahead and plan another trip back in a couple weeks and we can see how this goes”

Kayla: After that weekend, we pretty much immediately made plans for me to come to Florida to visit you. But then, which I feel like this is our version of U-Hauling, because we didn’t actually move in together quick enough for me to really consider it U-Hauling. But something that we did was, I was going to come see you in Florida, but it was too much time to wait, so you did another New York trip.

Kristen: No, I didn’t feel like it was me trying to do a U-haul situation. I think for me personally, I was like, okay, this went well. Since it went so well, I would like to come back sooner rather than later to see you and see if it’s like… I could be more specific.

Kayla: Yes, okay, sexual U-Hauling.

Kristen: And we texted about the kind of sex that maybe we would like to have this time, and we did. And it was very good.

And then I just had fun with you. We just had a good time. But our relationship came out of just mutually wanting to fuck each other.

Kayla: Yes.

Kristen: We did not know each other. I had no idea who you were or anything about you.

Kayla: We didn’t know anything about each other’s personal lives or anything like that. All we got was what we saw on Instagram and Twitter. That was it. Oh yeah. Truly. I was like, “I know she likes 7/11. And ravioli. That’s about it.” And you were still doing the “M’lady” bits then too.

Kristen: I think it’s just funny because that’s just how I came into the situation. But very quickly after these times, you came to Florida, and then it was obviously much more intimate. It’s hard to say when stuff turned into a relationship, because it was confusing to me, and I think for yourself as well, because you came out of a very specific relationship situation where it was a bad breakup. And for me, I’d been single for a while very purposely, because I was not trying to be in a relationship. And I think both of us were hardcore not trying to be in a relationship. Then when meeting each other, it was kind of like, how do we navigate these feelings of, we’re very compatible and it seems like we want to be in a relationship if both of us have been trying not to do that? And that made it a little more difficult to navigate.

Kayla: We were very much not looking for long term, and then we ended up in a long distance situation.

How do we feel about our big three astrological signs?

Kayla: I’ll go first. I am a Gemini sun, a Taurus moon, and a Libra rising. And I like being a Gemini, and I do often identify with Gemini traits. But I feel like you think that I don’t. Every time you see a Gemini meme, you’re like, “That’s not you.”

Kristen: Well, it doesn’t sound like you. Maybe that’s something we need to unpack. I think that is a thing too, because you’re like…

Kayla: But you also get a very specific version of me, and you have seen different versions of me.

Kristen: That’s true.

Kayla: The way I talk to my mother is shocking to you. Very different than the way I talk to you. I feel like you get all the kind of sweet and fun parts of the Gemini, and you’ve witnessed secondhand the other sides, but they’re not necessarily what you experience. I think that’s the disconnect there.

Kristen: I think you’re probably right. It just never feels like when I read something about Gemini, it doesn’t feel like how it is with my interactions with you. I’ll still read them to you sometimes because I’m interested in it, but it just never feels hardcore how you are. But maybe that’s a part of it being a Gemini, right?

Kayla: Yes.

Kristen: It’s very duality of man or whatever.

Kayla: But then, so what are your big three?

Kristen: I am a Sagittarius sun and very strongly identify with that.

Kayla: Yes. I feel like we never see something about a Sagittarius that is not true for you.

Kristen: Yeah. I’m an Aries moon and I’m a Scorpio rising.

Kayla: Yes, which is a pretty intense chart. I think my friend warned me about your chart when we were first hooking up.

Kristen: I feel good about that though. Because I think that a lot of me is very intense, but in a fun way for the most part, but with a lot of intensity. I can be exhausting. Even to myself.

Kayla: I didn’t know a lot of Sagittarians before we started dating, and I always joke that you guys come in packs because now I have so many Sagittarians.

Kristen: I literally have a Sagittarius group chat where it’s just a bunch of writers, and we’re all friends and Sagittarius.

Kayla: But before meeting you, I literally wrote something that was anti-Sagittarian for Autostraddle dot com.

Kristen: And I think the most Sagittarius part of my brain is that I accept that, and I think it is funny. And also flattering.

What do you enjoy most about your relationship?

Kristen: We genuinely have a good time together. Even though we have a lot of similarities, the parts of us that aren’t similar are still compatible.

Kayla: We’re very different people, but we hang out a lot. And in the beginning, that was out of necessity because we did move in together a month before Covid. Then it was just like, “Well, this is the only person I’m hanging out with for the foreseeable future.”

Kristen: It was kind of like, “Fingers crossed, hope it goes okay.” Which is a very Sagittarius feeling for me, Like, we’re doing it.

Kayla: But also, I don’t even really remember feeling that way at the time. It’s almost like in retrospect it became this thing of like, “Wow, yeah, we really went from this kind of long distance to lockdown life.” But yeah, we have a lot of fun.

Kristen: We still basically do that. We’re both people that work from home, and we see each other all day long, and we enjoy spending time together. I think from the moment we get up until we pretty much go to bed, we kind of riff off of each other. I like waking up and bouncing things off each other. Not everything has to be a joke, but you have such a good sense of humor. And I don’t think I could be with somebody if I didn’t feel like I could be silly and spontaneous and making jokes all the time. There’s times in which quite often I will say something, because I am a person who’s just very absurd and says a lot of things, and you’ll riff off of those things, and you’ll one up me. And I like that so much. It’s something that feels fun. It feels not competitive, but it feels like cumulative almost. It builds on each other, and it’s fun to be that way with another person who’s a creative person.

Kayla: I feel like we never really identified that or talked about it until recently when I said kind of jokingly that we should write a pilot together. And then you were like, “Yeah, actually we should.” And then we’re like, “Wait, we kind of just do weird punch up with each other all the time. This actually makes a lot of sense.”

Kristen: I think that it’s it because it becomes genuinely very playful, and it’s fun to me. It’s not boring ever. I am a person who gets very easily bored, and I hate being bored. It’s very fun. I’m always having a good time, and it feels surprising. I think another thing too for me that feels really good about our relationship is I am a person that doesn’t deal well with other people being jealous or having control issues. And you’re a person that is not like that at all from the moment we started talking with each other. It’s something where I constantly feel like I have a lot of freedom. Even though we’re with each other all the time, I never feel constricted or any kind of feeling like that.

Kayla: Both of those things you’re talking about are connected to something that I really value about our relationship, which is how aligned we are in terms of our writing and our creative passions being the number one priority for both of us and how we have so much respect for each other’s work and also each other’s process.

The jealousy stuff is connected to that too, because we don’t have professional jealousy of each other, and we never did, even in the beginning. We’ve even applied to some of the same things now. That was kind of a hurdle that we had to jump through that first time. Or maybe we didn’t actually have to jump through it because it was like…

Kristen: I kind of worried about that, too.

Kayla: Tell that story, actually.

Kristen: Because we both had applied for MacDowell, which is a fellowship, and it’s a big deal. And we both applied for it, and we both were anticipating responses for it during the same week. And I was laying in bed next to you, and I got my rejection from MacDowell, and I was like, “This is going to tell me a lot about how I feel.” And I was like, “I didn’t get in. Am I going to feel weird if Kayla gets in?” And then my feeling was, “No, I’m going to be really excited for her.” And that was such a relief, not that I thought that I would be upset, but we hadn’t gone through that before.

Kayla: No, that was the first time.

Kristen: And I was like, “I don’t know what that will look like.” And in my head, immediately being like, “Man, I hope she gets in”, was such a balm to me, because I don’t know what this would look like if I had immediately been the opposite. But instead immediately my brain was like, “Okay, great. I hope she does get it instead.”

Kayla: I didn’t though. We were rejected together.

I feel like we both celebrate each other’s wins, and I’ve never felt myself comparing myself to you. And I think both of us having never dated other writers before that, that’s not something we could have necessarily known about ourselves ahead of time, that we would deal with that well. But then just on top of that, not having the professional jealousy, it is something I never expected, to just love dating another writer, and not just another writer, but somebody whose work I really admire and whose work I engage with. It adds this level of intimacy. You don’t have that many people that you trust with your work, and you trust me. And that is so meaningful because I know that that’s hard for you to trust someone with unpublished work.

Kristen: I think I’m very particular. Some of it, too, is all writers have different practices. The exciting thing and nice thing about being a writer is that everybody’s practices and the way they create anything is wildly different. And there’s plenty of people that have a million readers or people who are engaged with their works in progress that they trust. And I think that’s a valid process, but that’s not my process. It’s a thing where I let the people that I feel like would be the best reader for it, be the reader for it. And that’s usually just one person, one or two people maybe. I feel like you’re my reader. Who we are as writers is like, “Who do we feel like our readers are?” And I feel like you’re my reader. And I would’ve probably felt like you’re my reader, even if we were people who hadn’t dated.

Kayla: I think that’s true. Absolutely.

What hurdles or obstacles have you overcome together in your relationship?

Kayla: I’ll start with my hurdle. It’s moving so far away from my friends. And it wasn’t a situation where you were like, “You have to move to Florida.” But I think a big part of being in a relationship with you is having a relationship with Florida. And whether we live here or not, dating you means dating Florida. And that was so new to me.

I’d never even been here before we had dated. I definitely ascribed to a lot of the dominant discourse about Florida of “it’s this place that we should just forget about and stuff,” which is crazy because I feel so passionately otherwise now.

But something that continues to be a struggle for me though is just being very far away from my communities. I’ve moved a lot in my life, and I always adapt to a place, and I’ve adapted to here, and I love it. But this is the farthest I’ve ever lived from my best friends. And I see them, but this is different. I’m used to having somebody literally down the street, and here, I have that, but it’s your friends who I’ve gradually become closer to. And that’s been hard and kind of ongoing.

Kristen: You and I process things very differently. And I had real worries about how we would get through if we had arguments or if we had differences of opinion, how those things would pan out. Because I am a person who very much previously, and it’s something I work on, shuts down emotionally. And I deal with things in a way in which either it’s very avoidant, conflict avoidant, or I have a hard time handling people when they’re processing emotions. That was something I worried a lot about because I didn’t want to be in a relationship where I felt like we weren’t communicating effectively, because that’s how previous things have felt for me.

And so I think I had a lot of very serious concerns in my own head about what it means to be a person who really shoves down a lot of feelings in a kind of, not to use gender terms, very bro-y way, where it’s like, “I’m not going to deal with this” and I’m going to be with somebody who is processing emotions, and how does that feel? And how does that work? But in reality, it’s really made me open up a lot more. I feel like I am better at talking about and understanding why I might feel a certain way about things. And with you and I, it’s shocking to me. We really don’t argue very much. We have very few fights.

Kayla: We definitely don’t bicker. When we fight, it’s definitely, it’s a fight, but we don’t bicker.

Kristen: Some of it too is, because we don’t bicker or have arguments, when we do have one, it’s hard to navigate it. Because we don’t do it very often.

Kayla: We don’t do it as much, because I feel like some couples have that learned behavior for better or worse.

Kristen: It’s something I dealt with in my previous relationship. We fought all the time, so I had a language for it. And I don’t think that’s very healthy. And this, since we don’t argue hardly ever, when we do have these situations that pop up, because everybody does, it’s a little more difficult. It feels hard because I’m like, “We don’t do this.” And so it feels very new.

But I also feel like, even when we do that, we’re very respectful of each other. And I think that it teaches me something new every time, and it’s something I really had worried about. I was kind of worried I was going to be a bad partner because of it. I was like, “I am a person that can’t deal with conflict, and if somebody’s emotional, I shut down.” And I really worried that it would make me not be a good partner, too.

Kayla: We both bring our own baggage to the table. You had been with the same person for so long and for such defining years of your life, basically most of your twenties, a lot of your thirties. It makes sense to me that you’d be nervous because you’ve never really experienced another person outside of that. I came into our relationship out of a really bad tumultuous breakup, and it was short compared to yours, but again, it was kind of a defining period of my life, most of my twenties. We both bring that kind of baggage to the table. I think that took a while, in the beginning, to figure out where certain things were coming from. But then once we were able to identify that, it helped us a lot, to just be like, “Okay, I know where this is coming for you, where it’s coming from for me.” It wasn’t us but moreso our histories.

Kristen: And I think that at the end of the day, those things are difficult, but they are not hard. I thought they would be. And also the thing I was most afraid of, which was that we would be harmful to each other in some kind of way, is not a thing that is ever involved. And we’re always deeply kind to each other, and that’s all I care about.

Where do you locate your relationship on the monogamy / polyamory spectrum? What philosophies do you have around how you handle monogamy / polyamory? How do you feel this impacts your relationship?

Kayla: Okay, so we’re very monogamous, and we came into this knowing that about ourselves.

Kristen: I think the thing that’s interesting is when we came into just fucking…

Kayla: We weren’t looking to be exclusive.

Kristen: No. We also weren’t looking to date, but also my feeling at the time was “I don’t want to be dating anybody.” And I knew that you were feeling the same kind of way. And that’s a different situation for me when I am in a relationship with somebody, I am a deeply monogamous person. I mean, I truly am a wife guy. It is completely in my nature.

Kayla: And I am whatever the femme version of that is. Yeah. Well, wife gal.

Kristen: It’s a situation that has not been a struggle for either of us, because we both are very much on the same page.

Kayla: I always have been. That’s been the case in every relationship that I’ve ever been in. I’ve never even really thought about it. I obviously don’t have a problem with polyamory, but I feel very secure in the way that I approach relationships for myself. Even in my last bad relationship, when things got bad, and even when we weren’t sleeping together anymore and there was no sexual component to our relationship, I still wanted to make it work, just us. It didn’t even kind of occur to me.

That said, I’m also very open to the idea of changing, technically. And I think that happens for people where maybe they change over time or what they want and all this stuff. I’m not ever the kind of person who’s says never.

Kristen: I haven’t ever been in any situation in a relationship with another person where I’ve been like, “I want to be open or I feel like I would maybe want to be polyamorous.” That’s not something that I have personally felt.

Kayla: Same.

Kristen: But I would literally never be like, “I would never feel like that way in my life” because I feel like that’s just who I am as a person. I can’t be like “I would never be a kind of way.”

But I do feel like it was very easy entering into a relationship together. Neither of us had to really have a discussion about this because both of us, for the most part, feel very monogamous,

Kayla: I will say I had some baggage of, my ex had cheated on me for a long time, lied about it before I knew the truth. She tried to ask to open up our relationship, and I said no, not knowing that she had done so already without my permission.

Kristen: I don’t know if I should say this, but then she sent you an Autostraddle article on it.

Kayla: Yes. Yes she did. She said, “Here’s this article about being monogamous and then opening up your relationship.” And it was literally an Autostraddle article. And I was like, “I can’t believe you’re trying to mansplain, gay-splain polyamory to me using an article from a place that I’ve written for for so long.”

But then not only that, she was not being truthful about the situation. I even remember telling her at the time: “I have legitimately poly friends who would kick your ass right now for doing this, because this is not what it is. It’s not lying. It’s not cheating. And then being retroactively like let’s so open the relationship.”

I definitely had some baggage, but I feel like I’ve always kind of known how I am on this regard. And it’s not because I’m a jealous person or something. It’s just not what I want.

Kristen: A big part of my life and continuing big part of my life is, my career is like my other love interest. It’s a very passionate part of my life, my relationship with my career and how I feel about writing and work and art. And I respect that about you, too. That’s so much of my time, for me, and how I share that with you. There’s not space for anything else, and there’s just not room for it. I don’t know how I would have more room, and also just who I am as a person and how I am with intimacy, which is that I am a very tough nut to crack. I feel like I’m extremely extroverted and very gregarious, and I have a lot of people that I love to see, but there’s very few people that get to have the small open part of me. And I’m careful with that. I don’t think I could do that outside of you and my work, and I don’t want to.

Kayla: I do think we’re both somewhat entertained by people hitting on each other. I feel like you often clock when somebody’s hitting on me, and I will not notice. But you think it’s entertaining. And I feel like the same way where I’m just, I know there are certain women on Twitter and stuff who have a crush on you, and it’s very entertaining to me. I feel like sometimes within monogamy, because that’s part of this question, “how do you handle monogamy” or whatever. Sometimes within monogamy, there are a lot of jealousy issues. But I don’t know, that’s not been a problem for us.

Kristen: You saying that is part of why I very much enjoy our relationship. Of course I appreciate the fact that people think you’re hot! You’re really hot. Yes, of course people are trying to hit on you or want to talk to you or have compliments for you, because why wouldn’t they? And it doesn’t make me feel bad or any kind or weird at all. I’m like, “They’re right.”

Obviously I want people to be respectful of you and your space, but it is not anything that makes me upset ever. And if anything, I’m like, “Yeah, I agree with you. Yeah. This is a person who is extremely attractive and worth your time.”

What’s your living situation like (together, separate, long distance with long visits, something else), how often do you see each other and why?

Kayla: We live together and…

Kristen: We see each other all day long.

Kayla: We see each other all day long. It was about, I think seven months into our relationship that we moved in together. And we kind of had a weird moving in situation though, because I was living in New York. You were living in Florida. We did the seven months of long distance.

We had the best long distance experience that I can imagine. It is a romcom almost. You were on book tour. I worked from home and had a lot of flexibility with my work life and was able to just meet you in different cities. And we literally met up in different cities all across the country and just had an incredible time. It was the best way to do long distance.

Kristen: It was basically having sex in a lot of different hotel rooms and going to restaurants.

Kayla: It was amazing.

Kristen: Going to book events.

Kayla: It was stupid. It was so fun. It was so good. And I feel like there’s something about that energy that has carried through in our relationship. We like to travel, we like to go out. Obviously, Covid has made that more difficult, which was hard because that was such a big part of our relationship.

As far as long distance goes, we had a great time. We did want to move in together though. We didn’t love the time apart.

Kristen: My editor at the time, his wife, who is Karen Russell, the author of-

Kayla: Name drop.

Kristen: She is incredible and literally one of my favorite authors of all time. He was like, “Half the time, Karen has to live in Texas,” so they were trying to rent out their house. I was like, “They’re only renting it out for six months. What if we tried it out living in Portland for six months?”

Kayla: Because then we were even thinking, “If we like it, we could stay.”

Kristen: I had messaged you, we talked about it. I was like, “What do you think, since you’re able to be freelance and move around, if we went to Portland and lived in this house for six months?” You had said yes.

Kayla: I had said yes. I had already put in my notice at my part-time job at Eater New York, where I was a restaurant reporter. They knew that I was leaving, and then I told them I was moving to Portland. I was actually on the way to my going away dinner with those coworkers. I love those coworkers, they were taking me out to dinner, I was on the way there, and I got a phone call from you, which was weird because at that time we only ever FaceTimed.

Kristen: That was our first call on the telephone.

I was on the book tour still. I was in Madison, Wisconsin, in a hotel room, and I received an acceptance to a residency I had applied for. I received the Shearing Fellowship in Las Vegas at Black Mountain Institute. It was something I did not think I was going to get, and it was for the exact same timeline that we were talking about being in Portland. I was like, “I have to take this fellowship.”

I was like, “I want to take this fellowship, but I can’t just sign this person on to be like, ‘Guess what? Psych. You’re going to…'”

Kayla: Portland and Vegas are very different.

Kristen: I wanted to talk to you about what it was, and I needed to make a decision, so I needed to call you right away.

Kayla: Yeah, and I said yes. I was like, “Yeah, I’ll do an adventure in Vegas. Why not?” Definitely a weird situation, because basically we moved in together for your fellowship, but that was also January 2020.

Kristen: We had a great time.

Kayla: We had an amazing time.

Kristen: It was so wonderful.

Kayla: We were already talking about extending our time in Vegas, and I always joke like, “We caused COVID.” I was like, “Let’s stay in Vegas longer.” And then we were trapped in Vegas.

Luckily, the fellowship was nice enough to let us stay, because we had both left our living situations. I had moved out of New York, had left my apartment there.

Kristen: And I left my house in Orlando.

Kayla: We had nowhere to go, technically. We were thinking that we were going to maybe apartment hunt in places while you were doing your fellowship.

Luckily, they let us stay longer. It did mean being stuck in Vegas during the majority of a summer, which neither of us were really prepared for that. That was a very intense move-in-together thing, but it was also funny, because before COVID, before all that, we were going out to Vegas as a temporary situation. The fellowship gives you this gorgeous apartment, but it’s furnished. Normally, people would just have what they have there. We ended up buying all this stuff for it, because we were nesting. We’d never lived together, so we were like, “We want to have nice shit.” We were just buying stuff, which was so silly, but in retrospect, nice, because once we were stuck, it felt more like home and not just this weird place that we were staying just because it was free.

It worked out, but it was funny, because we were obviously very eager to live together, so we were immediately like, “Let’s go to Target, let’s go to Bed Bath and Beyond.” We had never lived together. It felt like a novelty.

From there, we moved to Miami, because Miami weirdly felt like a compromise between New York and Orlando. You wanted to still be in Florida, or at least close to it. I wanted to be able to order takeout at 2 a.m.

Kristen: Also, South Florida is not a place that I had lived previously.

Kayla: Yeah, so it would be new to you. New to us both. It felt fair, because again, me moving to Florida was a big decision, and it felt fair to pick a place that was new to both of us. We’re both going to have to learn new things, find new communities.

We did choose it before COVID hit, which was not a great choice. It was so hard for us to make friends moving there, and we would’ve maybe made a different decision given all the circumstances. Even though we didn’t do the move until after COVID, it almost felt like, “We already decided this, so we’re going to follow through on it.”

Kristen: I definitely don’t regret it. It taught me a lot about myself and about how I feel about Florida. Also, we made such good friends. The few friends we did make-

Kayla: Are lifelong friends, for sure.

Kristen: Yeah, absolutely.

Kayla: You needed something new. We also needed a little space from your old life. You had had a marriage here, and I think you needed a little bit of space from that.

Kristen: My family was here, and I’m estranged from them. There were a lot of things going on, so it seemed it was a good idea. And now we’re back in Orlando.

Kayla: We were always going to end up back here, but I think it happened faster than either of us expected. I think it would surprise a lot of people to know that I’m actually the one who accelerated the timeline. I can remember sitting outside on the balcony in Miami and saying, “When our lease is up, let’s move to Orlando. Let’s not sign again.”

Kristen: You were the one and I was like, “Are you sure?”

Kayla: Yeah, because I think you were going to want to sign again, because you haven’t moved as many times as me either. Another move so soon seemed daunting to you.

Kristen: Every time we would come back here when we were in Miami, we’d be getting an Airbnb once a month and coming to Orlando.

Kayla: Yes, we basically were treating Orlando like our weekend getaway. We spent too much money.

Kristen: I was deeply homesick. Every time we’d come back here, I would have a couple beers, get teary-eyed.

Kayla: Also, there’d be an uptick in your writing and your productivity in your creative life. Even when we’d just get back from Orlando, you’d be working so well. I could see all that, but the reason why I pushed it, it wasn’t just because of that even, I was like, “We fit in better in Orlando. This is where we belong.” I don’t regret Miami, and I think it was necessary to do, because Orlando would’ve been a harder transition for me if we hadn’t baby-stepped into it.

Kristen: Mentally, I felt immediately terrific once we moved. I just feel good being outside here. A big part of me, connecting with work, art, and creativity is being outside, especially in a personal space. We have a yard here, and I just get to be outside.

As we’ve been sitting here, there’s a raccoon that comes in our yard every night to drink out of our bird bath, a possum that crawls across the fence, there are rats that are crawling up in the tree, and our dog is smashing her face against the sliding glass door. You can hear this chirping sound of night insects. It feels so vibrant to me, and I need it. I feel like I need it, and when I don’t have it, I don’t feel great.

How do you all share expenses or work out finances? How do you share or split up labor in the relationship? Can you talk about why that is?

Kristen: I think this is a great question. I feel like we have very solid, strong responses to this.

I’m a person who would never share a bank account with another person. But that doesn’t mean that finances can’t be split. When you and I started dating, my writing career was in an upswing. I’m significantly older than you, but for a majority of my life, I had been working strictly library work. Also, I had a kid when I was a teenager, I went to school non-traditionally, at night. I didn’t have any money, I was poor and grew up that way. When you and I met, it was right on the cusp of me coming into this writing career. Writing is not a tremendous amount of money, but in this specific instance of my writing career, I was like, “I’m in a comfortable space, and you’re more freelance.”

Kayla: You were fluhhhh-husssssh with caaaaa-haaaash. [ed. note: i rly did the voice]

Kristen: Yes, exactly. No, I was not, but I was in a place where I’m like, “I have stability right now for this moment.” I had just gotten a book deal with a Big Five publisher. I was like, “You and I dating, we’re both creatives, we’re both writers. Our circumstances are going to change over time consistently.” I was like, “There are times where my writing career is going to be flourishing and times when yours is going to be. That means, if we’re in a relationship together, we can take those ebbs and flows and be like, ‘For right now, I’ll be paying more, and then when you’re in that situation, then maybe you are.'”

Kayla: I have always been very honest and open about the fact that I did grow up with money, and I have a safety net in the way that you never have. At the beginning of our relationship, you were like, “I’m making more money now,” and I was like, “I’m not making that much money, but I could borrow money from my parents if we get into a situation where we need it.” You were like, “No, I understand that if things change and you’re the one making more money, then things will shift.”

At the beginning of our relationship, you paid for everything. You paid our full rent in Miami until I got this full-time job at Autostraddle, literally.

Kristen: It’s possibly because I grew up very poor and also for a majority of my adult life have been poor, but I love transparency around money, and I wish that people were more transparent about it.

Being in a relationship together, I was very upfront with you. I was like, “We need to be super honest about finances, and we need to be talking about how money functions inside of this relationship, because it’s always obscured in these ways.” That’s our capitalist society where people who have money don’t want to talk about money in this way.

For me, especially because I am a writer and people try and hide what things cost or how much you get, I was like, “I want to be very upfront about it,” but I also want to be like, “It’s okay for us. For right now, I’m doing it, and then you do it.” For right now, as I’m writing and trying to work on new stuff, we have switched.

Kayla: I think that’s something that people don’t always understand, too, especially maybe people who are non-writers who would be reading this. Just because you had your moment where you did get this really big deal, you were a bestseller, so you’re able to get this amazing deal. That only lasts for so long, and then you don’t know what your next fucking deal looks like. You have no idea. And you’re in that limbo stage right now.

Kristen: Anybody who asks me at any time, I try and be transparent about book money, because I think people aren’t honest enough about how finances work. We’re getting really outside of the realm of our relationship, but I guess it’s still contained within it. Yeah, 25% of your book money it has to go to taxes. Also, just because you have a deal doesn’t mean those things happen in real time.

Kayla: It’s parceled out in a weird way.

Kristen: But to address the other part of the question about how things happen in our household, Kayla cooks a lot. She’s an amazing chef. She makes an amazing amount of food.

Truly, when we began dating, I was happily living off of late night Taco Bell and 7-Eleven fare. Kayla makes us a lot of meals, and because she does all of that, I’ve very happily fallen into, I would say, a lion’s share of cleaning in the house.

Kayla: I would say you do all of it. I really enjoy doing certain domestic work, but it’s very limited to the kitchen. Not even, because I don’t like doing dishes. I don’t like doing that shit. I love to cook, and I love to perform this housewife duty, but I don’t love to clean. I don’t love to do all that stuff. I’m not necessarily a slob, but I have been a slob at periods of my life. I do feel like we have this very queer relationship where, in so many ways, I’m the housewife. I am cooking the food and doing that stuff, but then you’re doing all of the cleaning, you’re doing all of the housework, and then you do some of the more quote, unquote “butch work,” too. You work in the yard and all that stuff. You take both of those things on.

Kristen: I feel like I have dominion over the garage, the tools that we have, the yard work, and trying to get things set up. I take out the garbage.

Kayla: Then also the vacuum and the dusting.

Kristen: I vacuum and I dust. I clean the bathrooms.

Kayla: You do the laundry now too. [ed. note: omg maybe it’s boring for us to talk about laundry so much but if you slog through our laundry tangent i promise there’s horny content coming soooooon]

Kristen: I do the laundry and I do the dishes for the most part.

Kayla: When we lived in Miami, I did all of the laundry for a very specific reason. You had always had in-unit laundry where you lived.

Kristen: I said, “I don’t want to do that,” because having a dog means that sometimes they piss on things. I was like, “I don’t want to have to be like it’s 2 a.m., we have to go somewhere, and try and wash this.”

Kayla: We both made lists of deal breakers when we were moving into our first real place together, because the fellowship didn’t count. Our first real place together, we had certain deal breakers as far as the apartments we were looking at. Couples should do that when apartment hunting together.

Your deal breakers were… The main one was, “It has to have in-unit laundry.”

Kristen: That was my only one.

Kayla: The place in Miami had laundry in the building’s basement. You were like, “I don’t want to live here, because of this reason alone.” I was like, “This place is so nice. It is the nicest place we will ever live. There is a view of the ocean. I am going to swear to you right now that I will do the laundry every single time. You will never ever have to do the laundry,” and that remained true. You never even learned how to use the machines down there.

Kristen: As soon as we moved into this new place-

Kayla: Now you do all the laundry.

Kristen: I almost 100% of the time do the laundry and I’m fine with that.

Kayla: I feel like one of the first times I did it was yesterday. I didn’t even switch it, you switched it.

Kristen: Part of it too is, for me, when I’m trying to deal with anxiety, stress, having things be cluttered, or not set in the house makes my brain feel messy.

Kayla: You’re a resetter. At the end of the night, you want to reset everything the way that it looks before, so that we wake up in the morning…

Kristen: I literally set the pillows on the couch, I make sure the kitchen is cleaned up, I bring all of our stuff upstairs, I throw out any garbage, everything’s done. That way, when I come down in the morning, stuff feels set. Because I don’t like coming down into a space and having it feel cluttered. I don’t know how much of that is just… There are areas of control that I think feed into. Even how I like to perform sex. I like to have my hands on things, and I want to be the one dictating how things happen. If I’m able to do it myself, control it, and to see, it is very satisfying to me. Yeah, I reset. We have a bunch of candles in our house, I reset the candles in the morning. I have a fucking leaf blower, I come outside and I leaf blow the deck, so it’s clean the way I like it to be.

I feel like a sense of satisfaction. I get a deep sense of satisfaction from doing those things. Part of it too is I’m in a career, my writing career, where I don’t get to have a say in how those things function. Also, you’re very nice to let me do a lot of the things I need to do. Some of my behaviors I didn’t realize were so deeply… I have my nails dug into it. The detergent I can buy, the type of toothpaste I want to buy, or paper towels.

Kayla: You never want to change it up.

Kristen: I didn’t realize that I was like that until you and I started dating. It’s very fascinating to me.

Kayla: I’m always like, “What do I have the coupon for?” And you’re like, “No, I want to get the thing that I want.”

I’m trying to think if there’s any other financial things that we haven’t turned over, just because I do think that it’s important to talk about that stuff. We share a car that is your car and you pay for pretty much all the expenses related to that car. Also, when we go out, whether it’s on a date together or out with people, we don’t really nickel and dime each other. We don’t split bills.

Kristen: Absolutely not.

Kayla: We just take turns, and it feels very natural. I do think that we are very aware of how much money each other has at any given time. Once I got the Autostraddle job, you were so willing to let me pay at restaurants and bars in a way that, before, you would’ve just immediately grabbed the check and done it. All of a sudden you would just be like, “Yeah, I’m going to let you take this.” Even though we don’t share any bank accounts or anything like that, we have a lot of transparency. You tell me every time you get weird checks from shit. That’s part of writer life too. You’re like, “I sold the German rights to this and I get this check.” You always tell me, “I got this check,” and then I know that you have that money. You know what I mean?

Kristen: When we do have money, I consider it to be our money in the household, because it’s going towards household expenses. Even though we don’t share a bank account. I was like, “When money comes in, it’s still shared money, because we are sharing our lives together.” When I’m doing stuff for the house, getting things for the yard, I have an understanding that it’s a shared expense, because it’s something we’re both using and it’s for us.

Kayla: We’re very rarely like, “You owe me this, you owe me that.”

Kristen: I literally have never done that. It’s also just not something that I want to do. I don’t know how much of that is… I am a person who likes to pick up the check at places and is like…

Kayla: Yes, I do know that.

Kristen: I love to do it. I love being out with friends, picking up the check, and doing things like that. For our relationship, my mindset is, “It’s a shared expense household.” What we have together is what we share, so our finances are linked, even if our bank accounts aren’t.

Kayla: And for us, that doesn’t mean a 50, 50 split. It totally moves with how much each other is making.

Kristen: That’s just going to continually shift through our careers.

Kayla: I’m pretty sure we’ve never, actually, split rent 50, 50.

Kristen: No, we have not.

Kayla: It’s always been some sort of adjustment for our income.

Kristen: I think that makes sense.

Kayla: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Wait, can we move inside for the rest of this?

Kristen: Yes. It’s going to pick up a lot of Lola snoring in the background. Jesus.

Do you have kids, pets, plants, all three? Do you not currently have, but want any of these things? Why? Are you in agreement?

Kristen: I have a 22-year-old son. I had him when I was a teenager.

Kayla: He was 18 when we started talking.

Kristen: He was already off at college when we started talking.

Kayla: He was a full-grown person.

Kristen: Yes. This is something I very much kept out of any… Obviously, I was just trying to sleep with people and I never had anyone come to my home.

Kayla: Yeah. I knew it, though. We didn’t talk about it in the beginning, but I knew it, because I Googled you before we met up, and it was in one bio of yours. It was in your bio on The Toast.

Kristen: That’s one of my first pieces that I had come out.

Kayla: I think that was maybe before you had made the decision to be a little more private about that. You hadn’t gone viral on Twitter yet.

Kristen: Yes. This is something that happens when people have a lot of online access to you, they think they have access to everything, and I wanted my son’s life to be freely and completely his own and not for my own life to have any bearing on what he was doing or trying to be. I didn’t want him to have to deal with anything just because I was terminally online.

He’s 22 now. When we started dating, he was 18 and then turned 19, but was already off for his freshman year of college. And then I have a dog named Lola.

Kayla: You had a lot of pets when we started dating. To the point where I remember my best friend Becca at the time was like, “How many pets does this person have?!” My friends obviously creeped you at the beginning and a big part of your Instagram presence was all of your animals.

Kristen: Part of this, too, is shared pet custody with my ex partner. When I moved to Vegas, I took my most portable piglet baby, which is Lola, who’s a French bulldog. Yeah, we shared a lot of pets together. That was something I shared a lot with my ex, we both very much loved animals.

Kayla: I did joke to someone, I remember early on, that I was dating Snow White. Butch Snow White.

Kristen: I feel like at the time when we started talking, there were three dogs in the house, a cat, a hamster, and a fish. There were a lot of animals and I love animals. That is a thing about me and a part of why I really love being in Florida, it’s such a space for creatures. Yeah, they were shared custody animals.

Kayla: You brought Lola to Vegas, and I had never lived with a dog before.

Kristen: That was very funny. The first time you met Lola was when we were moving across the country.

Kayla: I met her on the cross-country trip.

Kristen: I picked you up from the airport. Lola was in the backseat along with our suitcases and things. We got you, you leaned in the back and pet her on the head and were like, “Hello, nice to meet you.” And then we stopped in New Orleans. Our friend Jami Attenberg put us up for the weekend as we were driving across the country, and we got to visit with her. And we were sleeping in the bed, and it was the first time we had slept with the dog and you were like, “Oh my God, this dog snores so-

Kayla: So much.

Kristen: So much. It’s so loud.

Kayla: Yeah, because it was Lola and it was Jami’s late dog, Sid, as well, who recently passed away. Which is very, very sad because literally the first time that I ever slept in a bed with dogs, it was Lola and Sid at the same time. So I got a crash course.

Kristen: You did, yes.

Kayla: They both snored. They were both stinky. I was like, “Well, this is my life now.”

But I do remember having that thought of, I was like, “Wow, I really am into this person.” I always in theory, liked dogs, but I didn’t grow up with them. And my dad actively dislikes dogs.

Kristen: But he seems to like Lola, which is funny.

Kayla: He does, yes. He’s very Indian dad about it all. It’s kind of like dogs don’t belong inside the house. But he has warmed up to Lola a lot. But yeah, I was always like, one day I’m going to have a giant Husky. I remember thinking that when I was younger and telling my parents that. But I’d never slept with a dog. I’d never had a dog in my personal space. And so Lola was the first one. And the joke formed early on that I was step-mommy. And I was like, “I am so fiercely protective of her.”

Kristen: And she is of you, which is extremely funny.

Kayla: Yes.

Kristen: In a way that she has never been of me.

Kayla: Yes. She can’t handle me being in a pool swimming.

Kristen: French bulldogs notoriously cannot swim. And Lola definitely can’t. She’s very top heavy. And she has never done this with me, but as soon as Kayla gets in a pool around her, she paces around a pool. She’ll scream. She hurled herself in once, and we like to say she fell to the bottom of the pool with the heaviness of a toaster.

Kayla: Yes, yes. It was throwing a toaster into a pool.

Kristen: We had to rescue her from that because that’s how much she didn’t like that you were in there. So you guys have a very specific kind of bond together that’s different than what I have with her.

Kayla: Yes, it’s true. It is true. And in the beginning, I let her really truly sleep right up against me and up by my face, which I’ve since learned that she can just stay at the bottom of the bed. She can stay at our feet. But at the beginning I was just like, “Oh no, this is the baby, she’s got to be close.”

Kristen: We have a million plants in our house.

Kayla: We do. But they’re under your supervision.

Kristen: That’s part of my purview also. I think I grew up thinking I wasn’t good at taking care of plants. And part of that was having pets so often, and pets need a lot of care. And I was almost too attentive to plants.

Kayla: You cared them to death.

Kristen: Yes. I was like obviously, I need to feed them every day. That’s not how plants function. And so I have since then become a plant dad … Like we have so many plants. We have an entire wall of pothos that grows down the wall. I like things that are alive. I love being in spaces where things feel alive.

Kayla: You have a lemon tree that I feel like your mental health hinges on.

Kristen: Well, God, please don’t let it die.

Kayla: You’re like, “If the lemon tree is doing well, then I’m doing well.”

Kristen: But it is a thing where it’s like, I genuinely enjoy having creatures and things feel like alive around me.

Kayla: You do. You like alive things. It’s a big part of your love of Florida. It’s like there’s always creatures. There’s always plants. It’s not only, there’s only plants, but they’re almost trying to take over. It’s like you love the overgrown look, you love-

Kristen: I don’t want anything to feel super manicured.

But I mean, I guess a good question of this, too, is how we feel about having kids together.

Kayla: I feel very passionate about the fact that all couples but especially queer couples should talk about this and early on.

Kristen: And that’s something we did, right away.

Kayla: Yes. And it’s not weird to talk about early on. It’s something that you should be on the same page about as early as possible. And I still remember the first time we talked about it. It was during that lockdown time in Vegas, and we were sitting outside and you know, you wanted to gauge things because you were like, “We have this age difference.” You were like, “I have a kid ….”

Kristen: And he’s already an adult. I have raised him.

Kayla: You were like, “I want to know where you’re at.” And I was very honest. I was just kind of like, “I don’t want to rule it out. I don’t want to have a hard no.” But for right now, that’s not my focus. And I think, yeah, my answer was basically not yes or no. It was like, I’m not ready to decide, but there’s a good chance I will want to one day.

Kristen: And I think that that is where I was, as well. But also, it’s an interesting thing to consider because I have a lot of things attached to parenthood that were very much attached to … I was a teenager and had to have this very gendered kind of specific role as mother, as a single mother for this child and what that looked like. And my financial circumstances, my age, and the role I felt like I had to play inside of that.

Kayla: Or you had to have a relationship with your parents who … You had to rely on them for certain things, and it extended your relationship with them in a way where you weren’t able to put up the boundaries that you could later in life because you had to rely on them for things.

Kristen: And my relationship with my son is terrific, and we have a very close, great relationship. But I do sometimes say this is, we had a relationship that was almost like … I mean I was 18-

Kayla: So you grew up together.

Kristen: We grew up together. I was still growing and learning. And so the idea of becoming a parent now, which is, obviously, I would not be carrying a child, that’s not something I would be doing. But I was like, “What does my role look like if you and I had a child?” And it’s a very different kind of relationship, and it’s also a very different financial circumstance and age circumstance and in a committed relationship circumstance. And those things all are very different than what it was previously. And so I was like, “I’m not ruling that stuff out either, but it’s also a decision we would make together.”

Kayla: That conversation went really well, though, because I feel like we both were being very honest and I think I was a little nervous that my answer felt wishy-washy of like, no, yes, no.

Kristen: But that’s how mine felt.

Kayla: I think when we had that conversation I was 28, so I was just like, yeah, I still feel very young. But also the thing we immediately agreed about, and I think I was the one who said it, I was like, “My main focus is my writing.” I was writing, and my career is my child. And I knew that you would be able to relate to that because I was like, “I know that you’ve never been able to really treat it like that because you had this kid.”

Your kid had to be your focus for so long that even when you were writing and first coming into yourself as a writer, the kid is always going to supersede that. And so you’d never been able to be selfish in this way of, I’m making choices based solely on my own writing. Not that that’s selfish. You know what I mean?

Kristen: There’s this great piece that maybe we can link to about Becoming The Art Monster. And it’s this great idea about what it means to be, quote, unquote, “Selfish about work outside of the traditional trajectories of love, life and romantic life and kids and family and what that looks like to be the art monster and make the art your lover and these things.” Which is maybe what I was trying to get at earlier when I was talking about a big part of relationships in our lives outside of each other is we have very intense, very specific relationships with our specific art. And that takes precedent.

So I think that you and I talking about that, I felt secure in talking to you about the idea about having children because I feel like we will always be on the same page when it comes to … But where is the space for making work? And where is space for art?

Kayla: I think the point at which either of us would decide to have kids is it would be a point where we’re like, “This is not going to take away from these other parts of our lives.”

Kristen: But I think that that’s such a specific conversation, and maybe people aren’t always on the same page about it, but very happily we were.

Kayla: For me, I think what’s important to me is that it remains an option. I think it would’ve been a very different conversation if … Because I remember, you put the ball in my court a little bit. You were like, “What are you feeling?” And I was very honest of, “I don’t want to rule it out, but I’m not sure.” And I think it would’ve been a very different conversation and a different trajectory if you had said, “Well, no, never for me.

Kristen: I’m just never going to be a never person. I think it is not in my nature to be like, “This thing will never happen” because that’s not how I think life works. Saying never to anything isn’t how my entire life has functioned. So that’s just not how I would ever frame anything, especially any kind of life trajectory or choice.

Kayla: I think for me it’s just like I always want it to be an option to the point where it’s like, if I do get to be a certain age, maybe I would consider freezing my eggs or doing something like that, which is obviously very costly and stuff. But for me, if I can have it as an option, I want it as an option.

How would you describe the sex we have together? Do you believe in lesbian bed death and, if so, has it or do you think it could visit our relationship? What haven’t we done together but would like to?

Kristen: Both of us are very sex driven.

Kayla: Yes, we have very high sex drives. And I had never been with someone who could match my sex drive. If anything, I have a higher sex drive than you do.

Kristen: I think it’s shocking to me. It’s very shocking. I’ve never been with another person who I felt wanted to fuck more than I do. But I really enjoy that part of our relationship.

I mean, it’s about to be four years together, and that’s not something that’s factored into our relationship at all. I do know, especially from being in previous relationships, obviously I’m not going to use the terminology “lesbian bed death,” but I would say relationships go through ebbs and flows of things. How are people communicating with each other? Are there issues that a person is having mental health wise? Is there something that’s going on that’s very high stress? Is there grief or trauma or different things like that? And that obviously affects the idea of having sex in a relationship. But we haven’t had those issues in any major way. And you and I have both agreed on this: I don’t want to be in a long-term relationship where sex isn’t a big important part of that relationship.

Kayla: Yeah. Again, because we both do have such high sex drives and, to go back a bit, are monogamous, too. So it’s like we want to have sex with each other. So that’s always going to be a component. I think what’s interesting to me is that, if there are ever periods of time where we aren’t having sex, whether that’s a few nights in a row, a full week or whatever, we both clock it and then talk about it. We’re both like, well, we haven’t had sex in a week. It’s like, we notice it.

Kristen: It’s because it’s very unusual. It’s unusual behavior. Usually it’s just like we have a lot going on. We don’t have an issue with talking about sex or engaging with sex.

Kayla: No. Because I do think that sex is a really big part of our relationship in the way that it’s not necessarily for everyone. Because obviously, it’s the way we got together. But it’s also, we happened to come into each other’s lives in a time where, I think, both of us had learned a lot about ourselves sexually.

Kristen: I know exactly the kind of sex I want to have.

Kayla: And same. For me, I know it’s different than for you. I think when you came into the situation with me, you were like “I know exactly what I want.” For me, I will say I did learn some of that in the beginning of our relationship. Because also, I’d never used a sex toy before we were together. Not even solo, which feels so crazy. Nothing!

And even talking about it here, I worry about it getting misconstrued in this weird way of this weird narrative of, you are older than me and more experienced than me and you kind of come into my life and being like, “Here’s how to have sex.” And that’s not what it was. It was not like that. That is a mischaracterization, but there is a degree to which I felt pretty inexperienced before we got together. I’d had a lot of sex, but I had a lot of sex that I didn’t really like.

Kristen: I did feel like you felt comfortable. And then feeling comfortable means you can try out new things. Because that’s what that level of comfort means. Something that felt very unusual to me or maybe a little scary to me before or I didn’t know how to access it, it feels a little more accessible because we feel comfortable with each other. And maybe that is the language that is.

Kayla: As soon as we started using toys and using different things, I was all in. I was like, “Let’s go.” It was never this weird kind of hesitation on my part. I knew that’s what I wanted. And I just had never, I think, had the space to explore that. And I think, yeah, you’re right. You created that safe space for me. You were surprised I hadn’t done a lot of things, but you didn’t make me feel weird about it.

Kristen: I mean, we’re both queer people. We know that stuff doesn’t come on a timeline, right?

Kayla: Right.

Kristen: It’s like you figure stuff out or try stuff out when you do. And that doesn’t mean you’re this age or you’re at this period of your life. It means, here’s who I am, this is when it happened.

Kayla: I think for me, I had been such a high sex drive, sexual person for so long and being queer and all this other stuff on top of it, I felt a lot of shame about that. And I think there was something about when we first got together that, finally, I could let go of that and then it was just, yeah, free for all. It’s like, I’m not going to experience this shame anymore. So I want to do all the things that I want to do. And you were also at a point of time where you had been fucking around for years at that point-

Kristen: Literally years.

Kayla: And you were like, “So I literally know exactly what I like.”

Kristen: I know what I like, and I know what I want. I mean, some of it, too, is like right, it’s this kind of bottom top dynamic we’ve talked about. Some of it is bottom and top, but some of it is just kind of control for me. And I know what I like control-wise during sex. And that doesn’t mean the other person is going to be interested in that. But you and I immediately had a dynamic where I’m like, this feels like it is compatible.

Kayla: Super compatible, yeah. Because you’re not full on stone, but you have some stone tendencies of…you like to get another person off.

Kristen: I very much do. But also I have a very specific idea about how I would want someone to touch me.

I always feel constantly, it could be any time of day, and you and I will be like, “Hey, I thought about this.” Or, “I wanted to try this out.” Or joking around about stuff, but also we both watch porn separately and together. We both masturbate separately and together, and we incorporate that into our conversations and our sex life.

Kayla: We early on watched a lot of porn together.

Kristen: But also separately. I mean, we still both do that. I love the idea that we both have very specific sex drives and engage in that, even outside of each other in that kind of way.

Kayla: Yeah. I mean, like we were saying before, we’re together all day, every day and yet we still find time to masturbate or watch porn separately.

Kristen: Having a body means having a relationship with that body by yourself. But also, I always feel excited. I’m never bored talking to you about anything having to do with sex. You and I are both up for pretty much whatever.

Kayla: We’re both very down to try things. So the last part of this question of what haven’t you done together that you want to. I don’t think we know that now.

Kristen: I’m sure there is going to be something but I don’t know what that is yet.

Kayla: And I also think the things that you don’t like necessarily for yourself, which you maybe have more of those than I do. But it’s also stuff that I’m not really interested in. You aren’t interested in experiencing pain at all during sex.

Kristen: No.

Kayla: And I do, but I I don’t want to make you feel pain. That’s what I mean, though, where it’s so compatible. Where it’s those things that you technically have hard lines about. They’re not hard lines that inhibit my pleasure. They’re not things that I’m just like, “Oh, I feel like I’m missing out on this experience or anything like that.” It’s the lines that you have, I’m like, “No, I get it.” It’s cliché to say we’re a good fit, but we’re a really fucking good fit. And I don’t think I would have learned as much about myself sexually in this relationship if that hadn’t been the case.

Kristen: Well, I mean, some of the dynamics between our relationship are-

Kayla: Right. You’re very strongly top and I’m very strongly bottom.

Kristen: It’s very much I want to fuck, and you want to be fucked. And I don’t have a problem with pain when it comes to providing that for you. Trying to think of a classy way to say that.

Kayla: Providing the pain. Providing the pain. No, I think that-

Kristen: And I like that. I like that.

Kayla: It’d be a very different story if you were … technically I have hooked up with people who are like, “Oh, I think it’s disgusting to choke out a woman.” Or, “I could never do that.” Which again, fine, that’s totally their prerogative. And if that’s the way they feel, that’s fine. But I could never be with a person like that because I’m just like, “Well, I want that and you’re telling me that that’s disgusting?” That’s what I feel like, the things that we both want or don’t want are so compatible. It helped free me of that shame.

Kristen: Well, because also I think, too, that it just feels comfortable. It feels interesting to use the word comfortable in these kinds of ways when talking about sex, because maybe comfort implies a kind of warm blanket, cup of tea, kind of situation. But comfort, I think, the idea of comfort is being able to be expressly free to say things and not feel any kind of tension or anxiety. I don’t think either of us has a feeling of stress or anxiety or fear when talking about something we would want. And I think if anything, I feel excited to talk to you about stuff I want, right?

Kayla: Oh yeah, we’re so honest with each other. I’m someone who strongly identifies as a lesbian and have for a long time, and I’ve told you that I watch straight porn. It’s things like that where I’ve never really been in a relationship where it felt like I could say that. I’ve never used sex toys, but I used to put weird things inside of myself when I was first exploring my own sexuality and stuff. And I felt comfortable to share things like that with you early on. And I think that can only mean a good sex life if you’re able to just talk about whatever.

Kristen: And in a way, too, where it doesn’t feel like we’re like, “Well, we have to have this conversation.”

Kayla: No.

Kristen: It’s like, “I want to have this conversation.”

I feel excited to tell you about things like that or to say what I want or to be like, this is what I’d like for us to try. It’s always a feeling of excitement and a feeling of anticipation. It’s never a feeling of … And maybe that’s what I mean when I say comfort because it’s a comforting feeling to be like, “I never have to feel worry over something like that.”

Kayla: I think I could say almost anything about sex or what I want sexually and it just would not faze you. Also we both write sex into our work. I feel like we’re both known for that in our writing, in different ways. But it’s why we’re able to even be open about it in something like this interview, for others to read.

Do you think your relationship will more or less continue to exist as it currently is? Why?

Kayla: Well, we’ve talked on this a bit already, but both of us are the type of people where we’re always open to change.

Kristen: Well, I wouldn’t want anything in my life to exist in exactly the same way, that sounds awful. Even my writing practice doesn’t work that way. I don’t want to be bored. And the idea of something staying the same way forever is extremely boring. Do I think it will stay as some kind of representation of what we have? Yeah.

Kayla: Yeah. I think we’ll always love to eat meals together, travel together. I think we’ll always love talking about writing, all the kind of fundamental things to our relationship. I don’t think those will shift. I think on a very surface level, we’re engaged, we’re going to get married. So that to me is a relationship change. We are going to be wives.

Kristen: I mean, that was already a big shift for me. I truthfully didn’t think I would ever get married again. I didn’t think that was something that was going to happen for me or that I would ever want. So that’s something that’s already shifted within the course of our relationship.

What would you say are your most fundamental differences?

Kristen: I think this is a given because of our age gap, because we are 12 years apart. I am not a person who … I’m not on my phone all the time. I’m a person who can’t even remember to reply to a text. And you are a person who, you met your core group of friends that you have that are your very good, close, incredible friends, literally online. And so how you connect with friendship and people is very much based on being like, I need to talk to people 24/7 in this kind of way. And that’s just not how I am. But I understand it. It’s not something I dislike.I understand it’s a fundamental difference in how we both are.

Kayla: Yeah, this is building on that, but I just have a lot more intimate relationships than you do.

Kristen: I feel like I’m more careful. I have a couple very, very close friends, and my thing with those friends, too, is I have two best friends and both of these best friends, I never text them. Not to use this language or whatever, but I guess my love language is … I need to spend time with people. It’s actual spent time. So when I’m with those people, I’m a hundred percent present. I’m like, “Here I am, I’m with you and I’m only thinking about you.”

Kayla: Whereas, I spend all day texting so many different friends, but even the ways that I text them or the ways that we talk is very different in the way that you are with your friends. Some of this goes back to, I would say our most fundamental difference is you’re a top, I’m a bottom, and that kind of manifests in these different ways. I will talk to my friends during the day about being horny for this celebrity or whatever. When we talk in this kind of way where it’s technically sexual, but not for each other, but we talk about these things like this hot mom on this show or whatever and you would never talk to your friends that way, ever. If you’re talking about a horny thing, it’s with me.

Kristen: I just don’t communicate that way, but I don’t dislike that you do it, I think it’s just different. I think it’s one of these things where some of it is an age gap thing, but some of it is just who we are as people. Who I am as a person is that I enjoy spending time with people face to face for the most part, and I struggle with doing that stuff in a text-based situation, but again, there’s not anything wrong or weird about that, it’s just different.

Do you all have any shared dreams/goals for the future or each other? What are these?

Kristen: I’m excited for when your writing career/book career is more established because I think that’s what you’re working towards. I think that will be an exciting time. I’ve already loved that you’ve spent that time with me. I’m looking forward to doing that time with you when you do book tours and when you’re in different spaces that I’ve already been in for writing. I think that will be really exciting, and I’m looking forward to that because it’s something we both love so much.

Kayla: I constantly feel excited about your future. I feel like every single thing that you do in your writing career, it makes me excited. We’ve talked about this recently, but something that I figured out for myself is I think we might end up having very different book careers and different writing careers, and I like that. Who knows? Again, this is something I feel like could change at any point, but I kind of like the space that I’m in right now of this very indie, kind of small, nontraditional publishing world. There are ways to have success and breakthroughs in that world, but I feel like I am maybe going to explore that a little more before pressuring myself to pursue more mainstream avenues. Our careers are always going to look different, but I think we’re both always excited about whatever the kind of milestone is for each other.

Kristen: I’m not trying to speak for you, but I think we are both always excited for when the other person is actively engaged in doing the creative work that’s very meaningful.

Kayla: Because that’s another thing that ebbs and flows, to go back to finances, our creative lives are in constant flux. We’re almost never aligned. This was something that we talked about in our Catapult piece that we did together: If you’re writing a lot, I’m usually not. If I’m writing a lot, you’re usually not. I don’t know why that happens, but it does. But we’re always excited for the other person.

Kristen: We’re both working on creative work, but what we’re making, they’re not the same thing. They’re both very deeply important to us, but our things are separate.

Kayla: As for shared goals, I’m not focused on having a kid together right now, but I would love to write a pilot together, that’s the thing I feel very excited about. We’re still at the very early stages of that, but that feels fun. I don’t think we ever really expected to write something together, but this is a different medium. That feels exciting to me, because it does feel connected to our relationship in this way where we are always riffing off each other. We watch a lot of TV and movies together.

Kristen: We also have a similar sensibility about humor and drama and tenderness, and I think those things factor into making something like that. Also, I just feel like what we’ve even talked about for the pilot so far is really good. It doesn’t feel like work.

Kayla: It doesn’t. It feels fun. We call it writer’s room kind of jokingly like, “Yeah, we’re in the writer’s room.” It’s the two of us on the couch. That’s something that I’m excited about for the future, because who knows what comes of that, but we’re working toward it together.

Kristen: But part of that is it doesn’t even matter, it’s just making something. To me, that’s especially where I’m at in my career, is the idea of making something and just enjoying the process of making something is reasonable enough and it feels right.

What piece of pop culture do you share or what piece of pop culture reminds you of your relationship? What’s your movie or your show or your book or your song?

Kayla: This is a funny thing though, because this is the part of our relationship where our age difference comes through the most. A lot of our pop culture references or even the things that we’re attached to or the things we know…this is where we kind of diverge a lot, but also we give each other a lot of grief about certain things.

Kristen: But in a funny way, I think, it’s in a funny way.

Kayla: Yes. Other than stuff that’s coming out now, anything that we brought into the relationship, none of it is going to perfectly overlap, because even the things that we both liked, we experienced in very different ways. A good example of that is you watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer when it was coming out. Not only that, it tracked your life.

Kristen: Buffy was in the same grade as me. Buffy was literally my age, and that was a show that was really deeply meaningful to me. It was at a time in my life where I felt like I didn’t really have a lot to grasp onto, and I felt very isolated. I was 18 and I had a baby, and I was very alone, and I didn’t really have a lot of art, and I very much embraced the idea of this show and fandom in general as something that I could have that felt like creative and a community space, that was deeply special to me. I know you had this with different shows in different ways. You were on Tumblr, you were in a completely different timeline.

Kayla: Not even that, even just my relationship to Buffy also had these kind of special contours to it and stuff, but was very different. It was not airing anymore, I kind of came to it later in life. It was foundational to some of my friendships. But it’s so different. I feel like we have these kind of things where, they mean a lot to us, but in very different ways and at very different times of our lives, or even just that we consume them in different ways. Because I watched all of Buffy on Netflix, or even The L Word.

Kristen: When I watched The L Word, I had no money at the time, and I got Showtime, and it was like my, “I’m not going to eat out.”

Kayla: And you shared the account with friends, right? [ed. note: Kristen kindly did not correct me here when i assumed there was a LOGIN for Showtime back in 2004 rather than a literal subscription for your cable account. So no, she did not share the account, she had people come over to her home to physically watch it together anyway I was born in 1992]

Kristen: Yes. I was like, “I’m never going to eat out at restaurants because I need to pay for Showtime,” so I just didn’t go to a restaurant for a year so I could watch The L Word.

Kayla: And I had checked it out from my college’s media library because it was on Netflix by the time I was watching it, but I had a shared Netflix account with my mom, so I was like, “I can’t watch it on there.” So I had to check out physical DVDs from my college. That’s what I’m saying. We have all this weird kind of overlap, but our experiences of it were so different because of our age difference.

Kristen: The way that we watch things together now is so exciting to me. Even how we watched Yellowjackets.

Kayla: That’s what I was about to say. I think that’s the most striking example of shared media because I was sent those screeners. You were saying, “Oh, the show Yellowjackets that’s coming out-”

Kristen: I really wanted to watch it.

Kayla: “It has all these people that I really like,” which it’s obviously catering toward nineties kids.

You were already hyped about it, and I was like, “I got screeners. Let’s check it out.” We were in Miami, and we pressed play on that first episode. We had screeners for the first six or seven, and we stayed up until four in the morning watching all of those screeners. That was the first time that we’d ever had a pop culture experience like that. We’d watched lots of stuff together. We’d had lots of fun watching things together. But I think you and I both have kind of somewhat obsessive tendencies.

Kristen: Oh, absolutely. Yes.

Kayla: Especially when it comes to pop culture. That had never happened at the same time for us, where we literally cannot stop. We are so obsessed and-

Kristen: Being able to talk about it together, not just enjoy it in the moment of watching it, but then rehashing it, thinking about it and considering it during the day, and then just popping it in because we’re together all the time. Just being like, “Oh, what did you think about this?” Or, “Oh, I’ve been thinking about this all day.”

Kayla: Not to be too meta about it, but it was teenage sleepover energy.

Kristen: It was really fun. It was legitimately fun. To me, I was like, “Oh, this is just indicative of how in the future we get to enjoy art in these kinds of ways.”

Kayla: I think we went through A League of Their Own the same way, too. That was another one where it was just like, “Oh, we are going to keep hitting play on these screeners.”

Kristen: And then we just get to talk about it and enjoy it and have conversations about it. It’s not something I’m sharing with you or you’re sharing with me. We’re experiencing it in real-time together, and then we get to obsessively talk about it.

Kayla: Or, even the way that we consumed White Lotus, because we both waited to watch White Lotus. We are very online and stuff, but we just hadn’t really watched that show. For me, sometimes work makes it hard to start new shows because if I’m not writing about it, if I’m not actively engaging with it for work, then it’s maybe not top priority. That was a show that we just both put off by accident almost, and then when we finally watched it, we watched both seasons straight through and had a lot of fun with it.

Kristen: I think that’s maybe the bottom line, is it’s legitimately fun to watch and consume art together.

Kayla: We kind of covered the TV show aspect of that, but other pop culture … What is our song?

Kristen: Oh, this is a great question. It was something that we were asked recently, since we’re engaged and we’re going to get married, which is what is our song? What would play at our wedding?

Kayla: My sister’s girlfriend, who is a musician, asked this.

Kristen: A very talented, great queer musician. The God’s honest truth is that our song is the punk version of “Mambo Italiano” because that second time that I came to New York, we couldn’t get into the hotel room, so we ended up wandering around. We went to a restaurant and then we went to a bar.

Kayla: Went to one of my favorite restaurants in New York, Kiki’s, the Greek restaurant.

Kristen: And we were making out at that restaurant.

Kayla: We were.

Kristen: And then, we left the restaurant and we were like, “Let’s go into this bar.”

Kayla: Clockwork in East Village.

Kristen: We went into the bar and we got shitty beers and we were sitting in the back room and just making out, and they started playing this song, this horrible song.

Kayla: It’s a punk cover of-

Kristen: And not a good cover.

Kayla: The band is called, Franks & Deans, like Frank and Beans, and they do Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin covers.

Kristen: They kept playing it because they were obviously trying to get us to leave the establishment because we were making out so much in the back of this bar. They must have played that song 10 times at least. I feel like they played it forever.

Kayla: It played a second time, and we thought it was just kind of a glitch, and then it played a third time and we’re like, “Oh no.”

Kristen: They played it a million times. And so, to me, I was like, “How could this not be our song?”

Kayla: Yeah. We said it in that moment. We were like, “Well, this is our song now.” Again, this is the second time we’d ever hung out together, and we were like, “Well, this is our song.”

Kristen: So, now literally at our wedding, we have to dance to the punk version of “Mambo Italiano,” slow dance romantic style, and we’re going to make out just as much, and everybody has to watch us.

Kayla: Yep. It feels fitting because later on in our relationship, we did listen to a lot of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra together.

As far as movies go, we don’t have a movie that’s our movie, but something that we really enjoy is watching horror movies together.

Kristen: Oh, we both love that. On the Friday the 13th, we always watch Friday the 13th. We did a drinking game for it, so fun, which is something that we like to do.

Kayla: We like to do drinking games to movies. We won’t talk about the time that Kristen made the rules for the Twilight movies.

Kristen: Never again am I allowed to do it. I’ve never been so hungover.

Kayla: I mean, we can’t talk about it because we don’t remember. She’s basically like, “Every time there’s a vampire.”

Kristen: I didn’t say, “Every time there was a vampire.” I just said, “Every time they say vampire,” which was maybe worse.

Kayla: I think something that stuck out to me at the beginning of a relationship is that because of the pandemic hitting when it did in our relationship, I was used to going out to the movies all the time. That was something I did a lot that Kristen didn’t necessarily do. She loved movies but she didn’t go to the theater. I practically lived there, and that has really shifted now.

Kristen: Oh, another thing I really think we should talk about was that I was not involved in any kind of reality TV.

Kayla: Oh, yeah. That does feel important.

Kristen: Until Kayla and I started dating.

Kayla: Yeah, Kristen had never watched any-

Kristen: Any Bravo.

Kayla: Any Bravo.

Kristen: And Kayla was trying to watch an episode of Vanderpump Rules in the kitchen on her computer. You asked it in a funny way too, because you were like, “Hey, I’m going to make some food. Do you care if I put this on?” I’m like, “Why would I care?”

Kayla: This is in Vegas. Yeah.

Kristen: It was also just for you. You were like, “Do you care if I put this on my own computer?”

Kayla: For context, my ex hated reality television so much that I literally wasn’t allowed to watch it in her presence. Except for maybe once, on my birthday weekend.

Kristen: For me, I was like, “You never have to ask me that. Why would I care?” I was like, “I don’t watch it, but why would I care?” And she put on this episode, and immediately I was-

Kayla: Leaning over the island. We had this island in Vegas. I had the laptop faced toward me in the kitchen, and Kristen was sitting on the other side, on the bar side, and she was leaning over trying to hear what these people were talking about.

Kristen: I started asking, “What did they just say? What was that?” And I was like, “Throw me into the deep end of this pool.” And we started watching everything. And it’s something that I deeply enjoy now.

Kayla: Oh yeah. And she’s more caught up on Bravo shit because she reads all the Vulture stuff on it. That’s a big part of our relationship, watching all the shows together.

Kristen: But it’s so fun. I’m deeply invested in it.

Kayla: And we talk about it extensively. Like you were talking about earlier, what’s fun is to be like, “Let’s process this. Let’s talk about what just happened.” We do that with Bravo all the time. Sometimes I’d catch us sitting on the balcony at night, the gorgeous water view in front of us, city skylights, a bottle of wine, good food, very romantic…and we’ll have been just talking about the Real Housewives for hours, almost like they’re people we know or literature to be dissected.

Kristen: Trying to make Bravo Dykes happen.

Kayla: To make Bravo Dykes happen. It’s also just good for writing fiction. You can’t make that shit up.

Kristen: You can’t make that shit up.

Kayla: If you want to write good-ass, weird-ass fiction, watch reality television, you’re going to see that people do the weirdest fucking shit.

Kristen: To me, it takes me back a little bit to my long time working inside of libraries.

Kayla: And seeing people act weird.

Kristen: Because working in a library, because you’re a service worker in this very specific capacity in a library, people don’t see you, you’re invisible to them. They act out, they wild out. To me, I was like, “Oh, watching these Bravo shows, I haven’t seen somebody act so wild since I was in a public library.” So, it’s gorgeous. Watching Housewives is akin to working in a public library. I will come on and talk about this to Andy Cohen.

Okay. To wrap up, tell us a funny story about your partner.

Kristen: Here’s my funny story about Kayla. Kayla does this thing where occasionally in the middle of the night, she will wake me up and she’s very serious and will almost shake me awake to tell me something with utmost importance and seriousness. It’ll be the middle of the night, pitch black, and she’ll be saying something to me, and I will be freaking out. I can’t tell what’s going on, and it’s because I finally realized Kayla is still asleep and she’s saying something nonsensical.

Kayla: Give an example.

Kristen: What is that word that you said that time?

Kayla: Camsquatch.

Kristen: For instance, we were in an Airbnb in Orlando before we moved back here for pride. It was Pride weekend. I was awoken in a strange space in the middle of the night by Kayla very vigorously insisting I listen to this word that turned out to be Camsquatch. I’m dead asleep, can’t understand what she’s saying, and I think someone’s breaking in. A thing you should know about me is I’m always on alert in a space in case I have to protect us from an intruder. I need to be able to be awake and alert so I can protect you from whoever’s trying to kill us, and possibly that’s because I watched so many murder shows. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been deeply disturbed by Kayla waking me up by yelling something that’s not a word.

I mean, it’s funny. It’s funny to laugh at the next day, it’s funny. But yeah, Camsquatch is not a real thing, but to you in the moment, it was urgent. But when I’m awoken from a deep sleep, it is a shocking moment. But it’s always very funny too, I’m laughing right now, it’s a funny thing to think about. You say some nonsense in the middle of the night, and people need to know that.

Kayla: It’s hard for me to think of a funny story because you make me laugh a lot. I feel like we have a lot of funny moments in our relationship and a lot of those funny moments are those weird couples funny things where it’s not going to be funny to anyone else. We got very weird during lockdown, did a lot of bits. There’s one about a townsperson needing to take her baby to the town witch. I can’t even explain it.

Most recently, I cracked up on New Year’s when I came into the party and saw you were telling our engagement story, and you’d already turned it into a very funny story, with all these specific beats. And it’s mostly you roasting yourself, because you were so nervous when proposing that you were at a strange loss for words that never happens to you. And I saw you doing this whole standup act about the proposal for our friends just seven days after the proposal, and I was like “Oh, I will be hearing her tell this story over and over for the rest of my life.”

That’s all I can think of right now because when I think of anything else, I’m like, “Here’s this funny story about Kristen falling.”

Kristen: Well, I think that’s fair.

Kayla: You do fall a lot.

Kristen: And I’m upfront about that.

Kayla: You fall a lot, you spill a lot of drinks, but as you point out, it’s never anybody else’s drink and it’s never on anybody else.

Kristen: The party foul is only on myself.

Kayla: Yes. You spill your own drink on yourself.

Kristen: I will spill my own drink, I will spill my own food, and I will only spill it on me.

Kayla: But you do bust ass a lot, which unfortunately, I come from a family where we laugh at that.

Kristen: Oh, I think that’s amazing. I think we’d have a problem if you didn’t think that was funny because it is funny. It’s deeply funny. If there’s a crack in the sidewalk, I’m tripping over it.

Kayla: Yep. Your legs are-

Kristen: And I’m tall. It’s like Gumby falling.

Kayla: That’s a memory from the beginning of our relationship. We hadn’t met in person yet, and I was in this shoe store in Vermont. I was texting you, and I was like, “Are you tall?” And you were like, “No, not really.” And then I was like, “Oh.” And you were like, “Yeah, just 5’8.” I was like, “5’8 is tall. What are you talking about?” I was like, “You’re a flamingo.”

Kristen: Well, that’s because you’re very short.

Kayla: Well, and you think that I’m lying about my height to this day.

Kristen: Well, it’s not that I think you’re lying, it’s that I think you are mistaken because how could I be the height that I am and you be the height that you are?

Kayla: Why would I be mistaken? People have told me my height. I am 5’4″, which is above average for a North American woman.

Kristen: You also said you could see, maybe that’s a funny story you should have told us about, you thinking you could see 20/20 vision and that very much not being true.

Kayla: Well, I wasn’t going to drag myself.

Kristen: We’re just being goofy now.

Kayla: What?

Kristen: I said we’re just doing our … *razzle dazzle hand motions* little weird show, no one is going to think this is as funny or interesting as we do.

Interview With My Girlfriend: Gretchen

One night at a Wendy’s drive-through, Gretchen asked me, “how come you haven’t asked me to do that interview with your person thing?”

I confirmed there was honey mustard in my bag and turned to her. “Because you explicitly said you didn’t wanna do stuff like that.” By “stuff like that” I meant “be vulnerable on the internet,” because even though that’s basically my entire career, it’s not hers!

This was true, Gretchen admitted. But in that moment, she told me later, she’d wanted to be the type of significant other who was “super chill and open” as well as “a selfless human with impeccable vibes,” so she said, “well, I changed my mind! Let’s do the interview.”

I was surprised and clearly so was Gretchen — after dropping me off she ate all of her nuggets in the car and sped home high on the pure thrill of being an extremely cool person. Then she got home, threw open her computer, read the interview questions, and totally, 100% panicked. “I obviously can’t do this,” she followed up. “What IS WRONG WITH ME?”

I told her it was fine — again, no pressure! But she seemed really determined to get over her reticence and so it happened that with an absolute void of insistence from me to do so, she informed me a few weeks later that she was in fact ready, right that minute (it was 10pm on a Saturday night) to conduct this interrogation.

---

How did you meet/get together? How long did you know each other before becoming romantically involved?

Gretchen: That’s the first question? Not—

Riese: It’s a softball question!

Gretchen: Not “what’s your name and your favorite color?”

Riese: Well, what is your name and favorite color?

Gretchen: Gretchen, blue.

Riese: Okay.

Gretchen: Next question.

Riese: Okay. You want to ease into it?

Gretchen: Yeah.

Riese: Okay. What do you like to have for dinner?

Gretchen: Oh gosh. So many things. You see how I just lit up with that question? That’s never going to happen again for the rest of the interview. How did we meet and what’s the second part?

Riese: How long we knew each other before we were romantically involved.

Gretchen: We met how all lesbians meet. At the GLAAD Awards.

Riese: Right. We met for the first time at the GLAAD Awards in 2017. I was still living in Michigan but I’d come out to L.A. to do red carpet for it with Kristin.

Gretchen: Yeah. We were both being honored for Lesbians of the Year. You beat me. Your speech was… It took my breath away.

Riese: Yeah. I swept the awards that year, I also won Outstanding Film Wide Release.

Gretchen: And I thought: “I have to make her mine.”

Riese: Exactly. That’s exactly what happened.

Gretchen: Wow. It just— tears come to my eyes just remembering it.

Riese: It was a memorable… It was such a magical night honestly.

Gretchen:  Actually, we made no impression on each other.

Riese: Nope, not at all.

Gretchen: Just a blip.

Riese: I have a super, super vague memory of Kristin introducing me to you and [Gretchen’s girlfriend at the time] Hil after the show. And I was with S– [who I’d just started dating].

Gretchen: Who was adorable.

Riese: Yeah. Yeah. They were adorable, they had their backpack on!

Gretchen: For the whole night.

Riese: They were in law school so they’d come straight from class or something, or I think were gonna spend the night so they’d packed for that.

Gretchen: They made more of an impression because they looked so… they were just so happy to be there.

Riese: I know, they were so happy.

Gretchen: Like they got right off the school bus and right into the GLAAD Awards. It was truly adorable.

Riese: And you thought, “wow, one day I could be that happy to be standing there with this person.”

Gretchen: I was just like, “hopefully one day I’ll know how to be that happy.” That wide-eyed and just … your whole life’s in front of you. I guess that’s also a symptom of them being younger.

Riese: So that night we didn’t really talk besides being introduced to each other, and then we actually met for real at A-Camp in 2018.

Gretchen: I was close friends with [A-Camp Co-Director] Kristin and she invited me to come check it out as her guest. So I showed up in the middle of camp. The first thing I did was go to a Boxed Wine and Cheese tasting that you and Laneia were hosting, which I didn’t realize was an extremely exclusive event.

Riese: I’m sure you Venmoed us $500 afterwards. [Ed. Note: Gretchen: always venmos people unprompted for any perceived amount of money she suspects she could in any way owe for anything.]

Gretchen: Well, when I found out I was horrified, when you explained, “Oh, it’s kind of exclusive and only 25 campers who win the lottery get to come.” And I’d just rolled up all, “What’s your best event and where should I sit for it?” Anyway I was oblivious, so I sat down and I was sitting with [Laneia’s then-spouse].

Riese: Right.

Gretchen: Yes. And you and Laneia were doing your sketch or I don’t know — not a sketch, but it felt like that. Like a tight five. And everyone thought it was just thrilling, you guys were hilarious and the campers were clearly loving it, so I got my phone out and started recording. And I still have videos of you and Laneia doing your little boxed wine bits.

Riese: That’s really cute.

Gretchen: Yeah. I just thought, this is really adorable. But we were both getting into situationships with other people at the time. It wasn’t like in that moment I thought, “That will be my girlfriend.”

Riese: No, you just said that you really wanted to be friends. You left a little note in my box, like “Do you want to be friends? We both live in LA” or something like that.

Gretchen: That’s funny. I don’t remember that at all. But I remember I was in bed with you at one point platonically, ’cause your room was across the hall from Kristin’s so we were all hanging out there, and you said, “Your boob is falling out of your shirt.”

Riese: Really?

Gretchen: Yeah.

Riese: You’ve never told me this before!

Gretchen: Yeah. You pulled up my shirt. My boob was showing. And you had just thrown up glitter. It was like everything-

Riese: Oh yeah, I did throw up glitter.

Gretchen: … The stars were aligned.

Riese: It sounds like we were both doing really well.

Gretchen: Yeah. I was like, what do you mean my boob is out… anyway I was dressed as a lifeguard!

Riese: Wow. Oh yeah. I remember the lifeguard outfit.

Gretchen: I was going to save all those lives.

Riese: Because I was like, “wow, she’s not even a camper and she brought a really good costume for the dance.”

Gretchen: I was hype! God, that was so fun. Anyway, that’s how we kind of started to get to know each other.

Riese: We hung out a little bit in LA here and there, often with mutual friends.

Gretchen: So then what happened?

Riese: Then what happened? Then we sort of became part of the same little social group that began forming around that time.

Gretchen: Yes. Debauchery.

Riese: Yeah. So much fun.

Gretchen: Chaos.

Riese: A chaotic group chat — there were like, six of us in the beginning and we all started hanging out in the spring of 2019. Which was great because that summer is when my life started to go downhill and this little friend group became like my lifeline through all that, like eventually we all became a family. And also it was my escape from all of the stressful stuff.

Gretchen: Yeah. You had a mental breakdown.

Riese: Yeah, in August [2019].

Gretchen: And I went to your house and… it was very upsetting. I mean, we weren’t together at that time, but I was very worried.

Riese: It’s true.

Gretchen: Because you had told Kristin, “Give Carol to Gretchen,” and I was like, I better get over there before she up and dies, she’s already bequeathing her dog!

Riese: I was getting my affairs in order.

Gretchen: I hightailed to your house.

Riese: But it’s interesting because now we’re dating. Right? But it’s weird because you were there for all of these important parts of my life. I mean, not that like my nervous breakdown was a key moment in my life—

Gretchen: Highlight reel.

Riese: … right up there with getting my GLAAD award. But that also means by the time we started dating, I knew you’d already seen me at the actual definition of my worst.

Gretchen: I mean, we were, if not best friends, very, very close friends by that time.

Riese: Yeah. You were my emergency contact pretty quickly. And also when you saved your name in my phone, you wrote “Can we be best friends? Think about it.” And you saved your name as “Gretchen Best Friend.”

Gretchen: You’ve got to manifest! That’s what I’m saying.

Riese: And luckily for me, I invited you to a Valentine’s Day Lilith Fair Karaoke thing when we were just friends too, so now I can say we’ve been together for every Valentine’s Day since 2019 [even though we didn’t start dating until 2021].

Gretchen: I gave you a valentine that said—

Riese: “Sorry that I’m not Sarah.”

Gretchen: You were like, truly, you’re one of the weirdest people I’ve ever met.

Riese: I thought it was funny though.

Gretchen: That was good.

Riese: What’s really good is that then we drank two entire bottles of blue champagne that night.

Gretchen: We had a lot of fun times before we started dating, and then we started hooking up.

Riese: Yeah. Well, our first kiss was on New Year’s Eve 2019.

Gretchen: Right! Right… We were at [Los Angeles dance party] Gay Asstrology and you said, “If you don’t have anybody to hook up with at midnight, and I don’t have anybody to hook up with at midnight, we should kiss.”

Riese: Yeah. And then we did.

Gretchen: I was in line for the bathroom, and you’re texting me because people were starting the countdown. I hear ten, nine and get a text like “Where the fuck are you?” And I found you in the middle of the dance floor and ran over and then it was midnight and we kissed. Then basically all of our friends–

Riese: They went bananas.

Gretchen: Yeah. They were all cheering around us and laughing.

Riese: It was really cute because first of all, the main thing that happened in that moment was that we had learned that we really liked kissing each other. Everything could’ve died on that night.

Gretchen: Right. It could’ve been just a joke. It could have been just a hilarious-

Riese: Like, “Ha ha, we kissed on New Year’s Eve.” But instead it was like, Uh-oh.

Gretchen: Right. It was horrifying. It was horrifying. It was like, oh no. Oh no. Oh no.

Riese: Then there was a pandemic. So we didn’t see anyone for a long time. And then once COVID got a little bit better, our group chat became a pandemic pod! And we’d all hang out, we had some little weekend trips. So at some point we started making out again and then after a year and a half of making out…

Gretchen: We had a kickball game and I said, “if we win, we can talk about what this is. And if we lose, then we continue hooking up and we don’t have to talk about it.” As you can see, I don’t like talking about things. Anyway, we won the game. We were champions that year.

Riese: It’s a good thing. If this all happened now, when our kickball team is less good, we would still just be having amorphous relationship that was bound to eventually hurt one of us.

Gretchen: I don’t like sitting down and saying what something is!

Riese: We would’ve just kept hooking up for years and never talked about it?

Gretchen: Honestly forever. Just imagine.

Riese: But one of us would’ve met someone else!

Gretchen: No. You’re like, “I would’ve.” Well, after we won that kickball game, we went back to your apartment, and I said, “I guess we’re dating.” And you were like, “You weirdo.”

Riese: So now we’ve been together for almost two years, I guess?

Gretchen: Yeah.

Riese: And every minute of it has been the best moment of your life.

Gretchen: Bliss.

What are your big three astrological signs and how do we feel about that?

Gretchen: Do people care about this?

Riese: They in fact do.

Gretchen: Okay. Well, we’re not astrology gays.

Riese: We’re not.

Gretchen: We’re both Libras.

Riese: But we’re both Libras.

Gretchen: “How can you be together?” “Who makes the decisions?” I hate when people say that. I’m like, “I make my own choices! I make decisions! Thank you very much.”

Riese: When they say, “Who makes decisions?” I’m like—

Gretchen: I’m like, “ever try flipping a coin?”

Riese: I’m like, “neither of us do.” We just say, “You pick.” “No, you pick.” “You pick.”

Gretchen: Yeah. But then eventually someone gets annoyed and picks.

Riese: So that’s whoever’s the most annoyed. That’s who makes the decisions.

Gretchen: We make decisions all the time. And I think in our personal lives we’re ambivalent because we have to make so many decisions at work.

Riese: Yeah. We’re both big leaders at work. And then when it’s like, “What restaurant are we going to order from?” We’re like, “Ugh.”

Gretchen: Yeah.

Riese: Or it’s like, “What do you want to do today?” It’s like, “I don’t knowwwww”

Gretchen: Yeah. Because I truly don’t know. But we make decisions.

Riese: Yeah. Somehow we live.

Gretchen: So I have a rising and a whatever, and a moon and a sun and..?

Riese: I don’t know what those things are so there you have it: Two Libras.

Gretchen: Two Libras. Making choices.

Riese: Making decisions.

Gretchen: Making moves.

What do you enjoy most about your relationship?

Riese: What I enjoy most is that you make me laugh and that we laugh together. I know you’re groaning because you think that’s the most boring thing people say about each other but it’s true!

Gretchen: It is true. We laugh a lot.

Riese: We laugh all the time.

Gretchen: Yeah, we do.

Riese: We’re really good at making each other laugh.

Gretchen: It’s true. I would say more than anybody.

Riese: Yeah. I know other people are like, “Oh, we laugh so much together” but not as much as us, I don’t think.

Gretchen: Nope. Sorry.

Riese: We laugh a lot.

Gretchen: I mean, we do have a really fun time. I wouldn’t date somebody that I didn’t think was hilarious, and that was part of what I found attractive about you from the get-go. When I think about it, I feel like I’ve told you this before, but when we’d be in a group setting, I would tell a joke and I’d look at you to see if you were laughing first before anyone else. Because I wanted to know if it’s actually funny. Or if people are just humoring me. So I would look at your expression, and if I got nothing, I’d think, okay, I can do better. I can make it funnier.

Riese: You’re so funny in text too, like in the group chat? I’m not as funny in chat as you are. Like when you made that little movie about shipping and stuff? You were always killing it.

Gretchen: I love making little inside jokes with my friends. I live for that. I make TikToks, but just to make them for one person and then I share it only with them.

Riese: Yeah, basically every TikTok I’ve made has been just for you.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think that laughing is one of the best parts of our relationship. But also that you really press me to say what I’m feeling.

Riese: I do.

Gretchen: And it’s awful, but it’s personal growth.

Riese: It’s funny because they ask about your astrological sign but I think what’s more important is “what religion did you grow up in”? And I grew up Jewish and you grew up Catholic, which means I grew up talking about everything very loudly all the time too much and you grew up… not doing that.

Gretchen: We talk about absolutely nothing. You have a feeling you tuck that inside and you take it to your grave like a good Catholic.

Riese: But you’re getting a lot better talking about your feelings.

Gretchen: I like that about our relationship, that you do make me do things that are good for me that make me feel initially uncomfortable. Like this interview! Next question.

Riese: Well, I also think that we have a nice time together and you’re really smart and I like talking to you about stuff and we—

Gretchen: Hmm.

Riese: What do you mean? What’s that? What was that?

Gretchen: Nothing.

Riese: You don’t believe me?

Gretchen: No, I believe you.

Riese: I feel like I can talk to you about stuff with my work or with the media in general. I don’t know. I trust your opinion on stuff for you to tell me if something’s good or not. If you really like something, it means a lot to me. You know what I mean?

Gretchen: Yeah. Same.

Riese: You being my fan means a lot to me. I really respect your opinion.

Gretchen: Yeah, same.

Riese: And also you know how to make GIFs and I don’t, so you can make GIFs for me.

Gretchen: Oh, I thought you meant literal gifts. You mean GIFs.

Riese: GIFs. Yeah.

Gretchen: It’s GIFs. I say GIFs too, but I thought you meant I give good gifts.

Riese: Oh, you do give good gifts, so.

Gretchen: And I was like, that’s true.

Riese: That was part of when I was… Because you’d been saying you had a crush on me for a while, but I thought it was a bit.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Riese: But then you gave me a really good Christmas gift that year and I was like, “Wow. She really sees me.”

Gretchen: Yeah. I like making people presents.

Riese: Yeah, you’re a really good artist. You make really good cards.

Gretchen: Yeah. Thanks.

Riese: Also you saw me have a nervous breakdown and you still wanted to be my best friend and then be my girlfriend.

Gretchen: I mean, that wasn’t that bad.

Riese: It wasn’t?

Gretchen: I mean, it was pretty bad. It was pretty bad.

Riese: It was embarrassing!

Gretchen: It was pretty bad. I’m trying to pave over it for you. I’m kind of protecting you even in this moment of your honesty. But yeah, it was pretty awful. You were obviously in a really… It was bad to watch because I love you, but it didn’t make me think less of you. I thought, wow, this is a person that’s really struggling, but who clearly, I don’t know… but also, you’re doing something that actually matters in the world. If I can’t do something that matters, I’m happy enough to be with somebody that’s doing something that actually matters.

Riese: You do stuff that matters.

Gretchen: I mean.

Riese: You tell me jokes to use in my recaps that matter.

Gretchen: Yeah. You’re always worried that I’m going to want credit for the jokes and like I always tell you, no, it—

Riese: And also this, your job is every day, you’re making jokes for other people!

Gretchen: Yeah. I’m used to that, I guess. I mean, I kind of love that. It brings me nothing but pure joy—

Riese: But also you are- you’re good at your job. You know what I mean?

Gretchen: No.

Riese: You are. You’re like a boss. Like a boss bitch.

Gretchen: No, I’m not.

Riese: And you’re really cute.

Gretchen: We’re cutting this part out.

Riese: You’re cute!

Gretchen: Well-

Riese: And you’re hot.

Gretchen: … Also, what I like about our relationship is that you’re cute.

Riese: And you’re a good dancer.

Gretchen: You’re the great dancer. You’re one of the best dancers I’ve ever seen.

Riese: Yeah. Do you think if I was doing Dancing with the Stars, that I would be a star?

Gretchen: Yeah. They’d be like 10, 10!

What hurdles or obstacles have you overcome together in your relationship? These can be within your relationship or things that you face together.

Gretchen: Nothing, everything’s been perfect, rainbows, pass.

Riese: Well.

Gretchen: Oh. A bunch of stuff.

Riese: Yeah. Tons. A lot of stuff.

Gretchen: Literally everything.

Riese: Yeah. You’ve had a rough few years.

Gretchen: Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to get too into it, but yeah, I’ve had a lot of things. And one of those things led to me becoming sober. The “not drinking” part has been very easy. But the rest of sobriety has been an interesting challenge for me.

Riese: I love it when you’re talking about your feelings.

Gretchen: I’ve had to do a lot of personal growth. Looking at how I was living before — but what’s really interesting is that we started dating when I was not sober and I think…

Riese: We were both drinking all the time. Or not all the time, just on weekends, but when we drank, we drank a lot.

Gretchen: A lot.

Riese: Every weekend we would drink way too much.

Gretchen: Yeah. Yeah.

Riese: And every time we hung out at first, we would also drink way too much.

Gretchen: Yeah, a lot of our relationship was that.

Riese: We were drunk a lot.

Gretchen: Yeah, that’s what I mean by “a lot.” Our relationship was drunk, I would say. And so I think there’s this risk of, once you stop drinking that—

Riese: Right. Well, we both stopped drinking for a while [starting in July 2021], because the stuff you were going through made me realize I had to take a look at myself also. So for the first nine months of you being sober, I was sober too, which was an interesting thing to be doing in a relationship.

Gretchen: Right. That’s what I’m saying, that I think when you get sober and you remove something that was so crucial to the relationship out of the equation, it’s like, “do I even like this person when we’re sober…” You know?

Riese: Yeah.

Gretchen: I think there’s… At least for me, it felt vulnerable in a whole different way.

Riese: Yeah. I remember the first time we went out to dinner when neither of us were drinking, and I was like, “What happens? What is this…”

Gretchen: Yeah. Yeah.

Riese: Like, part of what bonded us as friends was that, like me at the time, you were always down to get wasted, another shot, another bottle, another round, whatever.

Gretchen: Yeah, everything I did, everything social that I did, that was the fundamental part of it. So I think when I took that out of the equation, I thought, what does that mean for me and Riese? And initially I think I wanted to get out of our relationship because I didn’t think I could handle it. And I thought I needed to really focus on being sober. But I think what’s wildly fascinating to me was that we were still really compatible and maybe moreso once we—

Riese: Stopped drinking.

Gretchen: … Stopped drinking. I think it was an adjustment for us, personally, but in our relationship, I think it got way stronger because it wasn’t so messy. Everything I said to you, I meant, and I felt good about it. And I felt like we were both there mentally, which I’ve never had in a relationship before.

Riese: Right. Yeah, we’d never had sex sober with each other before.

Gretchen: Yeah, and in my past… I know you have because you’ve been in a thousand relationships. But I mean, most of the time I didn’t really. It’s not like I was scared of being vulnerable in that way, really. Honestly, I would’ve rather had sober sex than like… a conversation like this around our feelings, that would kill me! I think you were really patient with me, while I navigated being sober. And I felt lucky because I think… I wasn’t easy. That was a really rough time for me and you bore a lot of that.

Riese: Yeah. It was pretty bad for a while.

Gretchen: Yeah. And I mean, I tried to acknowledge that, but I was very much in my own shit. And you were really, really, really patient about that. But you were going through your own stuff too.

Riese: It was weird. It’s a recalibration because now I’m not sober, but I’ve completely shifted my relationship to alcohol, like it’s a special occasion thing. It was a recalibration of how I’d been living or how I perceived life in general. Even though I didn’t drink every day or anything, there were certain social situations where I always binge drank at those situations. Things like a pool party, or going out for dinner, you drink, right?

Gretchen: Yeah.

Riese: I was like…

Gretchen: Now what do we do?

Riese: … What happens after? I think we went back to my apartment and did a jigsaw puzzle because I was like, what happens? This is the part of the night where we get a little messy and someone starts a stupid fight.

Gretchen: Also, I was thinking about your stuff too.

Riese: Oh, you mean that I had a miscarriage?

Gretchen: That, yeah. I think… I don’t know, we both had totally life altering… I mean, my sobriety wasn’t the only thing that was going on with me, but I don’t really want to talk about the rest of it.

Riese: Yeah, that’s fine.

Gretchen: But yeah, we were both on paths. I mean we were together, but going through our own personal hells. I don’t know how else to say it.

Riese: Well, I think also though, I had a lot of walls up in the beginning.

Gretchen: Yeah. I have so many walls that I didn’t even see your walls. My walls were so high that you were like, “I have walls.” I’m like, “Yeah, okay. You have a couple bricks lying around, I wouldn’t call that a wall.”

Riese: Well, I didn’t really want to fully invest. I had this intense relationship that ended in 2016 that sort of ruined my whole life because I’d invested everything in it, literally and figuratively. And so the people I dated after that, before you, I had a ton of walls up with them. I was terrified of making sacrifices or adjusting my life for someone else and then losing it all again. For like the first six months of our relationship, we had maybe two sleepovers?

Gretchen: Yeah.

Riese: You couldn’t stay over at my house because of your dog, but also didn’t want me to come over because of your dog, and I didn’t wanna come all the way out there and mess up my weekend routine or my writing time. So we saw each other really just like a few times over the weekend.

Gretchen: Yeah. Perfect for me.

Riese: You’re like, “that’s just enough.”

Gretchen: Just my speed.

Riese: Oh yeah, we should probably say, so I live in Hollywood, Gretchen lives in Santa Monica. This is a big challenge in our relationship. So when there’s no traffic, it’s half an hour. When there’s traffic—

Gretchen: It could be an hour and a half.

Riese: It could be an hour and a half. And Gretchen’s dog is…

Gretchen: Special.

Riese: Gretchen’s dog is bananas.

Gretchen: Yeah, in a special way,

Riese: So Gretchen’s dog can’t really go anywhere. You can’t take Penny to my apartment.

Gretchen: No. No one would live. You can’t bring Penny anywhere.

Riese: Carol’s portable. I can bring Carol around.

Gretchen: Yeah, we put Carol in anything. The thing is in Santa Monica, here I live in a duplex and there’s a yard.

Riese: Yeah, so now I come stay in Santa Monica on the weekends, which was a big step for me! But I love it here ‘cause we can walk to the coffee shop.

Gretchen: Yeah. You would say, “Wow, you let me do so much. You let me work all the time and never ask me to come over, you always come to me.” And I’m like, “Yeah, everything’s going at my speed.”

Riese: It was weird at first because I was used to people always wanting so much more from me, that had been my primary relationship conflict since I started Autostraddle!

Gretchen: There was just a lot of walls up too for me.

Riese: Yeah. You were in a really dark place for a while.

Gretchen: I wasn’t thinking about “How do I move this relationship along?” Honestly, it was more, “How do I keep everything together? How do I keep things as straightforward as they can possibly be?”

Riese: Yeah. And then I got pregnant [in February 2022].

Gretchen: You said, “I’m going to have this baby.” And I thought, “Oh my God. Holy shit.”

Riese: But it wasn’t…

Gretchen: I was nervous about it. And then you had a miscarriage, which was awful.

Riese: And then the process of continuing to try to get pregnant was also really bad.

Gretchen: Yeah, all that was really, I would say overall, I would rate it as bad. We both just had really heavy stuff to unpack.

Riese: We’ve really done a lot of work, huh?

Gretchen: A lot! I mean, I know I’m being obtuse about the… I don’t know. I don’t really want to talk about what happened [that prompted getting sober] — I mean, I want to. But i don’t, you know?

Riese: Yeah. You can just say that something happened.

Gretchen: Yes. Shit really went down for me.

Riese: Something happened that was bad.

Gretchen: And it really affected and impacted my whole life. I mean, hopefully I was there for you. But I know I could barely be there for myself, for my own stuff so I don’t know if either one of us could be a hundred percent the most amazing partner. Or at least I know I wasn’t, but I did what I could.

Riese: But also, you’re the best at like “being there for me whenever I need you,” even very early in our friendship, I knew at any moment you’d drop everything if I needed you.

Gretchen: Of course. But I don’t want to burden anybody with my shit.

Riese: Right. So I’ve spent now two years trying to convince you that it’s not a burden and that it’s not shit.

Gretchen: And I’m starting to learn it I think, just now, after two years of being—

Riese: But it’s funny because you don’t consider my stuff a burden!

Gretchen: Never.

Riese: So it’s all about just you realizing that other people are thinking the same way that you are.

Gretchen: It’s been really hard for me to let you help.

Riese: Yeah. I have to force my help on you sometimes.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Riese: And both of our jobs are really challenging.

Gretchen: Yeah. I don’t know if you know this, but Riese is is the CEO of Autostraddle.

Riese: It’s really stressful!

Gretchen: We dealt with a lot, job stuff, personal stuff, some of the most devastating things that can happen to a person, I think, happened to us right as we were starting to date. And somehow… Honestly, I mean, I’m not going to lie, I’m surprised that we’ve somehow made it through all of that—

Riese: Maybe it’s because we really like each other.

Gretchen: I mean, yeah. I think that speaks to how much I love you.

Riese: And how much I love you!

Gretchen: Oh.

Riese: Okay, then I also want to say that Gretchen had COVID for 20 days.

Gretchen: Yeah. Why do you—

Riese: And was really nice to me the whole time.

Gretchen: Okay. Maybe let’s get to another question.

---

What’s your living situation like? Together? Separate? Long distance with long visits? Something else? How often do you see each other and why?

Gretchen: Okay. We’re in a long-distance relationship. [riese note: we’re kidding we know we’re not actually in a long-distance relationship]

Riese: Yes.

Gretchen: As stated, Riese lives in Hollywood. I live in Santa Monica. It’s basically living in Brooklyn and LA.

Riese: It’s basically, I live in Idaho and you live in Texas. If you imagine the distance from the earth to the moon, it’s similar.

Gretchen: Now multiply that by 12 and that’s how far it is. Well, I think in LA there’s traffic, okay, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard about the traffic in LA? Anyway, you come here on weekends.

Riese: Which took me a long time to convince you that it was okay because you don’t let anyone come over! I’m the only person who’s allowed to come over.

Gretchen: Well, Penny is a lot. She’s jumping all over… I mean… I don’t want to make this about Penny. All of a sudden we’re pivoting to a dog training interview. I’ve spent hours and hours and hours and hours and a ton of money on training this dog. And some wild hearts can’t be broken! And Penny is her own spirit. And anyway, you are friends now.

Riese: Yeah, she’s crazy, but I love her too.

Gretchen: I mean, she loves you.

Riese: I’m the only other person she knows.

Gretchen: I know. But she loves you so much. When you come over, she’s so happy. I mean, truly.

Riese: Yeah, she’s so happy she tries to eat my whole hand. She’s so cute. If I put in a picture of Penny, everybody will be like, “Oh my God, she’s so cute.”

Gretchen: Yeah. People will be like, “This is a perfect dog.”

Riese: And you’ll be like, “She’s a pit bull, a pulpit.”

Gretchen: A pug pit bully.

Riese: A pug kittle. Pug kittle.

Gretchen: A pug, a bull, bull, billy.

Riese: A pugabilly! Anyhow, we both work really long hours during the week, but sometimes we see each other during the week if there’s something happening — an event or something.

Gretchen: Yeah. I mean, we sometimes see each other during the week, and it’s wonderful.

Do you have kids, pets, plants, all three? Do you not currently have but want any of these things? Why are you in agreement?

Riese: Well, I think we don’t see eye-to-eye about plants.

Gretchen: We don’t?

Riese: I’m just kidding. I’m avoiding the kids question.

Gretchen: I was like, “Why? What plant of mine don’t you like?”

Riese: You have more plants than me.

Gretchen: Yeah. I’ve been collecting some plants.

Riese: I think you’re better at plant care than I am. But I think when we live together—

Gretchen: Remember when you were showing me that plant on your bookshelf and you pulled it out of its pot?

Riese: I do.

Gretchen: All the dirt fell off and you said, “Well, I think it’s dead.”

Riese: That pot is still just sitting on my bookshelf now. An empty pot.

Gretchen: The whole plant fell apart.

Riese: Right. I was showing you how I had re-potted it. So you’re telling me I did a really good job with the plant.

Gretchen: Yeah, we love a plant. You kill them more than I do. Pets, everyone’s very aware that Carol is your pet and is a dream angel. And I think what’s fun is that our dogs hate each other.

Riese: Right. Yeah. And Penny wants to play and Carol doesn’t want to play.

Gretchen: Penn. Penn loves Carol, and Carol hates — hate’s a strong word, but hate—

Riese: Is terrified of.

Gretchen: Yeah. I’m terrified of Penn and so is Carol. So yeah, shout out to Carol and all the trauma she experiences every weekend she comes here.

Riese: But also Carol picked you. Remember?

Gretchen: Yeah. Yeah.

Riese: If there’s anything true about Carol, it’s that she always wants to be where I am — but once at Kristin’s house [in 2018], when we were just friends but not best friends yet, you were on the bed ready to go to sleep and Carol was lying there with you and I was like, “Come on, Carol, we’re going to the other room for sleep!” And nope.

Gretchen: Would not move.

Riese: She was happy. She wanted to stay the night with you.

Gretchen: And you were like, “Carol…”

Riese: I was like, this is a new personality trait. Carol’s never done this before. But every time I took Carol anywhere and you were there, she would go sit on your lap. So that was her picking you for me.

Gretchen: But now she’s pissed at me because I got Penny.

Riese: Yeah. But in the morning before we let Penny out, you guys still cuddle.

Gretchen: Yeah, we do.

Riese: When you come over to my apartment, she’s so excited.

Gretchen: Yeah, because it’s just me. She looks around for Penny and if Penn’s not there, she’s like, “Ha, ha, ha.”

Riese: Yeah. She’s like, “I got her back. She’s just mine. Penny’s dead.”

Gretchen: Yeah. And then kids. So what do you have to say about that?

Riese: We both want to have 10 children right away, and Gretchen wants to give birth to all of them.

Gretchen: Wow. You said it better than I ever could.

Riese: Every morning Gretchen wakes up and says, “I wish I was pregnant.”

Gretchen: “How can I have kids today?”

Riese: Yeah. Yeah. She’s like, “Who wants to fill my uterus today?” Sometimes I look over and Gretchen’s looking at pictures of pregnant people on Instagram, and she’s like, “Ugh, I wish I was pregnant.”

Gretchen: Posting them on my baby Pinterest.

Riese: Yeah. You follow all these families on TikTok that have 12 kids, and you’re like, “Where’s our 12? Where’s our 13? Where’s our baker’s dozen?”

Gretchen: I’m only happy if I’m pregnant.

Riese: Yeah. Exactly. Gretchen’s just always…. Only wants to be pregnant. Kids, kids, kids is all she can talk about. It’s all she can think about.

Gretchen: Okay. So for real, I think I’ve been pretty torn on the subject of children. I think, because of life circumstances over the past couple of years for me, I don’t know if I’m in a position to be a parent. But I’ve been very inspired by your confidence around it. I know that’s something that you want a lot, so I’m definitely warming up to it. I think… I know—

Riese: For everybody reading this I want you to know that when you tell your girlfriend that you want to have a kid and are gonna start trying to get pregnant and you want to know what level of involvement she’s comfortable with and she says, “I just need a little bit of time to think about it,” just so you know—

Gretchen: It could be a year.

Riese: … By “a little bit of time,” she means 18 months.

Gretchen: I mean, now I’m the one asking you what’s going on!

Riese: Right. Because I took a break from trying to get pregnant because I ran out of money, and work was so busy and it was making me sad. But now I have to start trying again soon because I’m getting so old!

Gretchen: Right so now I’m the one asking you, what are we doing? What’s going on?

Riese: Okay for serious though, personally, I would like to have a child or two! And I am willing to get pregnant in order to do so.

Gretchen: You want a yes or no on kids?

Riese: I mean, sure!

Gretchen: Yes. I could do that.

Riese: Gretchen-—

Gretchen: You heard it here first.

Riese: Yes?

Gretchen: Yeah. I could do… I can handle that. You have it on record now. I’m in. We can have a kid.

Riese: Yeah?

Gretchen: Yeah.

Riese: Really?

Gretchen: Yeah. What do you mean really?

Riese: Really?

Gretchen: Yeah, we really can.

Riese: That’s so lovely. Are you going to take it back tomorrow?

Gretchen: No.

Riese: Okay. Can we name it Fidget?

Gretchen: No.

Riese: Can we name it Dilbert?

Gretchen: Let’s get back to the interview.

Riese: Okay, i’m not going to test my luck and keep talking about I’m just going to leave it.

How would you describe the sex you have together (if you have sex)? Do you believe in lesbian bed death and has it or do you think it will visit your relationship? What haven’t you done together, but want to?

Gretchen: Oh my God.

Riese: I would describe the sex we have as fun.

Gretchen: I would describe it as fantastic.

Riese: I enjoy the sex we have.

Gretchen: Same. We did it. Is that the… Do we have to go more into it?

Riese: Do you believe in lesbian bed death?

Gretchen: Sure.

Riese: Yeah. I mean, I believe in bed death.

Gretchen: Yeah. I believe in killing you in your sleep.

Riese: Sometimes I look at you at night and I think “this pillow would fit perfectly over her face.” Which leads us right into, what would you like to try together sexually?

Gretchen: I would like to try bed death. I would like to try killing you. My kink is death.

Riese: My kink is bed death. Yeah, we’re taking bed death to a whole new level.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Riese: Do we want to tell all of our readers what sexual things we want to try?

Gretchen: No.

Riese: I want to try a role play where I’m a furniture store salesman and you’re shopping for furniture.

Gretchen: Oh yeah, we do a bit where it’s like, “I’ll be a this, and you’ll be a…”

Riese: Where did the furniture store thing came from? Yellowjackets?

Gretchen: Yeah. It was like, you’ll be a furniture salesman and I’ll be the customer.

Riese: We really did that one though.

Gretchen: What haven’t we done together that you want to do?

Riese: I feel like eventually we’ll do everything.

Gretchen: Yeah. I’m in no rush. I like the sex that we have together.

Riese: Yeah, me too. I don’t think there’s anything I’d be like, “I want to try this” and you wouldn’t be down.

Gretchen: Yeah. I feel very comfortable to do anything with you. I think we’re on the same page. Whatever you wanted. If you said, “I wanna try this,” I’d probably say, “Yeah. Okay. Cool. Great. That’s weird. I’ve never even heard of it, but sure.”

Riese: And the most important thing is that kissing is the best—

Gretchen: Oh, yeah.

Riese: … Thing in the world.

Gretchen: When we kiss, it’s really nice. And that is honestly…

Riese: And I look at your eyeballs and I think, wow.

Gretchen: Oh yeah? You go, WOW?

Riese: I go, wow. Yeah. Or I smile. It makes me smile sometimes kissing you—

Gretchen: Yeah. And then I go, “Why are you laughing?”

Riese: And then I go, “Because I’m so happy.”

Gretchen: “Why are you laughing in the middle of kissing me?” Which is cute. That’s pretty cute.

Where do you locate your relationship on the monogamy, polyamory spectrum? What philosophies do you have around monogamy, polyamory? How do you feel this impacts the relationship?

Riese: I feel like I barely have enough time to be in a relationship with just you.

Gretchen: It’s about time management.

Riese: I feel like I would be more capable of being poly than you, but I’d rather not be.

Gretchen: We’re monogamous.

Riese: Yeah, we’re monogamous.

Gretchen: I mean, if you wanted to be poly, I’d probably say okay. But I don’t think I’d be good at it.

Riese: Yeah. You’re a very all or nothing person.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Riese: I think I felt differently when I was younger, but now I’m just like… too tired.

Gretchen: I am pretty tired.

Riese: But also I’d rather… If I have more time to be around anybody besides you or my laptop, I’d rather be seeing my friends than be spending time dating. I hate dating! You know what I mean?

Gretchen: Yeah. Agree.

---

Do you think your relationship will more or less continue to exist as it currently is?

Gretchen: Hell no.

Riese: We’re looking to make big changes.

Gretchen: We’re gonna make changes in 2023. We’re going to upgrade the site. We’re going to get an app. We’re going to launch a podcast. We’re going to do merch. We’re going to do 10 camps. We’re going to take this on the road. We’re gonna do a cruise.

Riese: Yeah. We’re gonna do a cruise. We’re going to do a traveling circus. But no animals will be harmed in the circus.

Gretchen: No animals harmed.

Riese: What are our plans?

Gretchen: Oh, I mean, I think we want to live together.

Riese: Yeah. That’s our big dream.

Gretchen: Our modest dream.

Riese: That’s our modest dream at this time is just to live together.

Gretchen: But that’s it. Right?

Riese: Yeah. One step at a time, people.

---

What would you say are your most fundamental differences?

Riese: Well, you’re much more socially competent than I am.

Gretchen: I definitely… But I’m… I mean, I wouldn’t say I’m super outgoing though.

Riese: You’re comfortable with people though, inherently. It takes a lot for me to feel comfortable with people.

Gretchen: Yeah, that’s true. I think I need more social interaction than you tend to.

Riese: Or more than I think I need I guess. I might be wrong.

Gretchen: You might need it, you have to kind of push yourself to do it.

Riese: Yeah.

Gretchen: So how we socialize is different for sure. And the way we interact with other people, I think is different. I think you’re a little bit more closed. It takes a little bit more for you to open up to people socially than it does for me. Also, how you react when you’re in a crisis is different.

Riese: Yeah, when I’m in a crisis I want your help. When you’re in a crisis, you want nobody to ever care about you ever again.

Gretchen: I’m like, “Just let me die in a hole.”

Riese: Yeah.

Gretchen: Yeah, that’s the messed up part of me that I’m working on. But it’s fundamentally different than… it shocks me when you’re like, “I want to lean on you for support.” I think, “You do?” I’m stunned.

Riese: Which is wild, ‘cause I’ve been in relationships where literally all I was doing was helping the other person.

Gretchen: Which is wild to me. But we’ve both tried to meet the other person halfway. You try to be more social. You’ll dance with me if beg you to. But that’s where most of our conflicts originate — the amount we’re socializing and the amount that I’m able to open up to you when I need help.

Riese: Yeah, that’s true. Wow, you’re right. Good job.

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s like I basically go to therapy? [Gretchen’s note: “I don’t”]

Riese: I think what we did was we watched Couples Therapy on Showtime-

Gretchen: After that I felt I was healed. I could do anything.

Riese: And I think it was my Showtime account. So it was free for you.

Gretchen: Yeah, totally free. Could not recommend it more!

Do you have any shared dreams or goals for the future or each other? What are those?

Gretchen: Zero.

Riese: This is the biggest difference between us.

Gretchen: What?

Riese: I am constantly thinking about the future, not just now, but my whole life… I’ve always had big dreams about the future and I could lay out a million scenarios of what I would like to have in my future. And you have not—

Gretchen: I don’t even know what’s going to happen in three minutes.

Riese: Which is wild to me.

Gretchen: What a ride. So that’s me.

Riese: I mean, I would love to have a house.

Gretchen: Sure. Sure.

Riese: I would love for you to be able to do your art.

Gretchen: Yeah. I would love that. I freak out about what the future might look like because… I don’t know. If we want to get really into it… I get nervous about wanting things.

Riese: That you can’t really have?

Gretchen: Or that I might never have. And then I’m just wanting things that I never get. I’m trying to be happy with what I have in the moment and not wanting too many things because, I don’t know. It’s the same thing as being vulnerable. You have more to lose. I’ve always said I don’t want to be married. I don’t want to have kids. I don’t… I mean, for a while, we couldn’t legally get married, so I thought, what am I wanting this for? I shut that down. I don’t think that far in the future, and that might seem like a slight of us or of you, but I hope you can see that it’s not.

Riese: So maybe I can just kind of railroad you into my future.

Gretchen: Essentially, that’s what I’m looking for in our partnership, someone to railroad me into bed death.

Riese: That’s something that we want to try in bed is more railroading. If you want to get really personal, and I think that everyone does, it would be that.

Gretchen: It would be way more railroading.

Riese: I asked you once what your dream yard would be like, and you were so stressed out. You had a full breakdown.

Gretchen: I was like, “Some of us can’t really want a yard because maybe we’ll never get it!!!”

Riese: You make more money than I do!

Gretchen: You were like, “Just picture a fucking yard. Is it big? Is it small?” I was like, ahhhh—

Riese: I mean, I run my own business and it’s increasingly clear that it’s never going to make any amount of money ever.

Gretchen: Are you sure? Even after this interview?

Riese: Even after this interview, we’re just — if I’m gonna make money for a down payment on a house it won’t be through my job. It’ll be selling a book or movie or show or something. Which I have yet to have time to do. And yet I still am dreaming of owning a home!

Gretchen: Yeah. I think that’s the thing about dreaming — I get nervous these things might not ever happen for me. I’m opening to it more though, I’m different than the person I was when we were at the start of this relationship.

Riese: Yeah. You’ve thought about yards a little bit.

Gretchen: Yeah. I’ve opened up to the concept of a yard. Just having a yard with my best girl.

Riese: I think we’d both like to work less hours and to be less stressed out. And I’d like to publish a novel—

Gretchen: Yes.

Riese: And we want our… oh, we want to be screenwriters.

Gretchen: I mean, yeah.

Riese: We want to write movies together.

Gretchen: Yeah, we want to make stuff together without killing each other. And we’ll see if we can do it. But I think we’re both really creative and we like being creative together and we have some different rules around what creativity looks like, but ultimately I think we’re going to make some good shit together.

Riese: I think so too. And everyone’s going to be like, “Wow, look at these funny bitches. Who knew that once upon a time they kissed on New Year’s Eve, and the next day their friends on their group chat made a little video of tater tots on toothpicks to re-enact the kiss to make fun of how skinny and blonde they were.”

Gretchen: Put that in your pipe and smoke it—

Riese: Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, bed death.

---

What piece of pop culture do you share? Or what piece of pop culture reminds you of your relationship?

Gretchen: What I love to do is I love to cue up a show that is roughly 10 to 15 years old that we’ve both seen at least three times and say, “What about a little Battlestar Galactica tonight?”

Riese: And then we talk and think about Battlestar Galactica nonstop for a month.

Gretchen: And then we’ll watch a little bit of The Office. And then you’re like, “I am supposed to be a TV critic” and I say, “Have you thought about watching seasons 1 through 15 of ER?” It’s okay. I have an addiction and it’s nostalgia TV.

Riese: It’s ER?

Gretchen: Yeah. ER and all the TV that I grew up watching and want to watch a million times and don’t want to watch anything else. But I also watch all the mainstream stuff because we both work in film and TV, so a majority of our relationship is spent discussing pop culture.

Riese: Yeah. It’s hard to say what TV show reminds me of our relationship because every TV show—

Gretchen: We have more opinions of anybody I’ve ever…

Riese: We can talk about the same TV show that airs once a week for probably a month.

Gretchen: Yeah. I mean…

Riese: If we’re watching Love is Blind we can talk about Love is Blind every night for an hour.

Gretchen: Every night-

Riese: For a week until the next episode of Love is Blind.

Gretchen: Right. Because we don’t live with each other too, so we’ll cue it up at the same time and press play and then we’ll call each other and talk about it for three hours and then if I remember—

Riese: See, this is why we have to be writing our own stuff because obviously we have opinions.

Gretchen: We have opinions, whoo, boy. Opinions for sale. And if after those three hours we hang up and I think of another really strong opinion that I’ve had, I’ll text you or I’ll call you back and say, “There’s just one other thing I want to say about it….”

Riese: I did make you watch all of Gen Q. That’s really nice of me. We’re usually into whatever HBO prestige drama of the moment is on except the Game of Thrones stuff.

Gretchen: Yeah. We watch pretty much everything.

Riese: Also, we have to watch a lot of stuff for work, so we’ll watch each other’s work things.

Gretchen: We watch other’s work things.

Riese: Sometimes that’s a real treat. When I got the screeners for a League of their Own, and we got to know before everybody else that it was the best thing in the world? That everyone’s lives were about to change?

Gretchen: Yeah. That was so fun. Because of our work — film and TV almost our whole lives, so it would be weird to say, this one thing is our thing.

Riese: Ok, I think that’s it!

Gretchen: Yeah. Is that the whole interview?

Riese: Yeah.

Gretchen: That’s it? That’s the last question?

Riese: Yeah.

Gretchen: I thought there was one more question.

Riese: Did you?

Gretchen: You don’t want to do it?

Riese: What’s the last question?

Gretchen: Tell a funny story about your partner?

Riese: You’re right, it’s tell a funny story. I hate this question so I was pretending like it didn’t exist.

Gretchen: You don’t have to do it.

Riese: Tell a funny story.

Gretchen: The thing is, we can’t really answer this because we spent 15 minutes talking about how funny we are. So one, we’re going to have to cut that, all of that, because whatever we think is funny is going to totally bomb. And readers will think, “Oh man. A couple thinks that they’re funny together, but they’re not. They’re just annoying.”

Riese: A really funny story is how you got these really tiny T-shirts.

Gretchen: No, this isn’t funny. See, no one thinks this is funny.

Riese: TINY T-shirt!!!

Gretchen: No one is laughing.

Riese: I think what’s funny is everything.

Gretchen: We don’t have to do a funny story. We can just live our own lives and make our own rules.

Riese: We can.

Gretchen: Yeah. What was the tagline of Gen Q?

Riese: Hello again?

Gretchen: Yeah, exactly.

Riese: In conclusion, what was your favorite part of The L Word Generation Q?

Gretchen: Oh God. It was so bad.

Riese: Who’s your favorite character?

Gretchen: The only reason I want anything to do with that show is because of you.

Riese: Who’s your favorite character?

Gretchen: You. You’re my favorite character. I mean, Shane?

Riese: Shane? Really?

Gretchen: Sure.

Riese: I thought you were going to say Carrie.

Gretchen: Oh, Carrie’s my fave. Yeah. I mean, I love Rosie. She lights up the screen. She lights up my life. I’d watch anything with Rosie in it.

Riese: In conclusion, I love you.

Gretchen: Yeah. I love you too. I think we covered a lot of ground. That has to be the longest interview anyone’s ever done.

Riese: It’s probably not.

Gretchen: It’s most I’ve ever talked.

Riese: It is?

Gretchen: Okay. That’s our show.

Riese: That’s the episode!

Gretchen: Oh, I love it when you say that on the podcast.

Interview With My Girlfriend: Sadie

I’ve been wanting to do one of these since we launched the Interview With My Significant Other series, but Sadie is an elusive human and it took us conducting this interview over multiple sessions in the woods to complete it. After nearly five years together, one thing is abundantly clear. We’re very chatty. Thanks for tuning in.

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How do you identify?

Nico: All right. So how I identify… Because we’re going to both talk about how we identify.

Sadie: Right.

Nico: Sure. Beautiful. I identify as a gender fluid/gender queer person. I’m white. I’m in my thirties. I use they/them pronouns, and I am a bisexual.

Sadie: You said that with such a sexy voice.

Nico: Yeah, because it’s the part of me that’s sexual.

Sadie: Two sexuals, not one every other sexual.

Nico: Yeah, per month.

Sadie: Right. And I am Sadie and I use she/her pronouns. I am gender nonconforming and butch. And I’m on the precipice of 40 and am white and Jewish and a lesbian.

Nico: Yes. Love you. Okay.

Sadie: Oh, we should also mention that we’re in the woods right now, so if you hear chopping, that’s not us.

How did we meet and get together?

Nico: Yeah, we’re in the woods doing this interview. It’s wonderful in the Allegheny National Forest. It’s September. The sun. Sadie’s just gave me the symbol we’ve devised for when I’m rambling and I did just start a sentence with the sun, so we’re going to move forward. How did we meet? How did we get together?

Sadie: It was 2018.

Nico: Yeah, it was.

Sadie: Early February is when we met at a dinner party.

Nico: I could have sworn it was late January, but you know I-

Sadie: It may have been late January. I don’t know. Maybe. It doesn’t matter. So-

Nico: It was several days before Valentine’s Day, so it was either incredibly late January or early February.

Sadie: Right. So we met at a dinner party-

Nico: Oh, shit. Sorry-

Sadie: What did you do?

Nico: … there’s just a spider spinning a full web on my mug. Okay, keep going. Sorry.

Sadie: So a friend of ours was having a dinner party that began at 9:00 PM because she is Portuguese. And I at first was not going to go because it was at 9:00 PM and there was a blizzard, and if you know anything about Pittsburgh there are a lot of hills and they don’t really plow them, so there’s lots of ice. And I was just like, “Hmm, don’t think so.”

Nico: It’s literally the scariest place to drive in the snow that I’ve ever driven in the snow.

Sadie: It’s harrowing. But I had been practicing for a tour, it was a last-second thing, and so I had a week or so to learn 20 songs. And-

Nico: A week?

Sadie: Yeah, it was like a week. Week and a couple days.

Nico: That’s intense.

Sadie: Yeah, it was really intense. I hadn’t talked to anyone because I was so focused. And I thought, you know what? It might be good for me to get out the house and-

Nico: Oh, I’m sorry. For the people reading. What instrument do you play?

Sadie: I play bass.

Nico: Fretless.

Sadie: Well, that doesn’t matter.

Nico: All bass.

Sadie: I play all bass. I’ve been to all the bases.

Nico: Okay. Wonderful. Keep going.

Sadie: No, you can tell your side of the story. That’s about it. I showed up. I also thought I was going to go for an hour and then leave. That was it. So I showed up at 9:00, I was like, I’m going to leave at 10:00.

Nico: So… I showed up an hour late on the tail end of my marriage. Basically when we went out that night, I was like, “This is the last night of our marriage,” me and my ex. And we had several engagements to go to. And so we arrived at the dinner party around 10:00, an hour into it. And I walk in the door and I’m pissed. I’m pissed at my ex, and it’s clearly over, but anyway… it had been over. And so I shake hands with this very hot looking person who just to my… according to my perception, glares at me while we shake hands, but also grips my hand with an abnormal firmness.

Sadie: Yeah, I held it a little bit too long. That was by design. And I mean, I do have resting-bitch face and resting-bitch swagger, so I mean that’s real. But also, I was just absolutely exhausted and-

Nico: Oh, you poor thing.

Sadie: But then you walked in the door and I was like, “Maybe I’ll stay for a little bit longer.” And I did.

Nico: Oh, right, because you were going to leave.

Sadie: I was going to leave. I was about ready to leave. I was about to say my goodbyes and just see my-

Nico: And then I showed up.

Sadie: And then you showed up.

Nico: Can you talk a little bit about your perception of me and my ex? And-

Sadie: Oh my god.

Nico: … whether or not you thought we were together?

Sadie: I couldn’t tell whether or not the two of you were together. I honestly thought that he… the impression I got was that you both knew the host and he was your gay roommate because you had no connection. He was being super flamboyant and very twink-ish, and you were just kind of… seemed like you were there. So it felt like he really wanted to go to the party and dragged you along.

Nico: Oh my goodness.

Sadie: And then we got to shit-talk Anselm Kiefer and it was wonderful. That’s how we really bonded.

Nico: Right. So how we really bonded was somebody was going on and on about how they like Anselm Kiefer at the table, and Sadie and I said that if you do not have that history grounded in you or your family being victims of the Holocaust, you simply cannot just make Holocaust art.

Sadie: To talk about your guilt, to elevate-

Nico: To elevate your art, and therefore become famous off of that.

Sadie: Right. And so you and I just really bonded over that. We were riffing off each other and just cackling. It was ridiculous.

Nico: We made eyes across that table at each other with all those people around us. It was very romantic.

Sadie: And one woman at the table, she’s like, “I know it’s fucked up, but his art’s so beautiful.” I’m like, “I don’t”-

Nico: And then I saw a piece in person and I was like, no.

All right, so wait, so what happened was…Immediately following the party, you and my ex exchange information.

Sadie: Correct.

Nico: Emails. And then what happened was, this is like 12 hours to the point where my ex storms out on me. I don’t care, I’m putting it in. It’s behind the A+ pay wall, it’s fine. It was like 12 hours, like countdown clock to when my ex storms out on me. And I was like, “CC me on that,” when he emailed you to follow up.

Sadie: Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, I emailed, “Hey, it was really great meeting you and Nico, and I’m about to leave for tour in two days for eight weeks or something, but we should hang out when I get back.” And he responded, and he CC’d you.

Nico: Okay, so then you went on tour. For how long?

Sadie: A couple months.

Nico: Very nice.

Sadie: And then I came back and was exhausted and didn’t really feel like talking to anyone.

Nico: Meanwhile, I thought, I was like, “This wonderfully hot person, never going to see her again in my life.” That’s nice though. I was like, “It’s nice to know that there are hot people in the world. That there’s hope because there are hotties out there.”

Sadie: Right. Yeah, and I got back from tour and I was about to hit reply and then something was just, “Just check the CC line,” and saw that you were also included. And so I did reply all, something like, “Hey, I’m back from tour. Do you want to hang out?” And he didn’t respond, and you immediately responded, “I’m having a party tonight. Do you want to come?”

Nico: I believe I said… Do you remember? I said, “My ex and I are no longer together.” And then in parenthesis said-

Sadie: You said, “We are no longer functioning as a couple,” in parentheses, “pending divorce.”

Nico: Yes, I was like… I said something very dryly to you. Okay, yeah.

Sadie: Yeah, and then we just kept hanging out.

How do we feel about our big three astrological signs?

Nico: Okay and sharp transition: How do you feel about your big three astrological signs?

Sadie: You go first.

Nico: No I asked you.

Sadie: I thought a lot about it and I have a lot of feelings. You should go first so that way I know how long I should talk.

Nico: No. All right. So you are-

Sadie: I am-

Nico: A Capricorn sun.

Sadie: Oh my goodness. You’re going to answer the question for me?

Nico: If you don’t answer it.

Sadie: All right. So I am a Capricorn sun, Taurus moon, and Scorpio rising. And I think it’s great. I love being a Capricorn.

Nico: I know. You’ve got a long list of all the famous Capricorns that you like.

Sadie: Yeah. I look to famous Capricorn visionary artists as a kind of structure for myself. I guess I should talk about why I like being a Capricorn.

Nico: Yeah. Go ahead.

Sadie: I think with those signs, the three of them, they’re incredibly loyal and trustworthy in terms of friendship. I’m really deeply invested in my close long-term friend-

Nico: I think in a lot of ways, that’s part Scorpio too.

Sadie: Yeah. And also Taurus.

Nico: Scorpio and Taurus. Those are two very friend-oriented, in a lot of ways, loyal signs.

Sadie: And long-term relationships.

Nico: Right. Right.

Sadie: Which does make making new friends somewhat difficult because it’s just really hard too.

Nico: But you are someone who has really prioritized friendship in a lot of ways, and treats your friends in a way that I find admirable.

Sadie: Oh, thank you. I think also it can be a little bit difficult with those three signs because I just have a really great barometer for detecting bullshit. A downside to that is I don’t really have time for it, but I also don’t have the aptitude for just kind of going with the flow with it. So it just… it can make things difficult in social situations.

Nico: Okay. What do you like about your signs?

Sadie: Well, I like that I can detect other people’s bullshit. It’s really good for not wasting my time.

Nico: Okay. Okay. Great. What else?

Sadie: I like that I’m a really hard worker. I like that I can see the long game in a lot of things so I’m able… It can get a little distracting because I think in terms of decades. When I think of my career, I don’t think about my career today. I think about where I want my career to be in 30 years, which is really great because it means I have a long-term vision.

Nico: 70.

Sadie: But it also means that I can kind of get hung up in the future, and it’s kind of difficult for me to see myself in the present.

Nico: Yeah. It’s very difficult for you to be where you are now. When you have goals that you’re trying to get toward.

Sadie: Right. Because it’s like I can see myself where I’m going to be and I know I’m going to get there, and so seeing where I am now can be a little bit frustrating, but the thing I like about it is that that doesn’t necessarily discourage me so much. It’s just I know I’m going to get there.

A thing that gets said about Capricorns is that we’re rocks. We’re solid and dependable, at least this is how we outwardly appear, and sometimes this can come off that we’re boring. But if you lift a rock, there’s so much weird stuff happening underneath. It’s visceral and alive. But you can’t just remove the rock and expect for that ecosystem to just continue on. The rock is what allows for that hidden life to thrive.

Nico: Okay. Can we talk about your Scorpio rising?

Sadie: What about it?

Nico: How mysterious it makes everyone think you are?

Sadie: My Scorpio rising is so sexy. Don’t even.

Nico: At shows, people will be like, “Who is that bassist?” You have like… Yeah. Because you just look really fucking sexy when you’re on stage and dark-

Sadie: Well, this is just me being very conscious of also being perceived, which is something that-

Nico: So you just throw up the Scorpio wall, just a wall of scorpions.

Sadie: But it’s funny because you’re like, “Oh my God, Nicole Kidman, she’s so hot. She’s so mysterious. What is it about her? It’s her murder eyes.” I’m like, “Honey, that’s just her Scorpio rising.”

Nico: And then you were like, “Do you want me to do the murder eyes for you?” And then, you did them, and I was like, “Ah.”

Sadie: Yeah. You were very excited about them. I was like, “You just don’t see the murder face because we’ve gotten to that point where I don’t give it to you.” But it’s-

Nico: Give me the murder face.

Sadie: It’s just like looking through someone. That’s all the murder face is. It’s like I’m seeing-

Nico: So it’s not that you’re looking into my soul. It’s that my soul’s transparent?

Sadie: It’s through layers. I’m looking into your soul, but I’m also looking beyond your soul.

Nico: Like dark matter.

Sadie: Yeah.

Nico: All right. And then your Taurus moon is actually very critical to your personality because you also may be a hard worker, but you also know how to prioritize comfort.

Sadie: Oh yeah. I think honestly my Taurus moon does a lot of the heavy lifting in making sure that I’m just not a complete workaholic. Capricorns are very pleasure delay. As I was saying earlier about long term goals, it’s like I have to do this and then once I do this… I guess I shouldn’t speak for other Capricorns, but this is something I’ve noticed, and especially something I see in myself, is the idea of like I’m going to set an impossible goal for myself. And then once I… But what I’m going to get myself as a reward is going to be worth it too. Not just accomplishing it. Because accomplishments, I don’t know, I don’t really enjoy my accomplishments because I just feel that they’re the inevitable conclusion of my hard work.

Nico: If I wake you up in the morning on a weekend and tell you, “I’m going to go get us breakfast sandwiches,” your face is unrivaled. The contentment that radiates off of you is palpable.

Sadie: I know. The only thing that would make them better is if they-

Nico: What?

Sadie: Breakfast sandwiches were delivered so that way we could just hang out.

Nico: No. I have to go get them…

Sadie: But I also love that you bring me coffee in the morning in bed.

Nico: Yeah.

Sadie: We did set up the coffeemaker in the bedroom, so that’s just like walking five feet.

Nico: But I still ferry it from the coffeemaker over to you.

Sadie: And it’s so wonderful.

Nico: So you don’t have to even lift up the covers.

Sadie: I don’t. I don’t have to lift up the covers. I just kind of sit up.

Nico: Yeah.

Sadie: It’s great.

Nico: Yeah. Okay. Who are some of your… Wrap this up. Who are some of your Capricorn idols?

Sadie: Oh goodness. There’s so many.

Nico: Name your top three.

Sadie: I can’t do that.

Nico: Just name three, first three that come to mind.

Sadie: Oh my God. I can’t. Obviously, Louise Bourgeois and Mark Hollis and Scott Walker.

Nico: There you go.

Sadie: And Janine Antoni.

Nico: Okay.

Sadie: And Lee Bontecou.

Nico: Okay. Excellent. My big three. Aquarius sun, Sag moon and rising on the front. I think it’s really important for people who are wondering how the heck I get anything done to know that I do have a five sign Capricorn stellium on the back end.

Sadie: I think in some ways, you appear as more Capricorn.

Nico: Right. But yeah. I’ve just got a very dry chart… It’s just like, yeah, we might be just aliens on fire, but there’s a bulldozer behind it pushing everything forward. There’s hardly a drop to drink. I think there’s a couple drops, but they’re very far out.

Sadie: You’ve got your Cancer in Jupiter, which you refuse to acknowledge.

Nico: No, I don’t refuse to acknowledge it.

Sadie: Or Jupiter in Cancer.

Nico: Yeah. Jupiter in Cancer. Yeah. It’s very… And my Lilith is in Scorpio. And that’s it.

Sadie: No. Your Pluto’s in Scorpio in the 12th house.

Nico: Oh.

Sadie: Because I’m a creep and I remember facts like that.

Nico: Thank you. But so, I share the same top three with Oprah and Lewis Carroll.

Sadie: Yes.

Nico: Yeah. Both of whom I’m convinced have probably done their part to precipitate Dr. Oz running for the PA Senate seat.

Sadie: Why Lewis Carroll, do you think?

Nico: There’s got to be something there, butterfly effect. It’s the caterpillar effect.

Sadie: Stop.

Nico: And who else? Aquarians also include Angela Davis, and problematic faves like Charles Dickens, and also I just have… In terms of my relationship to being an Aquarius and having a January Aquarius sign is that I have worked for two separate January Aquarian leaders in the arts, and they both have been visionary and fucked up in their own ways, that has been sort of a cautionary note for me about the Aquarian God complex and seeing it play out live. But also, inspirational at the same time in some ways.

And in terms of the Sag rising and moon, I think that actually a lot of my stuff comes across as Sag. I can be very… I’m always torn between the Aquarian sort of introversion and Aquarians can actually be very stubborn and very staged because they are a fixed sign. But then, so I have that push and pull between that and the Sag, like get up and go, just fucking disappear.

Sadie: The thing is, that’s something that I really love about you, is because for me having the Capricorn and especially the Taurus, being grounded and having that comfort is just… In my environment in order to feel safe before I can then venture out is something feels like a priority to me. But then, I have the Scorpio and I also have my Jupiter is in Sag, so expansion is through that risk taking and is through ideas and is through travel and is through that spontaneity.

Nico: In a lot of ways, I feel safe when shit is on fire.

Sadie: Right. And so, I am craving of that transformation and that expansion and that discomfort in order to grow. It’s something that I know that I need but I can also be so invested in- Needing to feel safe before I can do that, and you’re just like, “Fuck it. Let’s roll.” So seeing you just be really able to harness an idea amidst chaos and be able to see it through and make space in that chaos for that expansion is something that’s really inspirational to me.

Nico: Oh why thank you. Yeah. I feel like thriving in chaos is kind of eh, not really the truth.

Sadie: Chaos reigns.

Nico: Not really the truth because I’m not thriving. I’m surviving and making the most of it. But like-

Sadie: Did I say thriving?

Nico: No, I’m saying it. But like-

Sadie: But the thing is, you’re not thriving in a way. You’re able to do it just… It’s like carving out a little section of mountain for you to build shelter to get through the night. That’s kind of what you do.

Nico: Right. Because we can’t help it if we’re thrown into chaos, or if we have to perhaps incite chaos because that’s what is needed for the moment. Sometimes, you have to tear down an institution. Sometimes you have to do that.

Sadie: Okay Aquarius.

Nico: But you can really… I think that it’s important to also not lose yourself during those times, and that I sort of do that well, and that that is linked to my-

Sadie: Yes.

Nico: In a lot of ways. I also just love an adventure. I’ve been really limited during the pandemic, but I think my coworkers are starting to see it as I’ll just put on the calendar like, “You’re on your own, I’ll be off grid in the woods.”

Sadie: Yeah.

Nico: For like several days at a time as I leave and just disappear into the forest with you, or run off to… Or like the A+ members who we randomly met up with in-

Sadie: You were like, “I finished the fundraiser early. I’m going to organize some A+ meetups.”

Nico: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve been limited in my ability to do that because of the pandemic, but actually that is sort of the status quo that we are returning to, is that level of spontaneity, and I’m looking forward to letting that part of myself sort of shine again.

Sadie: Yeah. I think also for me, and you both, something to keep in mind is both of us have kind of blown up parts of our life, and just kind of trusted that we’ll see it through or just trust that it’s moving toward something better. And so, just that… I think both you and I, even though on the surface we’re very different, we just both have an innate trust in-

Nico: Ourselves.

Sadie: Ourselves and our skills.

Nico: Our cat-like reflexes.

Sadie: Oh God. Which is just really interesting to see how both of those things have manifested in how we kind of approach the world.

Nico: Yeah. Yeah. And I think also, we make each other better.

Sadie: Do I make you better with my- “I just want to get takeout and watch a movie?”

Nico: Well, I wasn’t resting. Before we got together in ways that-

Sadie: I keep saying takeout, but-

Nico: You keep saying… It’s very food oriented, but it’s okay.

Sadie: I just really love food.

Nico: But also before you, I was making some bachelor meals, and you were just kind of like, “I can’t live like this.”

Sadie: I can’t have everything be one texture.

Nico: Listen, if you put all the vegetables in a pot and you swish them up and then you make smush, nom nom nom.

Sadie: I don’t think people are ready to know about smush.

Nico: Ratatouille. Emphasis on the rat.

Sadie: Are we done?

What do you enjoy most about your relationship?

Nico: Okay, three, what do you enjoy most about our relationship?

Sadie: I enjoy how much fun we have together. I don’t know, we just find each other really funny and-

Nico: Yeah. I crack up so much with you.

Sadie: I don’t know. I don’t know, just anything could come out of your mouth and I’m just endlessly delighted. And we’re both pretty spontaneous and up for any adventure.

Nico: Mm-hmm.

Sadie: Even if we have things that we’ve planned to do in terms of work around the house or something, if one of us mentions like, “Oh, I heard about this art show happening,” or, “I just heard about this movie that’s only playing in town for a couple days,” or, “There’s this craft fair going on,” we’re pretty up for just doing it and being okay with just going out and seeing what happens.

Nico: I think one of the things I love most about our relationship is that we’re really strong together. We’re going to talk about this later, but I got to hope that it gets better in a lot of ways because we’ve been through some hard times, and emphasis on the hard times. But we’ve been able to, together, maintain our dignity, to maintain respect for each other, to see each other as individual people, to foster our creative practices.

Sadie: I love how we were so open to making space for each others’ creative practices. How sometimes where we had planned to do something or hang out together or something… This happens if you’re planning fundraisers or things like that, and we don’t get to see each other a lot, and we’ve planned downtime to hang, but you’re like, “Can I just spend the night actually working on writing?” And I’m always like, “Yeah.” Because you need to recharge, and so whatever you need to do. f you can get an hour or two in for your writing, that’s valuable.

Nico: Yeah, I would say that, definitely, our mutual respect for our creative relationship is key to our overall relationship. I think that when we first started dating, we explicitly… you explicitly said your first love is your bass.

Sadie: It is. And you said your first love is writing, and-

Nico: And I think that’s something that we respect about each other.

Sadie: Right.

Nico: And I think that’s really cool.

Sadie: Right.

Nico: And it’s not for everyone.

Sadie: But-

What hurdles or obstacles have you overcome together in your relationship?

Nico: It’s for us. All right, what hurdles or obstacles have you ever come together in your relationship? These can be within your relationship or things that you face together.

Sadie: So the first two years of our relationship we had no money. Broke.

Nico: Okay, so we were so broke when we first got together, I was on a Pittsburgh Arts nonprofit salary, which is very low. And-

Sadie: Do you want to tell people how much you were making?

Nico: When we got together I was making like $35,000 before taxes.

Sadie: Okay. I wasn’t making anywhere near that because I was trying to get touring work, so it was completely feast or famine. And even when you’re touring, you’re not making that much money. And when I was in town, picking up odd jobs here and there. I mean, it was really rough.

Nico: It was okay when I was renting in a place full of roommates, but then that also wasn’t okay because they were really homophobic.

Sadie: Yeah, and I was renting a place and my rent, because it was a room and a house and it was, again, Pittsburgh prices, so-

Nico: Mm-hmm, same like mine, was also a split house. But yours was like a room in a house somebody owned.

Sadie: Right. And so my rent was super duper cheap and it allowed for me to kind of live that lifestyle. But we really, thinking about it, we had no business buying a house, but it was so cheap and it required so little as a down payment, and-

Nico: They were like, “Yeah, you make $35,000? Buy a house.” And I was like, “Okay.”

Sadie: And we knew I was going to work on it.

Nico: Right, we knew you were going to renovate. So we got a house that we could live in, that we could also renovate while living in it on purpose.

Sadie: Do we want to tell people how much we paid for our house?

Nico: $78,000 is the price of the house. Yeah, and the thing was, by the time we got the house, you… What were you doing for work? Or you weren’t at that point doing much?

Sadie: At that point I was just kind of doing odd jobs with a friend of mine who was doing carpentry.

Nico: Right, right. You weren’t even doing anything consistent. I don’t want to say not doing much, but you weren’t doing anything consistent.

Sadie: Yeah, it was definitely like a friend of mine would call me up, “I need someone to help me on this project that’s going to last for a couple weeks.” So a lot of freelance stuff, but just kind of hustling and trying to get touring work. So we actually wound up having a time crunch in terms of both of us moving in together that was just economic ultimately.

We had three months between the time that you decided that you weren’t going to renew your lease on your place, because you didn’t want to keep having to find roommates.

Nico: Well, because my roommates… My one roommate. My one roommate wound up moving in with us. The other one was this terrifying straight woman…

Sadie: She was intense. Like, in a not great way. She had a lot of white feminist energy. Straight, white feminist energy.

Nico: In a way that was just mind boggling. Anyway-

Sadie: She picked going to yoga over her best friend’s dad’s funeral.

Nico: Staahp.

Sadie: She did that. That was a choice she made.

Sadie: And there was a period of about a year or so… I mean, really until you got the part-time job at Autostraddl,e where any surprise expense over $50, we would just cry.

Nico: Right.

Sadie: It was really rough. Because Mya, she started having some health problems and we would have days where we would just walk her and cry because we thought we’d have to put her down. She kept having to go to the vet.

Nico: Right. And honestly, when I went part-time at Autostraddle, it changed our lives completely.

Sadie: Right, because you were doing that on top of your other work.

Nico: It changed our lives completely. So basically, we were rationing our food and I remember getting mandarins from Aldi and just counting them, and basically doing one per each of us per day and making them stretch as far as we could. And-

Sadie: There were times where we would get one mandarin today and we would get half… like, when you made breakfast, you’d give me half the mandarin and then we’d eat the other half of the mandarin with lunch or dinner.

Nico: Right. And yeah, there were times where I was rationing essentially our fiber. And I became very adept at rationing our grocery budget and figuring out how we were going to feed two people on as little money as we had, and nutritiously. And also with dietary restrictions that wouldn’t activate either my lactose intolerance or your migraines. We both have dietary restrictions, too, so it wasn’t easy, but-

Sadie: Also in terms of home reno stuff, too, because we bought this house knowing that I was going to have to do… I mean, we were going to have to do work, but I was doing the majority of the work on it. And we couldn’t afford stuff to actually fix the house, so it was figuring out what’s the bare minimum that we need. So for a long time we couldn’t afford a saw, so I just… like anything electric, so cutting anything, we had a miter box and a $10 saw. And then the paint, we were getting the cheapest paint possible. AndI know this will fleck off and stuff, but I can just do touch up work as needed because we can’t afford nicer paint. And just really being like, okay, really budgeting, doing one room at a time, how much will it cost us to do this one room? And then moving on to the next room and seeing if we had the money to do another room.

Nico: And let’s be real, we lived in a room we called The Creepy Room.

Sadie: I mean, it still is a creepy room, but at least now…

Nico: We don’t sleep in there.

Sadie: Right, there was a huge hole in the ceiling where the plaster had collapsed. We didn’t even set up a bed because we thought, “This is just temporary.” We just slept on a mattress on the floor underneath the hole in the ceiling, thinking, “Well, if the ceiling collapses, at least it won’t fall on us because this section of ceiling is already missing.”

Nico: Right. And every day we would wake up with crumbled bits of-

Sadie: Crumbled plaster in bed with us.

Nico: Not just white plaster, but sooty plaster.

Sadie: Well, it’s an old house.

Nico: It is. And it’s full of soot-

Sadie: It really is.

Nico: … because they built natural gas and coal fires. They have a coal chute buried in the basement. So it’s full of that and…

Sadie: It’s kind of nice. It’s caramelized. It’s got a nice char to-

Nico: It’s caramelized.

Sadie: Our house is caramelized.

Nico: It’s just got good character. And we slept in that room for two years when we thought it would be six months. And we wound up sleeping in that room through the first part of the pandemic, and that was very hard. So that room was like… It was messy. We didn’t properly set it up. We didn’t think we were going to be in it for two years, and we were. Yeah, I think we had been sleeping in there for maybe one year when the pandemic started. Or less than a year, actually. Because you moved in officially July 2019.

Sadie: Okay, so I officially moved in, but I was-

Nico: I mean, we were shacking up.

Sadie: I was definitely sleeping there before-

Nico: Oh, baby, of course.

Sadie: It’s just when I moved my records over was in July.

Nico: All right, everybody here, when Sadie moves her records in, that’s when it’s the time.

Sadie: Everyone who has records knows that that’s a commitment.

Nico: Okay, so but not even a year actually when the pandemic hit. And so then we’re in the shitty room, and also… I’m going to let you take it, but as the pandemic started there was some specific concerns.

Sadie: I mean, for me… And you and I have talked about this, but you and I have both been in relationships where we had our movements restricted and there was-

Nico: Correct. Well, one of the things that we bonded about is that we have both come from abusive relationships.

Sadie: Right. And specific abuse where it was financially… It was financial abuse, and this feeling of not being able to leave because we couldn’t afford to leave, being restricted. If we left, even to go out and see friends, there would be consequences.

Nico: Being monitored.

Sadie: Being monitored, and just not being able to have support networks, not being able to see our friends. Or we could, but there would be consequences. I mean, for the first six to eight months of the pandemic, I mean, you can speak to your own experience, but for me it was hugely triggering because it was like leaving the house… I mean, we were really battening down the hatches because I have a chronic illness that I’m managing already, and also we just didn’t really know… I mean, people were dying. And-

Nico: Right. Well, can I say?

Sadie: Yeah, go ahead.

Nico: I mean, you’re at increased risk for a stroke, right?

Sadie: Yeah.

Nico: And that was one of the things that came out initially. And asthma. So you have both asthma and… So we just identified those things and we were like, “Uh oh.”

Sadie: Right. And so the flip side of that is that you and I were being super triggered not being able to leave the house. I started doing coping mechanisms that I had done back in my 20s in that relationship. I started listening to the same music; I was listening to a lot of ’80s New Wave, Brit Pop, and really bad ’90s goth on repeat. And it’s the same stuff that I listened to then. And it was really weird because in some ways it was also triggering, but it was also really comforting to be like, okay, well, I already have a roadmap for how to deal with what I’m feeling right now. And it’s listening to Jazz Butcher.

Nico: Okay. And to talk about that a little bit, in terms of being the slightly less medically vulnerable… Although, who is medically invulnerable to COVID? Nobody… But person in the relationship, I also went out and did the errands.

Sadie: Right.

Nico: And it always felt super heavy to have to be very careful, to-

Sadie: Yeah, you had this feeling of responsibility for everything that you did.

Nico: Exactly. And just be incredibly sterile. And I was always worried that I would’ve fucked up. And on top of that, I also was experiencing similar things in terms of flashbacks to abusive relationships. And then also, on top of that, I think when you’re experiencing those flashbacks, you’re looking at the other person, the only other person you’re around, and you’re wondering, are they responsible? And I felt like we were constantly negotiating that in terms of traumarama. In terms of just getting to the bottom of it and realizing that we weren’t each other’s enemy, but realizing that we could look like it.

Sadie: We really took a crash course in communication, I would say, inthe first six to eight months or so of the pandemic. It was just that we needed to figure out how to actually communicate effectively and make each other feel safe, but not feel that we were coddling each other or that we were doing things that were unhealthy. Because sometimes you can validate someone to the extent where they don’t take responsibility for managing their own triggers. And so we had to navigate that as well, to give each other space, but also have boundaries with each other.

Where do you locate your relationship on the monogamy / polyamory spectrum? What philosophies do you have around how you handle monogamy / polyamory? How do you feel this impacts your relationship?

Nico: Niiiice. So, next question: where do we locate ourselves upon the monogamy/polyamory spectrum? What philosophies do we have around how we handle monogamy and polyamory, and how do we feel this impacts our relationship? Go.

Sadie: I mean, even before we became really serious, we started having conversations about checking in with each other about how we felt about being monogamous versus open. I would not define myself as polyamorous, but I would define myself at specific times as maybe being open to an open relationship. But right now, we’re monogamous and we’ve been monogamous. It’s an ongoing conversation. By having that open conversation, we’ve allowed for us to check in with where we are.

Nico: I think we’ve been really communicative, and that when we first started dating, we decided that we wanted to just spend some time just with each other. Of course then, about a year in, the pandemic hits. And so by default, because of the precautions we were taking, we’ve become monogamous. And I think that we’ve unquestioningly, and I have no problems with it, held to that in order to keep each other safe. And that has been something that we’ve done that hasn’t been necessarily about monogamy or polyamory, but actually has been about, in a lot of ways, pathogen.

Sadie: That’s such an odd way to put it.

Nico: It is, but it’s true. And so it’s like, we’ve been monogamous. I’d be fine with you fucking other people, except for the pathogen.

Sadie: Except for the pathogen.

Nico: Well, it’s true. And it makes it more complicated.

Sadie: Which is so funny. I’m sorry, but it just reminds me of some ’90s, like Michael Crichton- Yeah, it’s fine. I mean, if we feel opening up the relationship in the future, that’s something that we’ll have to discuss based on where the world is and how we feel about our own risk appetite in the future. Obviously, we have an open agreement that if some hot celebrity wants to fuck us, no questions asked, like obviously-

Nico: Oh, well, you see, it’s so funny because you say obviously, but you haven’t introduced this concept to the reader. So please introduce the concept.

Sadie: … if Cate Blanchett or someone is in town and one of us just happens to be somewhere and we catch her eye and she’s like, “Do you want to come back to my rented loft?”

Nico: Which, I happen to know-

Sadie: Yes, you happen to know… Don’t put this in print. People are going to ask, “Where does she stay in Pittsburgh?”

Nico: I’ll never tell you.

Sadie: But it’s one of these things where we are completely in support. Honestly, if you don’t take that opportunity, we would be disappointed in each other. Like, why would-

Nico: I would so sad. Like, why wouldn’t you?

What’s wrong with you?

If you came home to me and you were like, “I didn’t fuck Cate Blanchett for you,” I’d be like, “Ew.”

Sadie: I almost fell down this embankment. Wow.

Nico: Oh, no, right into Cate Blanchett’s arms.

Sadie: laughing

Nico: Wait, no, Kirsten Dunst. I’m sorry, she’s looking for ammonite on the shore.

Sadie: That’s Kate Winslet.

Nico: Which one did I say?

Sadie: You said Kirsten Dunst.

Nico: Kate Winslet is down there waiting with open arms and a shell in each hand for you to tumble forth. Okay.

Sadie: Anyway…

Nico: Ah, it’s a bee. Ah, I’m going to die.

Sadie: Oh, it’s on you.

Nico: Fuck, get it away. Get it away. End it. End it.

Sadie: I’m sorry. Okay.

Nico: Where is it?

Sadie: It’s coming back for you.

Nico: I’m going to run.

Sadie: You’re not.

Nico: Tell me where the bee is.

Sadie: I think it’s gone.

Nico: Wow. A brief interlude in which I was chased by a bee.

Sadie: It landed on you. It was so chornky. It was like, “I live here now.”

What’s your living situation like (together, separate, long distance with long visits, something else), how often do you see each other and why?

Nico: What’s our living situation like? We live together.

Sadie: We do live together.

Nico: How often do we see each other? Can you just briefly explain?

Sadie: All the fucking time.
You’re an early riser. I’m not an early riser.

Nico: Oh, tell me more?

Sadie: That’s it. You get up early-

How do you all share expenses or work out finances? How do you share or split up labor in the relationship? Can you talk about why that is?

Nico: Okay, how do we share expenses, and how do we share or split up labor? Can we talk about why that is? Talk about expenses and labor. And we see each other a lot and we both work from home-

Sadie: You’re in the house, I’m in the house. It’s the same house.

Nico: How do we share expenses or work out finances? How do we share or split up labor in the relationship?

Sadie: I mean, you’ve got this big steady job I would say. How we split it is, you make the majority of the income and right now I’m working, I got a little part-time job, but I’m responsible for most of the home reno and paying for the home reno stuff, but that’s just materials because I’m doing the labor.

Nico: Yeah, you basically, you forewoman it and then if I help, I’m following your lead.

Sadie: And then you take care of the mortgage and then we are splitting utilities.

Nico: I get most of the food and stuff and all the various expenses.

Sadie: All the various expenses. I do all the fun stuff.

Nico: I never get to buy anything fun.

Sadie: I’m like, “Hey baby, you want that pair of sandals? Your feet are really hurting. Let’s do that. I can get you the sandals.”

Nico: Thanks, babe. In terms of labor, we’ve kind of worked out our chores. We split the dishes because there’s just so many dishes. I take out the garbage mostly. Sometimes you help but you don’t like doing that and I do-

Sadie: Right, and I do the majority of the home reno. That’s like… And then the cleaning, the straightening up.

Nico: You do tidying and I’ll do deep cleaning. And I am the only one who can fix the shower drain.

Sadie: Yeah. As we said, I’m a tidier and you’re a deep cleaner, although I’ve realized that one of my love languages is asking you to leave for several days every few months so that way I can clean and rearrange things without you around. Deep cleaning is like, you have to leave because it’s going to get ugly before it gets better.

Nico: Yeah. Also, you work a part-time job just because working part-time works better for you.

Sadie: Well, it’s better for me to be able to manage my migraines just because they are chronic.. I’m able to take fewer days off of work just because being able to only work four hours is a lot easier to manage than working eight hours. I can kind of rally and do that, but then also so much of what’s not really talked about with chronic illness is how much time you have to spend recovering. You do the thing and then you have to spend all that time recuperating from having done the thing. I have less to recuperate from only working part-time.

Nico: Right. When you’re working eight-hour days, we’ve seen that with you doing volunteering with Girls Rock and stuff, the entire rest of the time is just recovery.

Sadie: Or I’ll have my part-time job and then I’ll pick up a freelance thing just to make some extra money. If I work full-time, I’ll spend my all my time off just recovering and not really able to help out with much else.

Nico: But I feel like this works out okay.

Sadie: Also you’re fine with grocery shopping, I hate going to the grocery store. I feel completely overwhelmed with options. I feel like it works out all right. It’s a way for us to distribute labor that really kind of works to our strengths.

Do you have kids, pets, plants, all three? Do you not currently have, but want any of these things? Why? Are you in agreement?

Nico: All right. Do we have kids, pets, plants, all three? Do we not currently have but want any of these things? Why? Are we in agreement?

We lost our dear Mya.

Sadie: I know.

Nico: Poor baby angel. We had a wonderful senior floof.

Sadie: She was the best.

Nico: We have no interest in another dog.

Sadie: You have no interest in another dog. I want another dog in… Not right now because we’re still recovering financially from end-of-life care for Mya and we also want to do some traveling without having to figure out-

Nico: Worry about a dog.

Sadie: Yeah. I mean, I would love to get another dog in the next few years, but I know you’re very much, “Maybe in 20 years or never.”

Nico: I just don’t know if I can ever open myself up to that kind of emotional vulnerability again in my life.

Sadie: Yeah, but you’re also saying that you’re not willing to open yourself up to receiving that kind of love again, which-

Nico: You know what? I don’t need to be loved. It’s over.

Sadie: Lies.

Nico: We don’t want kids and we’re in agreement, is my understanding.

Sadie: Yeah. I asked you I think by our third date. I have this rule where I ask someone within the first couple of dates whether or not they want kids because I feel like if someone wants kids, then that’s awesome. They should have them and they should be with someone who wants them. I wouldn’t want someone to say they don’t want kids because I don’t want kids and then they’re missing out on… Either it becomes a thing, that becomes a problem later in the relationship after we’re established or it’s something that they feel like they’ve missed out on. That’s not-

Nico: And then they die.

Sadie: What?

Nico: Then they die having not had kids. The end. It’s so sad.

Sadie: I suppose, yeah.

Nico: We have plants. In terms of plants, I have my veggie garden and you do most of the flowers.

Sadie: I know. I’ve really been slacking this year on the flowers. I just haven’t really had the time.

Nico: I actually planted a wildflower patch out front.

Sadie: The wildflower patch was probably one of the best things you’ve done. You just tore up that grass and threw out wildflower seeds and now it’s beautiful.

Nico: The bees and the butterflies are always there. They are always present.

Sadie: I also grow herbs. I actually managed to… I mean, I grow dill every year but last year I think…

Nico: This year’s dill is really good.

Sadie: And then we have some house plants that I’m desperately trying not to kill.
I would like more house plants, but we get so little sun.

Nico: Yeah, it’s hard and they’re so expensive.

How would you describe the sex we have together? Do you believe in lesbian bed death and, if so, has it or do you think it could visit our relationship? What haven’t we done together but would like to?

Nico: Okay so this question is “How would you describe the sex you have together?”
Sadie?

Sadie: People don’t need to know everything about me.

Nico: Okay, all right. Well, we don’t have to get into too much detail. I would say that it was one of the things that we connected deeply about when we first got together.

Sadie: Yes, I would agree.

Nico: We were like, “This is fantastic.”

Sadie: Yes. I do like that we openly communicate really well and we’re really good at expressing our desires and trying new things.

Nico: I think we’ve cultivated a practice of that, which is good.
Okay. Do you believe in lesbian bed death and has it, or do you think it will, visit your relationship?

Sadie: I don’t really believe in lesbian bed death-

Nico: Neither do I.
Actually, this very website published a take down of lesbian bed death. Apparently, its origins are in-

Sadie: Misogyny? Let me-

Nico: … are in a survey of heterosexual Christian women so I’m not even sure how we got to this conclusion.
I do think obviously in a long term relationship sex ebbs and flows, and especially with health issues and stuff as you get older, can sometimes get in the way, but that’s a whole thing in and of itself.

Sadie: Well, not just in health issues. You go through ebbs and flows of how busy you are with your work.

Nico: Right. True, true.

Sadie: You ebb and flow with… I don’t know.

Nico: Yeah.

Sadie: Saying everything ebbs and flows-

Nico: Yeah, Sadie. Profound. Okay. What haven’t you done together, but want to?

Sadie:I want to get those under the bed straps.

Nico: Ooh, you know what I really want to do?

Sadie: What?

Nico: All right, so you know in The L Word, when they have-

Sadie: Wow. You said, “You know in The L Word?” This could go anywhere. This could go…

Nico: Well, we’re camping right now, right? I just really want to have strap on sex with you, but in a tent like lit from behind and then film it.

Sadie: You are a Jenny Sun. I knew it.

Nico: But I don’t know, it’s just been a vision I’ve been having.

Sadie: It’s a vision. It appeared to you?

Nico: It keeps appearing to me like that. Like the Virgin Mary.

And we need a tripod to set up the camera. All right, you know what? we’re going to… I’ll put a pin… Definitely going to put a pin in under-the-bed straps.

Sadie: Just let me know so I can add it to our packing list. Oh, that’s the thing we didn’t talk about last time, how I’mthe person who does the research-

Nico: Yes, you do the research. Send me the spreadsheet with the various under-the-bed strap options and we’ll take a look later.

Sadie: I do. I just kind of compile a list of, “This is what we need to do. These are the top three things that I’ve found. These are the price points, these are the pluses, the pros and cons. Do you have a preference?” And you’re like, “No, whatever you want.”

Nico: Oh my god.

Sadie: And I make a choice.

Do you think your relationship will more or less continue to exist as it currently is? Why?

Nico: This is incredibly efficient.

Do you think our relationship will more or less continue as it currently is? Why?

Sadie: I mean, this is going to sound harsh, but I hope not because if it stays the way it currently is, then it means that we haven’t really grown.

Nico: I would say that I’m a completely different person from when we started dating, so how can you not expect me to completely transform-

Sadie: I mean, same.

Nico: … every several years?

Sadie: Same. I’m a much different person than when we first met.

Nico: That’s true.

Sadie: Which I’m fine with and for the better. I think part of what excites me about our relationship is knowing that, seeing how we have grown together and knowing that we do have the capacity to grow more and being excited to see where that goes.

Nico: Yes. What would you-

Sadie: Wait, do you have anything to add?

Nico: No, I think that sounds good.

Sadie: Really? You’re not excited about the… You’re very much like-

Nico: I’m not excited about the future.

Sadie: You’re not excited about the future. You’re just vibing. You’re just vibing about the future.

Nico: I mean, it could be really bad. You don’t know.

Sadie: Don’t bring that energy.

Nico: Okay.

Sadie: I mean, it could be, but it could also be really great.

Nico: Maybe. I don’t think I’ve allowed myself to consider that my future might be cool.

Sadie: You said that when we first started dating and look at you now.

What would you say are your most fundamental differences?

Nico: What would you say are your most fundamental differences?

Sadie: Besides that you’re an agent of chaos?

Nico: I’m not.

Sadie: You say that so convincingly. I really wish that when they transcribe the interview, they could just pick up that slight whine in your voice, insisting…

Nico: All right, well, are you not an agent of chaos? You are kind of grounded.

Sadie: I’m pretty grounded, but-

Nico: Agent of order.

Sadie: I’m much more of a planner than you are.

Nico: Planning.

Sadie: I know, you get so bored. I just love talking about how we’re going to redo the kitchen and you just… I can see your soul leave your body when I talk about paint swatches. You’re just like, “I don’t care. It’s green. I don’t care.”

Nico: Yeah. Green’s a good choice.

Sadie: But I’m trying to think what else. You definitely tend to lead more with intuition and you trust that things won’t turn out terribly. You don’t necessarily trust that they’ll turn out great, but you’re just kind of like, “Whatever.”

Nico: Yeah. Okay.

Sadie: I’m definitely… That’s something that I really get from you is just kind of that trusting and moving forward. I kind of feel like I need to know all the information, which can be really paralyzing in a way.

Nico: I mean, I would say that you’re more social than I am.

Sadie: I am. I do love a good schmooze.

Nico: Whereas I will just hermit if left undisturbed.

Sadie: I’m definitely more open. It’s interesting because for a lot of things, you are more open to the uncertainty of a good outcome than I am except in social situations.

Nico: I’m just like, “No, this is already hard.”

Sadie: But I mean, I’m definitely not an extrovert, but I’m-

Nico: I make you look like one. Do you all have any shared dreams or goals for the future or each other? What are these?

Do you all have any shared dreams/goals for the future or each other? What are these?

Sadie: Well, we both want… I mean, maybe you’ve changed your mind, but we did used to talk about having a pack of malamutes.

Nico: Oh, they’d be so fluffy.

Sadie: They’d be little raptors. They’d be such hot messes.

Nico: I mean, yeah. We’ve definitely talked about a house in the woods, pack of dogs.

Sadie: Yeah. I’ve waffled between wanting to live in a small city and living in middle of the woods. If I could find a way to have both, I think I would be happy with that.

Nico: I know. I’m like, I either need to live downtown or live in the middle of nowhere. No in between. Leave me alone.

Sadie: I would like to have a place where I can build a big fire every now and then. That would be nice.

Nico:Well, I have dreams for you, for your artistic practice.

Sadie: Same, and I have dreams for us too.

Nico: Yeah. I’d really like to, I don’t know, travel more with you, see more things. Probably we might have done more of that if it weren’t for the pandemic.

Sadie: Yeah. And also Mya-

Nico: I know.

Sadie: … who was so old for so long that we couldn’t-

Nico: So old for so long.

Sadie: She was so old for so long.

Nico: She really was. She went on good adventures though. I do dream of you finally going back and getting your PhD. I dream of that for you.

Sadie: Yeah, that’d be nice. I mean, I don’t think getting the PhD would be nice, but I think having one would be nice just to say I have one.

Nico: Wow. Bye.

Sadie: Also, just kind of… I don’t know. I don’t really want to be in academia, but having it as an option.

Nico: I mean, in terms of our future, I just picture us… You know what we’ve talked about that’s been our dream, is a shared studio space where we can just work on our various practices and projects together in a space that is designed for that.

Sadie: Well, we’re going to have one once I take out that chandelier and rip up that carpet.

Nico: This dream may be more achievable than anyone ever thought.

Sadie: The dining room is actually becoming the shared studio space.

Nico: It actually is, yeah. Fuck dining rooms.

Sadie: Who uses a dining room? We don’t entertain more than once a year at most.

Nico: Even then they can just, I don’t know, stand.

What piece of pop culture do you share or what piece of pop culture reminds you of your relationship? What’s your movie or your show or your book or your song?

Nico: All right. What piece of pop culture do you share or what piece of pop culture reminds you of your relationship? What is your movie or your show or your book or your song?
I’ll go first.

Sadie: Oh my god.

Nico: Our song is “Babooshka” by Kate Bush.

Sadie: That was so funny. That was so funny. Should we tell the story?

Nico: Yeah, go ahead.

Sadie: We were first dating and we were walking Mya early in the morning and it was chilly outside so we both had big scarves. At this point we didn’t know that the other person liked Kate Bush, but it was cold and we both put the scarves up over our heads and then we both skipped a beat and just turned to each other and said, “Babooshka, babooshka, babooshka ya yaaa.” Just completely spontaneously and it was just one of those magic moments.

Nico: It was a magic moment.

Sadie: I would say Kate Bush in general is just a big-

Nico: A big, a cultural touchstone for us. I definitely feel like the first movie we ever watched together was The Witch.

Sadie:
It was. The Vivitch.

Nico: Yeah, the Vivich. That was when you came over for a sleepover date.

Sadie: Yes. I didn’t know at the time it was going to be a sleepover date, but I had hopes.

Nico: You were ready.

Sadie: I was ready. I packed a toothbrush.

Nico: And then we watched that movie that I called “the Footloose movie.” You were like, “I’ve not seen Footloose.” I was like, “No, the movie we watched.”

Sadie: Oh god, what was that movie called?

Nico: What is it actually called? Finder’s Keepers.

Sadie: Finder’s Keepers, a documentary-

Nico: It’s a documentary.

Sadie: … about-

Nico: … a foot-

Sadie: Just everyone… Just don’t.

Nico: … in a grill.

Sadie: Just don’t tell them about it. Just say, “You got to watch Finders Keepers. It’s a documentary.”

Nico: Those are the first two movies we watched together.

Sadie: But what are pieces of pop culture that are specifically… We just love trash. We watch a lot of trash. We watch a lot of really good movies.

Remember before we started dating, I texted you because there was a Bergman marathon happening at Row House-

Nico: Yes.

Sadie: … and it was on a Monday.

Nico: I was like, “I’m literally at work right now. I can’t go to the movies.”

Sadie: I was like, “Well, I’m going to this movie, you should come.” And then I tried, “Well, they’re playing Persona on Wednesday. Do you want to go?” And you’re like, “I don’t think I can.”

Nico: I do like Persona.

You know what? You know what? When we first got together, I was trying to finish the fantasy novel I was working on. My workspace was in the attic of the house that I shared with several roommates. It was incredibly hot up there, and it was just getting hotter and hotter and I would just go up and then become delirious working on this book.

Sadie: Yeah. You talked about how you were going to pass out.

Nico: You made me a playlist called Attic Delirium.

Sadie: I know. It’s how you got into Diamanda Galas.

Nico: I knew about Diamanda Galas, but I was like, “Oh, this is good. Thank you for reminding me.”

Sadie: Yeah, that was a fun playlist.

Nico: That was a great playlist.

Sadie: I was just kind of in this place where I didn’t try to pick songs that I specifically thought you would like, I just put on songs that I would normally be afraid to put on playlists because I thought they would be perceived as too weird. I just kind of said, “Fuck it,” and put…

Nico: I loved it. I was like, “This is such a gift.” I think that that is definitely a piece of culture that will always be ours, is that playlist.

Okay. To wrap up, tell us a funny story about your partner.

Sadie: Okay so it was a couple years ago. 2019?

Nico: Yeah, we were visiting your family, down by the seashore.

Sadie: I would not describe where I grew up as “down by the seashore.” But yes, a beach is a thing that exists there. It’s like this tourist trap. We went to the ocean and I was feeling nostalgic. And we were just walking on the beach and it was really nice.

Nico: It was December.

Sadie: Which is the best time to go to the beach because no one is there and everything is gray. It’s nice. It’s like you’re in a Cure song. So we’re walking along the water and since I grew up there, I kind of know how to gauge the waves to see…every now and then you just get a big wave that comes up further than the other ones and you just did not understand how the ocean worked. So you’re just dancing along and you’re looking really cute, super super cute.

Nico: Okay yeah, I was just having a good time.

Sadie: Just vibin’.

Nico: Just vibin’.

Sadie: Yeah you were and it was so cute. I just knew, I could see it that eventually you were gonna get hit with a wave and so I backed off and just started taking photos. I was just like, oh my god, my toots is dancing.

Nico: And then a big wave came! And it got in my shoes.

Sadie: It was so funny though because it took a moment for you to realize what had happened like you were still dancing. And then like the water came up above your ankles and you just had this moment where you just stopped, like “What is happening? This sensation! I did not plan for this.”

Nico: And then there’s a photo of me running toward the shore with my thumbs up.

Sadie: There’s like a whole photo series. And then you wrang your socks out and we went to a beach shack.

Nico: It was great. I think we got prosecco.

(The photos in question.)

Nico: Okay, so, the problem with Sadie is that her stories about her are she works really hard and then she does the thing and then it’s excellent because of course, because she worked really hard.

I don’t know. When I was away visiting my family the other weekend, you just tore apart a room and completely redid it while I was gone.

Sadie: We needed storage.

Nico: I just kept getting updates. “Carpet’s gone.”

Sadie: This was going to be a surprise.

Nico: “Sub floor is gone.” I was like, “Wow, she’s going to town.” Which of course my dad loved because he loves you.

Oh my god, Sadie and my dad get along really well and it’s not a story, but it is just funny how freaking cute you two are.

Sadie: Yeah. Every time I go to visit your dad’s like, “Sadie, I got the good stuff,” and then he goes into the closet, pulls out a bottle of Tullamore D.E.W. and motions toward it and is like, “The good stuff.”

Nico: He holds it up like Vera White and he’s like-

Sadie: Vanna White?

Nico: Vanna White, and he’s like, “The good stuff.” And then he’ll be like, “Sadie. Sadie. You got to come see my workshop,” and then he’ll take you to his workshop that he doesn’t use and show you his tools where they’re all lined up.

Sadie: They’re so shiny.

Nico: They are so shiny. I’ll be like, “I also use tools.” He’s like, “Nah.” I’m like, “You taught me to use tools.” He’s like, “Nah. Sadie, Sadie.” And then-

Sadie: He just likes that I make you happy. If I like all those things and you did not seem like you were happy, then he would not care.

Nico: Correct.

Sadie: I wouldn’t get to see his wrench collection.

Nico: No.

Sadie: That would be forbidden knowledge.

Nico: Okay so, funny story about Sadie. Okay. So I’m going to talk about the time Sadie got haunted.

Sadie: I mean, technically we’re all haunted.

Nico: Yes, of course. But now, so Sadie, as you know, does the fore-woman-ing of a lot of the home reno. So we were going hard at it for the first year in the house because there was a lot to do. And then I would say around the fall, it was always spooky.

Sadie: We were doing the living room.

Nico: That was when it started, was when we started redoing the living room was when the haunting really started in earnest. So then we’re starting to see out of the corner of our eye, a guy walking around. We’re starting to smell cigarette smoke for no reason. We’re hearing footsteps. Especially when one of us was home alone, we would start to hear footsteps and doors opening and shutting. And one of the things that I noticed was Sadie… So the people who had done renovations previously or any home work previously, sometimes took a lot of shortcuts and Sadie would be criticizing them out loud. And I would notice that I would get an ominous feeling when Sadie did that. And then the hauntings would escalate after her criticism.

Sadie: I will say that I have come to have a little bit more of a nuanced understanding of what their socioeconomic situation was and why they made some of the decisions that they did. However, there is a big part of Boomer culture where they think that knowing how to DIY something is just doing whatever or knowing a guy. And that because the house did not immediately burn down that they actually knew what they were doing. And I was very frustrated with some of the decisions that they had made concerning some of their supposed updates. And on one hand, they’re probably thinking, “We’ll just do it like this and we’ll never have to deal with it again.” And I mean, they were right. But I did become very vocally frustrated with some of the decisions that they had made, like I don’t know, covering this gorgeous hundred-year-old tile with tar.

Nico: I mean, look at this beautiful tile. And what I do when I see something beautiful is I put tar on it.

Sadie: I know. I’m constantly looking around in the world to see what I can cover in tar.

Nico: Okay. So then this was coinciding with the fact that I had a big fundraising event coming up. So it’s October, again. It’s October 2019.

Sadie: And I had a big composition that I was working on… A commission for a dance piece.

Nico: That’s true. And so we were both working really hard on top of doing home reno. And the first thing that happened was in terms of bigger hauntings, besides what I had mentioned before, was we were both up in bed, really on a mattress in the creepy room, as we called it at the time. And I was snoozing.

Sadie: No, this is one of the last things that happened.

Nico: Was it one of the last? Oh, okay. Nevermind. All right. Well, I’m all a jumble.

Sadie: No. I remember one time I put Mya’s leash on the counter and then it immediately got knocked off.

Nico: Okay. So basically Sadie started to… As we’re getting busier and busier, it’s October. And Sadie starts to experience Poltergeist activity essentially while trying to renovate the living room. She would put stuff on the counters. I watched her put Mya’s leash on the counter and then watched it slide to the edge and fall off.

Sadie: Yeah. And this was especially annoying because when I was working on this composition, I had my phone or other things on my desk, like pens on my desk or whatever, my notebook for taking notes. And they would just get knocked off while I was trying to work. And at one point I looked over and saw my phone moving toward the edge of the desk and was just like, “I don’t have time for this.” I literally said, “I don’t have time for this,” out loud and just put my phone in my pocket and just kept going. But I was very much undeterred by the ghost activity.

Nico: It just seemed to make it more persistent.

Sadie: I don’t know what you’d expect doing…

Nico: Oh my God.

Sadie: What?

Nico: Look at that bird.

Sadie: Oh my God.

Nico: Okay. Okay. Well, let’s talk about one of the climaxes of this.

Sadie: So it just kept escalating. And again, me being very much a… I didn’t feel like I was in the wrong because I’m having to fix their mistakes.

Nico: At that point, I had stopped verbally shaming them. I had stopped. So the focus then just really went to Sadie in terms of the hauntings.

Sadie: I wasn’t shaming them, I was just giving some constructive criticism. It may have been a little bit pointed…

Nico: Shame.

But then one night, I’m sleeping and what Sadie experiences is the sound of, and tell me if I’m wrong, you hear a rhythmic sound at first, right?

Sadie: Okay. So what I heard…

Nico: Go ahead.

Sadie: It definitely woke me up and then I went back to sleep. And then the next time I heard it, I heard this fan sound, like an overhead fan. And it just kept getting louder and louder. And I forced myself to sit up so that way I knew that I wasn’t asleep. Before, I just thought it was a dream. And it started downstairs in the living room basically where we were doing the work. And it came up the stairs and I heard it outside of our bedroom door. And I saw the shadows of someone walking in front of the door. And I shook you awake and was like, “Do you hear that?” And you said, “No, you’re probably being haunted.” And then you went back to sleep.

Nico: Right. And then to add insult to injury, as we’re working in the living room, we experienced a gas leak and then have to get the gas shut off for 10 days, 11 days.

Sadie: We did not start the gas leak. What had happened was they put subflooring over an old gas line that was being used for the gas fireplace, so they didn’t properly cap it.

Nico: Right. They just let the gas keep hanging out in there. And then, so we pulled the subflooring off, and smelled gas. And then basically plumbers found that basically the whole thing was leaking every which way all through this spiderweb of copper piping. And so we had to get a new gas line before we could get the gas turned back on.

Sadie: Right. So again, I just feel like it’s really rich that they decided to haunt me because they did a poor job.

Nico: So then I’m trying to get ready for this fundraising event and we have no gas and we’re being haunted. And I had a stern talking to.

Sadie: And also they were keeping me up.

Nico: I was like, “This is unacceptable.” And they have not woken us up in the night since.

Sadie: They haven’t. I also toned it down and maybe just kept my feelings inside, which is fine.

Nico: Anyway, that was the time Sadie got very haunted because she was a little bit cheeky about somebody’s workmanship. This is somebody who was dead and was right there.

Sadie: They’re really lucky they didn’t burn the house down.

Nico: They’re really lucky the ceiling didn’t fall through the drop ceiling and crush them in their sleep because the plaster was not attached.

Sadie: Yeah. But if that didn’t happen, then you wouldn’t have had your number one lesbian hole.

Nico: The big daddy hole.

Which has been shut at this point. RIP big daddy hole.

Sadie: It lives on in our hearts.

Interview With My Wife: Mia

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How do you identify?

How did we meet and get together?

What are our big three astrological signs? How do you feel about that?

What do you enjoy most about our relationship?

What hurdles or obstacles have we overcome together in our relationship?

Where do you locate our relationship on the monogamy/polyamory spectrum? What philosophies do you have around how you handle monogamy? How do you feel this impacts our relationship?

What is our living situation like? Together, separate, long distance, something else, how often do we see each other and why?

How do we share expenses or work out finances? How do we share or split up labor in the relationship? Can you talk about why that is?

Do we have kids, pets, plants? All three?

How would you describe the sex we have together? Do you believe in lesbian bed death and, if so, has it or do you think it could visit our relationship? What haven’t we done together but would like to?

Do you think our relationship will, more or less, continue to exist as it currently is and why?

What would you say are our most fundamental differences?

Do you have any shared dreams, goals for the future or each other?

What piece of pop culture do we share? What piece of pop culture reminds you of our relationship? What’s our movie, our show, our book, or our song?

Tell a funny story about me.

Interview With My Partner: Gerrie

Hello there and welcome to the fifth installment of Interview With My Significant Other, a new A+ series in which Autostraddle team members interview a signficiant other. Here at Autostraddle in spring of 2022, we’re in a historic era. There has never been a time in history in which more of the Autostraddle team have been in romantic relationships. So, to take advantage of this time, and so that we can all revel in the broad range of ways that queer relationships can look and be, we developed fourteen questions for our team members to answer in conversation with their significant others. We asked them how they met, to tell us their hopes for the future, about finances and sharing labor, and yes, about sex.

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How do you both identify?

Gerrie: I identify as a gay, nonbinary Chinese-Filipino. I was described as a comedian and podcaster in a news article recently. Was that journalist a friend? Yes, but no takesie backsies.

Ashni: Okay. I identify as a South Asian gender-averse…

Gerrie: I like that.

Ashni: Thank you. I just don’t want to be perceived. I’m a South Asian person, I’m second-gen. And I don’t identify as a New Yorker, but at some point I will I’m sure.

Gerrie: Are we going to live here forever?

Ashni: I don’t know, maybe!

Gerrie: Nice.

How’d you meet / get together?

Gerrie: We met on Tinder. I asked you on a date and then said that I didn’t like talking on Tinder, so I gave you my number. I think I also suggested that the date be at a rooftop bar, the one that was close to you. And then you ghosted me! Then we matched again on Hinge? I made a reference to the fact that we’d already matched on a different app. I don’t know what changed, but you said yes that time.

Ashni: I had never online dated before! And when a complete stranger pitched a rooftop bar to me, my brain was like, “well, they could just push you off.” And that’s why I stopped replying to your Tinder messages, which I know that we jokingly say is ghosting, but I don’t know if that counts as ghosting because we never met up IRL. We had never taken the conversation out of the apps! I don’t know… maybe it is ghosting.

Gerrie: We did have a back and forth.

Ashni: We talked a little bit.

Gerrie: Yeah. Okay, semi-ghosting.

Ashni: If it’s truly ghosting, I will accept that. (Someone please settle this for us, is this ghosting??)

Gerrie: We went on a couple more dates. The second one went okay — we got hot chocolate at City Bakery. Did the 36 questions. Third date, not so good. Fourth date, you tried to break up with me.

Ashni: I did. I wasn’t ready for a relationship!

Gerrie: But I lied and said that I also wasn’t looking for a relationship. I was like, “let’s just see where this goes.” And then we kept going on dates until April.

Ashni: I think that was a little sneaky of you.

Gerrie: What?

Ashni: Telling me that you didn’t want to be in a relationship and then secretly –

Gerrie: Well, I was hoping for a relationship, but when you said, “Oh, I’m not looking for a relationship”, in my head, I was like, “Well, a relationship with this person could be nice.”

What are your big 3 astrological signs?

Gerrie: So my sun is a Sagittarius. We’re both Sagittarius suns. And then my Scorpio moon, I looked it up – apparently I’m ultrasensitive. Surprise, I cry a lot. I have a lot of emotions.

Ashni: [laughing] You do cry a lot.

Gerrie: I can cry at a TikTok while pooping! My ascendant is in Virgo. I had to Google that because I still don’t know what ascendant signs mean, but it says “a personality that is purposeful and trustworthy”.

Ashni: I love that you did research.

Gerrie: What is your opinion on that?

Ashni: On the Virgo thing? That you’re trustworthy?

Gerrie: “Purposeful and trustworthy” is what the internet says.

Ashni: Yeah, I think you’re trustworthy. I feel like I wouldn’t date you if you weren’t trustworthy.

Gerrie: Me one question ago: “I lied.”

Ashni: [laughing] You don’t feel like a Sag to me. I know that your birthday is squarely Sag season, but you…

Gerrie: Is it because I don’t constantly feel the need to travel?

Ashni: Well, more than that, you just don’t feel chaotic. I feel like I don’t really get big fire sign energy from you in general.

Gerrie: Oh, is that a compliment?

Ashni: I don’t know! I’m mostly fire signs in my chart, right? I’ve got a Sag and an Aries in my big three. Wait, what are you Googling?

Gerrie: I’m Googling Virgos. Oh, that’s Earth, okay. We got a lot going on here. I would say that maybe I’m not a fire sign in the traditional Sag sense. I think mine is more like a scrambled brain, like a lot of projects at any given time.

Ashni: Especially when we first met, I feel like you had like 12 creative projects going on at once while being in grad school. That was…

Gerrie: Yeah. Half-assing a lot of things. Quarter-assing, really.

Ashni: No, but you were good at all of them!

Gerrie: My grades in grad school will show you that I was not.

Ashni: Okay, well you were great at your creative endeavors.

What do you enjoy most about your relationship?

Gerrie: I enjoy the communication and transparency that we have, and our little co-regulation technique where we put our foreheads together and hum at the same frequency. I think that’s super important. It looks so silly, but, oh my, I think it’s a game changer.

Ashni: It works wonders! If we’re in the middle of an argument and one of us is asking for the forehead thing, we do it and we immediately just figure it out. I think that’s so nice.

Gerrie: I have no problem talking to you about literally anything. I don’t think there’s anything that you don’t know about me. I’m trying to think if there are any secrets that I’ve been keeping from you.

Ashni: Yes. Tell the world your secrets right now!!

Gerrie: I think you know everything.

What hurdles or obstacles have you overcome together in your relationship?

Gerrie: Bed bugs in the New York City housing market.

Ashni: Oh my God. To be fair, we brought the bed bugs.

Gerrie: Okay, let’s be clear — I want to put it out there. We did not bring the bed bugs, the bed bugs were at the hotel.

Ashni: In New Orleans. No, no, Savannah.

Gerrie: We did not bring the bed bugs. The bed bugs were there, okay? And then we made sure that we did not bring the bed bugs with us. (in case it wasn’t clear, Gerrie seems to want y’all to know we did not bring the bed bugs!!)

Ashni: We stripped in the hallway.

Gerrie: Yeah, at my old apartment. It’s a good thing we got back really late. But more seriously, the concept of being friends with your exes. I think we come from different friendship cultures, because among my friends, we’re all very much of the, “Oh, you broke up with this person? Cut them off.” We’ll all cut them off.

Ashni: But you guys don’t date your friends. For me, I’ve only ever dated my friends. I’m not about to give up these multi-year friendships that have lasted, I don’t know, seven to 10 years, just because we dated and it didn’t work out.

Ashni: Any other hurdles or obstacles? Early on in the relationship I think we used to argue a lot about where we would live long term and how many babies we would have.

Gerrie: I mean, we still talk about that now. It’s just not arguing.

Ashni: Well, we don’t argue. I feel like we picked fights just to fight. Does that make any sense? Like, I feel like we fought a lot and I don’t know why.

Gerrie: Yeah, I don’t know why either.

Ashni: We fought about everything. Oh, and then moving in together.

Gerrie: What about that?

Ashni: That was a hurdle. We struggled.

Gerrie: The first year, yeah. Because we just live in a house very differently.

Where do you locate your relationship on the monogamy / polyamory spectrum?

Gerrie: I am monogamous. And we have agreed to monogamy in this relationship. If that changes, I’m sure we can talk about it.

Ashni: Yeah, I feel like we’re monogamous in practice, but I have crushes on people.

Gerrie: I’m sure I have crushes, I just don’t have the brain cells to even entertain what it would be like to date this person. You know?

Ashni: Yeah. We are monogamous now and we’ve negotiated monogamy, but for a period of time I did have two partners – you were one of them. At that point we were not monogamous, but we wound up going the monogamy route because you said that you didn’t really like that I had a second partner.

Gerrie: Yeah. And I think that was early on in our relationship because I felt really uncomfortable and unstable with what we had. But I mean, we can talk about it more like, not in an interview.

Ashni: Separately?

Gerrie: Yeah. But I mean, yeah, we’d have to negotiate the terms, but like, if you wanted to do that now, then we could talk about it.

Ashni: No, for sure. I mean we’ve had multiple years pass.

Gerrie: I don’t know if I could do polyamory with someone else, but I do feel secure enough with you that if you wanted to, then like, okay.

What’s your living situation like? How often do you see each other?

Gerrie: We live together. We see each other every day. We found this apartment last year. Was that last year?

Ashni: Yeah. It’s been over a year.

Gerrie: It was not the first one on the list, but it was the first one that we physically toured in person, because we scheduled 10 apartment tours in one weekend. I remember saying this was the second one on the list, but the first one we actually toured, and that’s why there was so much hesitation around it. We were just like, there’s no way the first apartment we toured is the one we’ll choose.

Ashni: I don’t remember this being the first one. I could have sworn we toured… Do you remember that five bedroom monstrosity that we toured just because? I thought that came first.

Gerrie: Maybe it did. Yeah, okay, it was five bedrooms, but it was listed for super cheap (the StreetEasy listing was wrong). And then we got there, and the realtor told us it was $5000.

Ashni: Yeah, we live together. I like it. I think we do good.

Gerrie: I like it too, yeah.

Ashni: I like that you wake me up in the mornings! And that we Wordle every night. It’s nice doing this together. Life.

How do you all share expenses or work out finances? How do you share or split up labor in the relationship?

Gerrie: You do the cooking and I do the cleaning.

Ashni: I feel like I do a lot of the grocery planning too. But you do a lot of the cleaning planning.

Gerrie: And I do a lot of thinking about what else the house needs.

Ashni: I think you just like to online shop.

Gerrie: And? What about that? Sometimes I like a choice of whatever cleaning spray I use, okay? I let you pick and now we have one that smells like margaritas!

Ashni: And it’s great. Have you used it? You haven’t even used it.

Gerrie: I’ve smelled it. I don’t drink, so it’s not the best smell. Lime is okay. It’s just that lime automatically triggers like shots for– Like it just reminds me of any alcoholic beverage. I drank a lot of tequila in college.

Ashni: Oh, I didn’t know that. All right. Well, noted. I will not purchase this again and if you want, I can just –

Gerrie: Well, let me sniff it some more and we’ll decide.

Ashni: What? Okay.

Gerrie: Oh, are we supposed to talk about why that is?

Ashni: I think you’re a better cleaner than I am.

Gerrie: Yeah, there we go.

Ashni: And I don’t think that you’re a very good cook.

Gerrie: Yeah, that too. Although you do like my red lentil soup.

Ashni: I like your red lentil soup. I also just like it when food is made for me, because that is such a rare occurrence. But you’re a much better cleaner than I am. Mostly because your standards are higher than mine. But I think that our division of labor… we’re like close to equal. I think sometimes you do more.

Gerrie: I’m glad we’re going on the record to say this!

Ashni: We are. But I do more household admin! So like planning activities, vacations, I feel like that always falls to me.

Gerrie: Okay. And I will say it’s because I’m okay just staying here.

Ashni: This is why I don’t feel like you don’t feel like a Sag! Also you were very pro-commitment. I know this is going back to the big three, but you’re very pro-commitment.

Gerrie: Oh yeah, that’s true.

Ashni: I just didn’t get it. But also, like I was in my early twenties, like what did I –

Gerrie: Oh my God, you are one year younger than me. Stop using that as an excuse for everything.

Do you have kids, pets, plants, all three?

Gerrie: Definitely no kids. We have plants. No pets.

Ashni: What about your tiny little shrimp?

Gerrie: I don’t even have to do anything to it, so it doesn’t really qualify.

Ashni: My goal is to have one dog, one baby, in that order.

Gerrie: I’m very excited that we have moved from, “I don’t understand the appeal of dogs. I hate dogs. They’re loud. They’re annoying.” to “I want a dog and I want it first before a baby.”

Ashni: Oh, totally. But I do want a baby.

Gerrie: Well, I don’t want babies. You know a baby stops being a baby at some point?

Ashni: Okay, but I think that you and I would bring an excellent child into this world and somebody who could positively impact–

Gerrie: I mean, it’s more about the idea of bringing life into a dying world.

Ashni: There are other ways to have kids!

Gerrie: Yeah, and that’s something to think about.

Ashni: Okay. Well, I would love to have a child or children. And a dog.

Gerrie: [clearly ready to move on] Mm-hmm.

How would you describe the sex you have together (if you have sex)?

Gerrie: Good.

Ashni: Yeah, I think it’s good. Infrequent, but good. Do you believe in lesbian bed death?

Gerrie: Yeah, I would say so.

Ashni: It feels less spontaneous now.

Gerrie: Yeah, that’s fair.

Ashni: But maybe that’s just because I see you all the time.

Gerrie: We are literally around each other all the time. I mean we wake up together, we both work from home. We eat together – we eat almost every meal together. Sometimes we shower together. It’s just so much together, which is… I’m not complaining at all, I love that. But I’m sure that has definitely impacted our relationship. Or not relationship, our sex life.

Ashni: Totally. I think so too.

Do you think your relationship will more or less continue to exist as it currently is?

Gerrie: I mean, yes and no. I hope it stays on this upwards trajectory because I think things are really good right now.

Ashni: Yeah, I feel like our relationship will stay the way it is. The only thing I can think of changing this dramatically would be if and when we formalize our commitment to each other on paper, which is my roundabout way of saying marriage or whatever.

Gerrie: Marriage or whatever, okay.

Ashni: [laughing] Marriage or whatever.

Gerrie: I like it. Marriage or whatever. “Do you want to go to the wedding or whatever”? Me when I propose: “Do you want to get married or whatever?” I’ll write this down.

Ashni: I like that we’ve established that you are proposing.

Gerrie: Yeah. Don’t act like we haven’t talked about this multiple times.

Ashni: Yeah. Though, I will say, I think even if and when we do do the Big M I think that our relationship will not change because we already live together.

Gerrie: I agree.

Ashni: We already split stuff pretty normally. I think the only thing that would change is maybe we’d get a joint bank account.

Gerrie: Yeah, like the big stuff. We’d need wills.

Ashni: Oh, and then I’d probably have to come visit your parents more often.

Gerrie: [sarcastically] Oh, no.

Ashni: They’re nice!

Gerrie: No, say more.

Ashni: I’m not going to say more! They’re nice. I love them! I think they’re cute.

What would you say are your most fundamental differences?

Gerrie: Our relationship to our own parents and then our relationship to our identities.

Ashni: Oh, yeah, that’s a really good one!

Gerrie: Yeah, I would say that I’m really attached to my culture and ethnic heritage, I think. Ethnicity, race, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t grow up around a lot of queerness. Like, any queer presence in my life was a cis gay man. I spent more brain cells thinking about being Asian, because I was around a lot of Asian people despite growing up in the South.

Ashni: That’s the complete opposite of me. I feel way more connected to my queer identity than my South Asian heritage. Our relationships with our parents are very different. I think that I have a really casual… I guess casual’s not the right word, but I –

Gerrie: Push back?

Ashni: I stand up to my parents a lot. I think it’s just because of the way we were raised. Like maybe you have more filial responsibility. Which is not to say I don’t, because I definitely have moments of being a “good South Asian child”. Anything else you want to add before we go onto the next one?

Gerrie: I would say our capacity to discuss death.

Ashni: In that I don’t discuss it?

Gerrie: Yeah. We got to talk about what happens!

Ashni: Why?

Gerrie: It’s important to be prepared. You have less anxiety if you talk about it. Also, you’re very into food. You live to eat, I eat to live.

Ashni: You’re one step away from becoming a Soylent bro.

Gerrie: I was just about to say that!

Ashni: Really?

Gerrie: I mean, I like to chew my food, so Soylent would not work out for me, but… yesterday’s meal of rice and meatballs. I mean truly, no sauce, just plain white rice and frozen meatballs from Trader Joe’s.

Ashni: Okay. If anyone’s listening, I did not eat that with Gerrie, just to save my reputation as a —

Gerrie: Okay, anyway.

Ashni: But I’m happy that you have that. It’s like the “Happy you have that, glad it’s not me” meme.

(As it turns out, that is not a meme that exists anywhere! But maybe it should.)

Do you all have any shared dreams/goals for the future or each other?

Gerrie: Yeah, a lot more traveling with you. I would like a home that we can call ours. Like, I mean-

Ashni: Oh, you want to be a homeowner?

Gerrie: Yeah, whether that’s an apartment or a house-house.

Ashni: It feels like an impossible dream unless we’ve moved out of New York.

Gerrie: I mean, yeah, but where? The surrounding suburbs are still kind of expensive. I still feel it’s unattainable.

Ashni: It’s sad.

Gerrie: Yeah, I would say that.

What piece of pop culture do you share?

Gerrie: I had to think about this one. Game of Thrones.

Ashni: What??

Gerrie: We watched that together when we first started dating. I made that picnic indoors in my apartment in Washington Heights. It was a blanket on the floor and we got Taco Bell. And then now I think it’s… we watch a lot of TV together. So you know, Futurama, Solar Opposites… Adult animation about sci-fi is a good category.

Ashni: Well, I think adult animation in general because you’ve also got Disenchantment.

Gerrie: That’s your show!

Ashni: I love that show. But we watch it together! Oh, or Abbott Elementary.

Gerrie: That’s a good one. I think the show that makes me think about you is definitely Futurama.

Ashni: Well, we did watch every episode of Futurama during the first three months of the pandemic. I love Futurama. I would also say that Instant Crush really reminds me of you.

Gerrie: Because I put that on the playlist I made for you when we first started dating.

Ashni: The playlist that was basically titled: “I know I said I’m not into a relationship, but I love you.”

Gerrie: So glad you got that message.

Tell us a funny story about your partner!

Gerrie: Okay. So you went to the sample sale at that sample sale place in New York. And you bought these bedsheets. I don’t remember the brand, it was –

Ashni: Boll & Branch. Which by the way, I think the presidents sleep on Boll & Branch!

Gerrie: So we want to sleep on the same sheets as war criminals?

Ashni: Fuck…

Gerrie: I don’t! You bought the sheets at a severely discounted price and you –

Ashni: Yeah, they retail for hundreds of dollars.

Gerrie: And you would not stop talking about them. But then we went into lockdown and you left them, unopened, at a friend’s. You eventually got them after two years. Two apartments later, you got them. We put them on the bed… and they weren’t much better than the Target sheets. And then we stained them shortly after.

Ashni: The Target sheets are really nice. I feel like the Target sheets are just as soft so… unfortunate for me. But also I paid the same amount that I would have for the Target sheets anyway. Not a total loss. All right, my funny story is that… I had to get a biopsy done, a vaginal biopsy done. But for some reason I went to a pediatric gynecologist? I don’t know why.

Gerrie: You picked out this person, so I don’t understand what the confusion is.

Ashni: I don’t know how that happened. Maybe she wasn’t a pediatric gynecologist.

Gerrie: There’s no way.

Ashni: Right? Okay, anyway –

Gerrie: Do they make pediatric gynecologists?

Ashni: Yeah, I feel like they should. You don’t just suddenly start needing a gyno once you’re –

Gerrie: I imagine a pediatrician would be able to handle… I don’t know. If there’s something more concerning then they just send you to the regular gyno.

Ashni: Okay, so maybe this was a regular gyno.

Gerrie: Let’s just hope it was.

Ashni: Right. So we’re at the gyno and Gerrie is there to hold my hand because I’m not very good with incisions or, I don’t know –

Gerrie: Doctors.

Ashni: No, I’m okay with doctors. But if I’m going to get cut, I don’t want to be there alone, so you came with me to hold my hand. And then the nurse walked in and said, “Oh, I see we’ve brought mom.”

Gerrie: We don’t look anything alike.

Ashni: Also, our age difference is one year.

Gerrie: Scarred for life, it’s fine. I think about that every day I put on my skincare routine.

Interview With My Wife: Jane

Hey, y’all. It’s shea. A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I drove across the country back to the East Coast for a quick teaching gig. Along the way, we ate crappy gas station snacks, belted out early 2000s hits, and yes – did this extensive interview with my S.O. which offers just a glimpse into the wild, beautiful ride that has been our last seven years together. Buckle up and enjoy!

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shea: I’ve started. Should I do an interview, a real interview?

Jane: Sure. Why not?

shea: shea wesley martin reporting live from I-81 North.

Jane: That’s not how you do it, babe. You’re supposed to say “I’m recording, the date, who was present…”

shea: Oh, okay. shea wesley martin on Friday, July…

Jane: I don’t know the date.

shea: On I-81 with Jane and Mabel the Pig. Just outside of Mohegan Sun Arena where Jane has just revealed that she saw the great Sarah McLachlan – known to me only by the song that she sings on those animal commercials.

Jane: That was the first time I openly wept at a concert. It was very weird. But we’re not here to talk about that. Let’s get on to these questions now that we’ve had our proper introduction.

shea: This is going to be an interesting ride.

How’d you meet / get together? (Include how long you knew each other before becoming romantically involved.)

Jane: So first – I’m a queer, cis woman and my pronouns are she /her. And how did we meet? Well, actually, so we did Teach for America back in 2015. I was on staff that summer and you were just starting to teach. I actually saw you before they saw me. I went and Facebook stalked.

shea: Stalker!

Jane: I Facebook stalked, whatever. I was looking for my queer people, people who I could have friendships with. I don’t know if I was looking for a relationship or anything, but I was looking for my queer people [who were joining the program in Florida].

shea: Well, how did you know I was queer?

Jane: Well, I guessed. Actually, no. You had pictures with you and your ex.

shea: Oh, okay.

Jane: So, but at that point, I was like, “They could be a friend, even though they’re dating someone, they could be a cool friend.” And then I found out you were moving in with [roomate]. And I was like, “Okay, that [roommate] doesn’t like me, but that’s fine. We’ll see.”

shea: Can you describe my roommate to the readers, because I think that’s important… You can’t just say [roommate].

Jane: She was 65, a self-proclaimed Butch dyke who had girlfriends in all these different cities and would refer to the girlfriends by their city names, like Phoenix and Sarasota.

shea: She was an absolute mess – a legend and also ridiculous.

Jane: Indeed. So, I found you that way. We met for the first time, probably about a month and a half later but I was on staff and I was really just focusing on trying to be a good mentor. And I knew that you were in a relationship.

shea: This is a very different story from the one that I tell and you know this. I fell for you before we even talked when I saw you across that room on the first day of that institute. You were handing out lunch boxes and just being so joyful. I had no idea if you were queer, taken, or even from the same region as me, but I was like “who is this girl?!” And then you ignored me all summer while I was trying to feel you out – so rude!

Jane: And that’s why I’m here telling my story. Enough of yours because everyone hears your damn story. “I ignored you [Blah Blah blah].” I ignored you because once I found out you were interested, I was like, “Okay, this could be something real and I don’t want to f*ck it up. So I’m going to wait till we get back to Jacksonville.” Because we were in Houston, Texas just for the pre-service summer program before we got back [to Florida] and I thought, “When we get back, I’ll feel it out. See what their relationship looks like,” because I was really confused about that.

shea: I know and by that time, I thought you were not interested at all.

Jane: Yes.

shea: You were ignoring me. So when I asked you out to dinner, I asked you as a friend first. I had no idea that anything else was in the cards.

Jane: Well, so I replied – I wanted to make sure I knew. I was like, “Is this a date date? Or is this a friend date?” And whatever the answer was going to be, I was excited about it.

shea: That was the best trip to Marshall’s ever.

Jane: Marshall’s?

shea: Yeah. I went to Marshall’s to buy a lamp the day I asked you out – That gold lamp you have in your office right now. On the way out, I texted you and asked you to dinner. And you asked if it was a friend date or a date date.

Jane: Well, I had no idea so I wanted to be sure! And then you were late for the first date! That’s not part of the question, but I just wanted to say that happened.

shea: Time is a social construct. It’s not real.

Jane: [Rolls eyes and smiles] What’s our next question?

What are your three big astrological signs? How do we feel about that?

Jane: We? As two people?

shea: Yes – us.

Jane: Well, my sun is Capricorn. My moon is Aries and my ascendant sign is Aquarius.

shea: Did you look these up?

Jane: I mean, they’re on my Co-Star. I reviewed what they mean a little bit because…

shea: Today?

Jane: Yes, today, because I don’t actually care that much but I knew you would ask.

shea: Ah.

Jane: When I was younger, I was very much into astrology. I was into a lot of new-age stuff – energy work, numerology. And then I don’t know what happened but there was an invalidation of it somewhere. It was probably when I went to college because I was a scientist and this idea of “pseudoscience” is not something that [most scientists] consider to be real. So I think that’s probably when I disengaged from new-age stuff.

shea: It’s interesting because I feel like I also never really engaged in it until recently, but I don’t think it’s because of science. I think it’s because of my religious upbringing. Growing up, it was definitely positioned as the opposite of Christianity. Not Satanic per se, but I hear my grandmother’s voice in my head saying it’s evil or not real.

Jane: I also think astrology has become very…I don’t want to say trendy in younger communities but –

shea: It’s definitely “in.”

Jane: I mean, I got asked about it in a job interview

shea: That was weird though.

Jane: The person asked what my signs were and at the time, honestly, I didn’t know. The interviewer was very much like, “Oh, interesting.” I felt like I was very much judged for not having my top three right off the top of my head.

shea: These days, it feels it’s very queer. People are like, “I’m queer. What are your signs?” And I’ve met some snooty, hipster people who are like, “I don’t use that app. I use…”

Jane: I’m not that cool.

shea: I don’t even know all of the information you gave. I know I’m a Taurus. When people, mostly queers ask me, I just open Co-Star and hand them my phone. It’s so much easier.

Jane: But you are very much a Taurus though. The stereotypical Taurus – very stubborn. Not that I know a ton about astrology, but…

shea: I also like to be really cozy and comfortable.

Jane: I am very much a Capricorn. I’m very driven. I want to do what I want to do, in the way I want to do it.

shea: Yes. Which it’s interesting because I’m stubborn. And so together we are quite the stubborn combination sometimes.

Jane: Yeah.

shea: But it works.

Jane: It does.

What do you enjoy most about your relationship?

Jane: I think that I have never been in a relationship, whether it be a friendship, romantic, or even a familial relationship – I’ve never been able to be my true self with someone. And that is something that I find comes very easily with you. I am weird. I am very strange and I like to be strange. And I like to be almost like, I don’t know, kid-like sometimes in my weirdness. I’ll make weird noises and we giggle about it for a half hour and it becomes a crux in our relationship, this weird noise that I made for weeks. Like that time that we were at the market and you made a weird noise at the people when they were walking away. That’s special to me – just to be able to laugh about it and be like, “That weird thing happened.” And we use that thing that other people might be embarrassed about to say, “it’s something that we’re going to bond over and giggle”

shea: I think that was probably my favorite realization in our relationship [when I realized that you were also weird]. I just thought you were hot, really smart, and just fun and all the things. I don’t remember when it was but all of a sudden, I realized you were weird and it was like the best surprise ever. Because I was always weird. And I do think there is something so incredibly freeing about being with someone who you don’t have to mask yourself for.

Jane: Well I had to mask so many pieces of myself to feel worthy of other humans’ attention like whether it be my queerness or whether I would have to pretend to hate my body. There were just a ton of different pieces that I never got to show everyone or even show one person all the pieces. It’s nice to be able to have that now

shea: To just be and know that the person’s going to love you no matter what. It’s also terrifying to be completely raw and vulnerable, but I think it is just fantastic.

Jane: Yeah. I agree.

What hurdles or obstacles have you overcome together in your relationship? These can be within your relationship or things that you’ve faced together.

Jane: I think that this is a question that we’re still grappling with as a couple. To be totally transparent, sex has been something that has been – there have been a lot of ups and downs throughout our sex life. I think when we first met probably for about the first six months of our relationship, we could not get enough.

shea: Yes and also the first few months, but they were also unexpectedly difficult.

Jane: So I had a cancer scare and a full hysterectomy when we had just been dating for about three months. That changed a lot of my sex drive/desire. And I mean, if you’re comfortable with me talking about this part [shea nods] I think also you are learning and coming to terms with gender and your dysphoria has been challenging. Did I say that correctly?

shea: Yeah.

Jane: There’s been a lot of shifting and you learning or understanding what your wants are combined with my pulling back of sexual desire because my chemistry was completely off. We have had a lot of ebbs and flows that haven’t necessarily aligned all the time. And I mean, that’s probably been the hardest, I think we’re also learning about intimacy in other ways beyond sex. And at the same time, I mean, our sex life isn’t dead. In fact, we’re going to go have sex in a couple of hours.

shea: Ha yes definitely! But I do think that’s been difficult. Really hard. It’s almost as if we both are having to get to know our bodies again and redefine what it means and doing that in a society and even in a queer culture that wants to define what good sex is or “a good sex life” is or “healthy” in a certain way. It’s complicated. I also think that even though it’s been hard, I’m grateful that I get to do this with you because we have such a solid foundation.

Jane: But I think that also goes into the next question, which I believe is about monogamy and polyamory. Correct?

Where do you locate your relationship on the monogamy/polyamory spectrum? What philosophies do you have around how you handle monogamy/polyamory? How do you feel this impacts your relationship?

shea: Maybe. Yes. It is. Look at you memorizing the questions.

Jane: No, I just, I mean, they’re so very closely related. I think that one of the most difficult times in my whole life was when we opened our relationship because I think you had some exploring to do and also needed to be affirmed. I just wasn’t able to do it. We did that for – I don’t know what, probably about seven, eight months? You were exploring. I attempted to talk to someone and I think she and I might have had a genuine connection, but I felt like I was cheating and I could not get past what the social construct that I grew up in was. And that was really… I mean, it was really, it wasn’t me just in my feelings. There was consistent stress in my body. I went on to some medications to try and counteract what was happening with my body. And I think that was important for us to do. But we’ve also talked about like, I am not built for that. And I am envious of people who can tap into that part of their mental clarity, but I can’t get through what I’ve been socialized and that’s okay. And I think that was probably a step we needed to take. Do you want to say more on that?

shea: No, I think that it was, and it was also when the pandemic was happening. It was heavy and super complicated.

Jane: Because we didn’t know how to do it.

shea: And the world was falling apart. We also got that couple’s therapist who was horrible and not.

Jane: She wasn’t horrible.

shea: If you’re reading this, you’re not horrible but just not for us.

Jane: Therapy also gave us pathways to heal a lot.

shea: I think that everything is a learning process or not even learning but unlearning. I learned a lot and I look forward to continuing to grow and develop with you in our sexual relationship together.

Jane: To be continued in a few hours. Just kidding. Anyways, what’s our next question?

What’s your living situation like? How often do you see each other and why?

Jane: Well, we live together in the same apartment with Mabel the Pig, our pup.

shea: She’s old. And she has like six teeth.

Jane: We spend a lot of time together. We eat meals together on a regular basis. I think that was something that was instilled in me as a child — you eat meals as a family.

shea: Same.

Jane: And then it was also instilled in me that when something was broken, you stop spending as much dedicated time together.

shea: Interesting.

Jane: Yes, very interesting. And I’m not saying that is the fact, but that was what was instilled in me. That’s what I saw in my family. When we stopped having meals together, I started to see the splintering, But while working mostly from home during the past two years or so, we’ve got to spend a lot of time together. We got to have a lot of work dates.

shea: It was really interesting. Because I feel like if you were in a relationship during the pandemic during isolation, it either broke you or –

Jane: Made you.

shea: Yeah – solidified your bond. I think I enjoyed – most of the time I enjoyed being at home with you during the pandemic – getting to see you teach, moving to Vermont, and being able to go see the sunset after. Before the pandemic, we were both teaching and just didn’t have a lot of quality time with each other. And so it was almost as if we’re given this gift amongst a ton of… in a shitstorm.

Jane: But it also gave us the space to work through a lot of that stuff where if we were both teaching and we had opened our relationship, we probably would’ve wound up divorced because we weren’t forced to have tough conversations or be in uncomfortable situations. [In the pandemic], we couldn’t escape them.

shea: You woke up and the problems were still there and you couldn’t leave the house. And so it was like, “either we’re going to break up or we’re going to fight through it together.” And that’s what we did. I think more so than just partners or a married couple, we’ve been best friends for the past seven years because we started dating in Florida and got married three days after Trump. And so it was like, you were my person in Northern Florida who I felt safe around when we had Confederate flags and Trump flags going up around our neighborhood.

Jane: Yes. And I think that living situation probably when we first started dating was codependent.

shea: Absolutely.

Jane: And I mean, I think I maybe even still a little touch codependent but at the same time, we are not afraid to venture out and try new things. Like you being involved in the writing community in Columbus and the creative community, a coffee shop that you love. And that is a very separate thing that you have compared to my creative community, which I tend to maybe bring you along, but.

shea: Just because you need help putting up a tent.

Jane: No one can put up a tent by themselves or if you do, please let me know. Put a YouTube tutorial up. I’d love to learn how.

shea: So we live together but we have separate [home] offices.

Jane: Yes which is really actually great – it’s like my own little haven to go into and paint and be creative.

shea: That’s beautiful.

How do you all share expenses or work out finances? How do you share or split up labor in the relationship? Can you talk about why that is?

Jane: Everything is together. As for Finances?

shea: I think we just –

Jane: We communicate constantly about it.

Jane: We don’t do that.

shea: But we keep it together and I think that my relationship before you was very abusive, emotionally, financially, all the things.

Jane: Financially abusive. Absolutely.

shea: I think that I was really nervous about combining everything with you. I was very nervous about moving my stuff in and feeling like I had my own space and everything.

Jane: You needed to make sure you had independence because you’d never had it before. And so that was something that I think we were very intentional about. As far as splitting up labor, it’s just about who has the capacity. We discuss it. Like if you don’t have the capacity, you let me know. And then we figure it out because nothing can be 50/50 all the time. You’ve got to be able to figure out if you’re partners with someone. Sometimes you have to give 70% when they can only give 30%. Or sometimes things just don’t get done and you’ve got to accept that. But they will – when you’ve got the capacity again.

shea: And I think there’s a lot of learning and working through trying to remember not to harbor resentment when you feel like you’re doing more or you’re offering more and just communicating about it.

Jane: Yes. [You] folded a lot of laundry the past couple of days as we were getting ready to go on a big trip and I think if there was like a, “I need you to do something,” you would have told me or said, “I can only do this for this much longer and it needs to get done. Can you help me out with that?”

shea: It’s taken me a while though because I don’t like asking for help.

Jane: But there’s that safety there. That when you do ask for it, it’s well received and I thank you for telling me.

Do you have kids, pets, plants, all three? Do you not currently have, but want any of these things? Why? Are you in agreement?

Jane: We have Mabel the pig, who is a six-year-old adopted little pibble that we have. Please make sure that you spell P-I-B-B-L-E. That’s very important. Mabel is awesome. We’ve got an abundance of plants.

shea: We do. We just procured quite a few.

Jane: And your favorite plant is a tiny little cactus. No bigger than a thumb. And you’ve named it…

shea: PEENELOPE.

Jane: Like penis e, but Peenelope. Anyways, we have lots and lots of plants. No children at this moment. I think this is something where we are constantly putting our careers first and that’s okay. Because that’s what we’re choosing.

shea: Eventually, we want to adopt – we’re very adamant about adopting – school-aged kids who are older, more than one kid. Siblings because we know that they’re less likely to get adopted and –

Jane: So they can stay together is really important because familiarity is important.

shea: But I think that the last thing we talked about was not necessarily our careers, but ourselves. Basically prioritizing taking care of ourselves – physically, emotionally, mentally, all of the things before we bring children into it. Because I know myself and I know you as well. And I know that if we had children in our house we would put them first and not prioritize our own wellbeing, which is…

Jane: A newfound thing that we’ve just started to learn how to actually put ourselves first.

shea: And I do think when you have children. that’s often your responsibility – to take care of that child.

Jane: And that responsibility becomes greater than your feeling for yourself. And I don’t think either one of us is ready to say we are prepared to take care of someone else over ourselves.

shea: But I think that we would.

Jane: That’s the problem though.

shea: I think that if someone said, “Tomorrow you’re going to get children and you need to take care of them,” we would drop everything and we would take care of those children.

Jane: But that’s the problem. And I know that many parents out there will be like, “You don’t get to take care of yourself fully again until…”

shea: They’re 18 and out of the house.

Jane: I mean, but realistically how many kids really leave at 18? Either way. We’ve also decided that we want to wait because we don’t know what part of the country we’re going to be in after this. And if children have familiarity and comfort in one part of the country where we adopt them, we don’t want to move them two years later.

shea: Uproot them.

Jane: Yes. So we will wait to find out wherever you, my brilliant partner, get a tenure-track position. Fingers crossed. We don’t need fingers. You’re really brilliant. Of course, we need our fingers. Why would I say something like that?

shea: I’m just crossing my toes instead.

Jane: Yes.

shea: Do you want to talk about LilyPad?

Jane: When we met, one of our first conversations before I invited you over to the house was about LilyPad. I was like, “How are you with dogs?” And you were like, “Great.” And then I say “ I have this 60-pound pit bull. She is red-nosed. She is very cute. Her name is LilyPad.” And LilyPad comes to meet you of course, she is very skeptical the first time.

shea: It’s also 1:00 AM.

Jane: It’s very early in the morning. I usually don’t stay out very late.

shea: No. Never.

Jane: LilyPad was our first dog and she moved with us from Florida to Massachusetts, to Vermont. And two days before we were supposed to move [to Ohio], we found out she had cancer and had to be put down that day. And it was the hardest thing. We’d both lost parents. And for me, this has been the most significant loss of my life because…not significant; it’s the most painful. Because it was just absolute, pure love. There was no complication to our relationship. There wasn’t a question about whether she loved me or she loved us. She was our baby.

shea: I also didn’t grow up with pets. I mean, besides the fish that died really quickly. I think I just… Whenever we talked about kids, we would be like, “LilyPad and the kids.” I just always assumed that LilyPad would be wherever we were. And I know that’s a very naive assumption as now a person who has experienced dog loss. But it was just kind of weird. I had known LilyPad almost as long as I’d known you.

Jane: Well, and I think that also now, as we’re talking about adoption in three years, we have to be realistic that Mabel might not be around because she’s already six. She might not meet our children.

shea: And I also think that LilyPad seemed really spry and Mabel does not.

Jane: Mabel’s a little lump. Mabel’s like, “I will nap for the next three hours.” And she’s fine. Anyways, there’s our children and pets and plants.

How would you describe the sex you have together (if you have sex)? Do you believe in lesbian bed death, and has it or do you think it will visit your relationship? What haven’t you done together but want to?

Jane: So I think we talked about it earlier, we were very active.

shea: It was just…

Jane: It took over our lives. There was nothing, but, it was like, “You’re going out to dinner, sex in the car before you go.”

shea: Oh my gosh. You know what it reminded me of, remember in Twilight when Bella first gets…when they first get married and they’re like, “We haven’t seen you all in a month or whatever?” That’s what it reminds me of. Our friends were just like, “We’ll invite you, but we know you’re not going to come or you’re going to come late.”

Jane: Because we’re cumming. Sorry, not sorry. I think as we talked about before, that has shifted and we’re learning about intimacy in different ways.

shea: And I honestly think, I mean, I think that the sex feels better to me.

Jane: Because we both know.

shea: Because we know and we’re giving ourselves time to process and actually acknowledge the feelings that are good and the feelings that feel unsettling and trying to work through that. And I think that sex – it just feels good. I don’t feel as much pressure as I did early on in our relationship or before I met you to perform a certain way or to show up a certain way in sex.

Jane: And I think because of that, I don’t think we’ll ever have bed death. I do think it is real. I definitely think that there are real things that keep people uncomfortable, from having conversations or the ability of… We talked about it before, giving so much to other people. I think that one of the things that came out of our conversation is we give so much to other people that we don’t save time for ourselves or each other. And especially when it comes to intimacy and or sex. We need to make sure that we’re intentional, that we are… If, we have to get to the point that we schedule a time to have sex or we schedule a time for intimacy, we have to do that because the world doesn’t give a shit. Corporate America, capitalism doesn’t give a shit whether we want to have sex or not. The world says, “No, you need to get done what you have agreed to do for X, Y, or Z.”

shea: And I think that “bed death” could be a thing, but I don’t think it’s just lesbians.

Jane: No, I don’t either.

shea: And I think that’s something that I just want to make clear.

Jane: I think that people who are queer have a very strong self=understanding and therefore probably name it more than cishet people do.

shea: And I also think that… I agree. I think that there’s self-knowing, frankness, and clarity when it comes to queerness and sex. But I also wonder if that’s because queerness oftentimes is kind of released from the idea of having to think about sex as procreative activity.

Jane: It’s about feeling good and about making your partner feel good. Or partners.

shea: So, how would you describe the sex that we have with adjectives?

Jane: Adjective is a…

shea: Describes a —

Jane: Yes. I know what an adjective is. Damn. I mean, it’s fun. I think that depending on our mood, it’s very steamy. I think that, how do I put this into an adjective? I think it can be very royal and I think electrifying. Because whatever.

shea: Oh my gosh. Do you remember Iceland?

Jane: Oh my God. Yes.

shea: You just said electrifying. And I just thought about that.

Jane: Well, so we used to have this Hitachi wand. We do not have it anymore. This is why. It was a knockoff, Hitachi. It wasn’t real.

shea: Wait, it wasn’t real? You had a knockoff?

Jane: Well, of course, I did. Because those things are expensive.

shea: What?!

Jane: And I probably had that for a very long time.

shea: Oh that was a newer one.

Jane: Anyways. So when we were in Iceland for Christmas right before the pandemic started, we needed a… What is it called? A converter [for the Hitachi].

shea: We had the converter!

Jane: But I think that something happened when we plugged in. The converter would short-circuit, but it didn’t just short circuit in our hotel room. It was the entire floor! And so I think we probably tried two or three times to try and get it to not short circuit the floor.

shea: So we just kept changing the outlets.

Jane: And we’re like, “Maybe this time it’ll be better.” No.

shea: So basically we’re in the middle of sex and the power goes out and then obviously the vibrator stops working.

Jane: But I would call down to the front desk and I would be like, “I don’t know why, but our power is out again.”

shea: And then it turns back on. And then instead of being like, “It turned back on, we’re not in trouble. We’re good.” We’re like, “Okay. It turned back on. Let us now plug the vibrator into another outlet in Iceland, in this Icelandic hotel.”

shea: We’re not going to be allowed in Iceland anymore.

Jane: That’s fine.

shea: No, it’s not!

Jane: We’ve been twice.

shea: I know. All right. So, yes it is electrifying. You didn’t answer what haven’t you done together, but want to? Is there something that you can think of?

Jane: I can’t. Can you? I think all the things we want to do, we’ve done before.

shea: I don’t necessarily think that what I was going to say is actually something I want to do. So now I’m trying to think. No, I don’t… I don’t think there’s anything that I would like to do with you that we haven’t already done.

Do you think your relationship will more or less continue to exist as it currently is? Why?

Jane: I mean, I think we’re in a growth stage, so I think we will continue to grow together. We continue to learn about ourselves. And therefore our relationship has to evolve because we need to accommodate the new pieces of ourselves and of each other that we’re learning. But I think that we’ve done that pretty well for the past two, three, four years. Before that, I think we might have even done it together, but I think there’s been a significant jump in that learning curve since the pandemic started.

shea: I don’t ever think we said this? But we’re married. So we’ll continue doing that!

Jane: Yes – we got married three days after Trump..

shea: So we met in 2015. We got married in November 2016.

Jane: Wait, can I tell them about the proposal?

shea: Yes. Sure.

Jane: I proposed at a Valentine’s Day dance with your students who brought over roses with a little memory attached to each one. And then I came out with a white rose and the ring and I couldn’t even say anything. I just opened the box and I was like, “Will you marry me?”

shea: It was so adorable and Mariah Carey was playing. It was really cute.

What would you say are your most fundamental differences?

Jane: I think that when it comes to processing, learning, teaching – you tend to be very drawn to words, written words. While I tend to be someone who is more auditory and kinesthetic. I need to do things hands-on and I need to build something while you’re like, “let me write this beautiful piece of writing to process.” Would you agree with that?

shea: Yeah. It’s funny because when you started off with processing, I thought you were going to talk about the way that we process conflict, where you are a person who…

Jane: I need to have a conversation.

shea: You want to have an immediate conversation and talk out your feelings about what just happened. And I’m like, “I’m just going to be quiet.”

Jane: You’re like, “I need to figure out why I’m feeling the way I’m feeling.” And I think that’s probably due to the abuse that you suffered from your past partner.

shea: And actually I think part of it is when we first met. I still had a guard up and was really scared, angry, and also grieving my mom’s death. When I would get into conflicts, my tendency was to try to throw a dagger immediately to hurt the person before they could hurt me. I learned that if I don’t say anything, just sit, and try to process why I’m upset then I can better articulate how I’m feeling.

Jane: And at the same time you don’t have to hurt the person.

shea: So, I don’t just spew out hate because I’m hurt. I sit in it and then later I’m able to have a more productive and honest conversation, not just trying to think “how can I protect myself?”

Jane: And I think that wait time also has given me the same opportunity to process what I’m thinking about. I agree. I think that’s a big difference for us.

shea: You did not mention the biggest difference.

Jane: That I am white and you are black. That’s it. I mean, yes. That’s a thing.

shea: There was this one point where we were working together at the same school and…

Jane: I was substitute teaching while I was in grad school.

shea: And the kids would call us the Black Mrs. Martin and the white Mrs. Martin because that was the only difference.

Jane: At the time you hadn’t come out as non-binary and we are both round.

shea: …both teachers with the last name “Martin.” So they would just be like, “No, the other Mrs. Martin.” And I’d be like, “But what do you mean the other one? What?” And the kids would say, “The white one. The Caucasian lady.”

Jane: Oh yeah. They called me ‘the Caucasian lady.’ “Is that Caucasian lady your wife?”

shea: It was very cute. I’m going to call you Caucasian for the rest of the day.

Do you all have any shared dreams/goals for the future or each other? What are these?

Jane: I think we do have a shared dream. I just think the culmination of it is, I don’t know. We want to have space. Whether it be a school, a retreat center, some space for queer kids to be able to exist and thrive. I think we were listening to a book on tape earlier.

shea: Bitter.

Jane: But what’s the author’s name?

shea: Akwaeke Emezi.

Jane: Thank you. And this author was writing about this place.

shea: Eucalyptus.

Jane: Yes. Eucalyptus. Where kids were able to be their creative selves and hold their identities true and not be afraid. And that’s the kind of space that I want to create. We have talked about so many different iterations of what that looks like a Christmas tree farm where you can have ice skating…to a school, to a maker center, to a summer camp, to fostering kids. Just having a place where queer kids are able to be in this space that we hold because neither one of us had that as a kid. We didn’t have a place where we were fully ourselves.

shea: Well, I mean, obviously [most spaces] weren’t designed to be.

Jane: No.

shea: I agree with that shared dream. I think I just want us to thrive separately and together and figure out how to do that holistically because there’s so much in this world that doesn’t want us to do that. The setup for us not to be able to do that. And I feel like, yeah…

Jane: We’re both very creative and nurturing. And we’re both very equity centered when it comes to how we interact with other people and just to be able to have hold and become a part of a community., because I know how driven we are and I know that will be something that happens in our future.

shea: That’ll be really cool.

Jane: It will be whatever it is.

shea: Whatever it is.

Jane: Watch out.

shea: The Martins are coming for you.

What piece of pop culture do you share or what piece of pop culture reminds you of your relationship? What’s your movie or your show or your book or your song?

shea: We really liked watching Sex Education and Love, Victor. I mean, but the thing that’s like… We don’t really watch TV like that. Sometimes we do the choreographed or non-choreographed dances to Justin Bieber. Is that pop culture?

Jane: Yes. But I also think social media presence, which clearly you have a bigger social media presence than I do, but I also think that’s part of pop culture. Twitter is pop culture.

shea: Is it?

Jane: But do you think that you’re a little trendy, hipster starting something new?

shea: No. I feel like I never know about [new] things. People will be like, “Did you see so- and-so’s new outfit?” And I’m like, “I don’t know who this person is.” Or they’ll be like, “Did you hear about this show getting canceled or this song?” And I’m like, “I don’t know.”

Jane: You are a content creator. You don’t absorb other people’s stuff. I know.

shea: No, but I feel like just normal TV shows, people will live-tweet a TV show or a movie or whatever. And I’m just like, “I don’t know what that is.” And I have mostly attributed it to the fact that I am as the kids call me, “an old” or “an elder.”

Jane: I agree.

shea: I mean, I think we like Justin Bieber. We don’t really agree on which albums are better.

Jane: You like his new stuff. And I like –

shea: No, that’s not true. I like swoosh-hair, old Bieber. And you like the “Boyfriend”/”Holy” Bieber.

Jane: I like “Peaches” Bieber, but I only like his music. I don’t like his politics.

shea: His politics? Is he a politician?

Jane: Never mind. You know what I mean. The appropriation is a lot.

shea: Well, people always call you a cartoon character.

Jane: No. You call me a cartoon character.

shea: And other people have agreed with me. And I feel like maybe we are already the characters. Maybe, we are pop culture. Maybe this is all just a movie of our lives and we’re just living in it. Okay, okay – what’s our movie or show or book or song?

Jane: Well, let’s start with our song. Talk about the three wedding songs.

shea: We have three wedding songs. We couldn’t decide for a while, but we have this song that’s really special to us that came out I think right after we started dating.

Jane: We were lying in bed and we had just said our “I love yous.”

shea: We heard the song. We were like, “This is so sweet.” That ended up being our wedding song. And that is, “Like I’m Going to Lose You” by Megan Trainor and John Legend. And then two other songs that maybe I like better than that song. You also like them better.

Jane: Well, yes, now I do.

shea: So, one of the other songs was “Adorn” by Miguel.

Jane: It was just very trendy at the time we had a lack of comfort with having a song that was very common for other people to have.

shea: Yes. My favorite song of all three is one of the final tracks on an album by Corinne Bailey Rae called “High”. It’s beautiful. Now, what about our books or reading?

Jane: I love when you read me books when we go for long drives because I tend to be the driver because I like to be in control. Surprise.

shea: Oh my gosh. We’re circling back to your little, what do they call? The stars sign.

Jane: Yes. A Capricorn. Astrology. That’s what that’s called. Now movies or TV shows. I mean, when it comes to TV, I think… I don’t know.

shea: We don’t watch the same thing.

Jane: We really don’t.

shea: I watch literally the same thing over and over again. And you like to watch things that have suspense. Whether it’s the baking thing –

Jane: I do like The Great British Bake Off.

shea: But it’s not ours. This is not an interview about you.

Jane: Damn. I would tell you about all my little favorite shows.

shea: Is there a movie?

Jane: A movie.

shea: Oh my gosh. The Winnie the Pooh movie – Christopher Robin.

Jane: Oh my God, that actually is it because I am Piglet and you are Pooh Bear. shea. Always like, “Naps and honey.”

shea: First of all, I don’t eat honey like that.

Jane: I know, but for you, it’s like snacks. Snacks and naps. And I’m over here just cheering everyone on. I’m like, “Yay.”

shea: You are really cute.

Jane: I’m adorable.

shea: You are.

Jane: And I’m pink.

shea: Well, sometimes.

Jane: You are not yellow.

shea: I feel like I’m close enough. I’m also a little cuddly.

Tell us a funny story about your partner!

shea: Wait – what…I’m so scared of what you’re going to tell or just the story.

Jane: [Cackles]

Jane: I have the best story. It’s always when I come back to like something funny that’s happened in our relationship. I always come back to this. [More cackling]

shea: Why are you laughing?!

Jane: Okay – shea and I were at a conference one time and it was very early in our relationship. I don’t think we were engaged yet. Or if we were just engaged. We had had some type of argument and I had to find you. You were in the hotel room taking your time to process and we talked it out and had our moment. And then we had great makeup sex after. And I don’t know how it happened.

shea: I think I was reaching for my phone.

Jane: Yes. Well, you fell off the bed but didn’t just fall off the bed anyway. They fell off the bed in between the wall and the bed. And large people, well, we get stuck easily. So there’s shea’s naked butt. I just kept taking pictures.

shea: Because you’re an asshole.

Jane: You were just really stuck there and really –

shea: I know, but you were not helping at all.

Jane: Because I couldn’t stop laughing. I would say that’s probably one of the funniest. I mean, we laugh all the time, but that was one of the times that I just laughed at you. Imagine a little naked brown butt staring at you. It’s not a little naked brown butt, it’s sizable, two planets.

shea: Are you quoting Jason Derulo?

Jane: Absolutely.

shea: “Two planets. Ham sammich.”

Jane: No, we’re not doing that. No snacks Poo Bear. All right.

shea: I don’t know if I have a funny story.

Jane: Are you kidding? There’s a bajillion of them.

shea: And I think it’s funny because when they’re like, “Tell a funny story about Jane.” I feel like every day something funny happens. And I’m just like, “This is just a part of normal life. This is just my wonderful existence with you.” Oh, what about the first time you passed gas in front of me and you were afraid to?

Jane: Gasp!

shea: And I was like, “It’s okay. You can do it.” I tickled you so much to get it out. You were fighting it so hard. Oh my gosh. That was the day when I learned that you were weird like me.

Jane: That was the day!

shea: Well this is us. Thanks for the interview.

Jane: Thanks. I had a lot of fun. I was nervous about it, but no need. It’s just us.

shea: Great!

Jane: I love you.

shea: I love you too and thank you Mabel for your support. This has been shea wesley martin interviewing Jane Martin, as we drive across the country to Connecticut, accompanied by Mabel the Pig, in our Subaru, because we are queers.

Jane: Those kind of queers.

Interview with My Fiancee: Beth

Hello there and welcome to the third installment of Interview With My Significant Other, a new A+ series in which Autostraddle team members interview a signficiant other. Here at Autostraddle in spring of 2022, we’re in a historic era. There has never been a time in history in which more of the Autostraddle team have been in romantic relationships. So, to take advantage of this time, and so that we can all revel in the broad range of ways that queer relationships can look and be, we developed fourteen questions for our team members to answer in conversation with their significant others. We asked them how they met, to tell us their hopes for the future, about finances and sharing labor, and yes, about sex.

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How’d you meet / get together? (Include how long you knew each other before becoming romantically involved.)

Beth: So I tell the story?

Sa’iyda: You could tell the story. I feel like I always tell it, so I’m curious to hear how you tell it.

Beth: Okay. Well, first of all, I identify as a lesbian. We met online dating. There’s an app called Lex, and at the time there were no photos. I was not interested in anything serious. I’d just come out of a very long term, serious relationship and I just wanted to get back out there, meet new people, have some fun, discover more of my sexuality. And so I put an ad out there and then you responded with a like, I think?

Sa’iyda: Yeah. I don’t think I reached out.

Beth: No.

Sa’iyda: I think I just liked it. Yeah.

Beth: You just liked it. And so I was like, “All right, who is this?” And I looked at your profile and saw something about you making warm cookies. And I was like, “Oh, that’s funny and I like cookies. Who is this person?” I introduced myself and we started chatting and I asked for your Facebook.

Sa’iyda: It was my Instagram.

Beth: Oh yeah, yeah. Your Instagram. And I saw this really cute woman with this really cute kid and I figured you were his mom.

Sa’iyda: Oh, thank you.

Beth: Did you say you had a kid? No.

Sa’iyda: Yes, I did. I think I said I had a kid and that’s why I didn’t link to my Instagram through my profile. Because I feel like I like to be able to present that to people and not have them find out before they’ve gotten to talk to me.

Beth: I thought he was adorable and it didn’t at all scare me off. I kind of liked that you were a mom, actually.

Sa’iyda: Yeah?

Beth: Yeah. I did. And so we met for coffee.

Sa’iyda: Oh.

Beth: Which was a little disastrous.

Sa’iyda: That’s a nice way of putting it.

Beth: But there was definitely an attraction and we went our separate ways and then you texted me and I was very… Can I say what you said?

Sa’iyda: Yeah. You can say what I said. It’s fine.

Beth: You said something about how you wanted to see me again with less talking and more touching. And I was like, “All right.” We spent the next week just texting a lot and we finally met up and…

Sa’iyda: The rest, as they say, is history.

Beth: The rest is history. It was a very intense couple weeks.

Okay, so what are your big 3 astrological signs? How do we feel about that?

Beth: Oh, we’re really into that.

Sa’iyda: Yeah, we’re really into that. It’s true.

Beth: And very much feel like there’s something to be said about that.

Sa’iyda: Yes.

Beth: I am an Aries sun, a Scorpio moon, and Sagittarius rising. Then, Sai’s an Aries sun.

Sa’iyda: Gemini moon. Libra rising.

Beth: We checked into our love and romantic and…

Sa’iyda: And given the way Venus moves we’re both Venus in Taurus. I think it’s very indicative of who we are.

Beth: We’re both Aries.

Sa’iyda: We are both Aries suns, which is why we are doing something like this because we like to talk about ourselves.

Beth: Yes, we do.

Sa’iyda: That’s how I pitched it. I was like, “Yeah, we can totally do this because we absolutely like to talk about ourselves.” There you go.

What do you enjoy most about your relationship?

Beth: I wish I’d thought about that in advance.

Sa’iyda: No, you just got to go off the cuff, man.

Beth: We have a lot of fun. We laugh a lot and I think that fun permeates and I think if we didn’t have fun and laugh a lot, we both…we have a lot of fun. We both sing a lot. We’ll be silly and dance in the kitchen and whatnot. But I think singing in the car.

Sa’iyda: Yeah. We do have fun doing that. We like to have a good time.

Beth: And how well you can read me. It’s like there’s no hiding.

Sa’iyda: Nope. No, it’s true. Oh my God, because you like to pretend that you’re just such an enigmatic creature and you’re so hard to figure out and I’m like, “Ma’am, you are not.”

Beth: Yes.

Sa’iyda: You just have to know. You just have to know the way around you.

Beth: What’s your favorite part about our relationship?

Sa’iyda: I love that we let each other be ourselves, even though we might give the other some good natured ribbing about it. Okay, at least that’s me. I call you a snob all the time, but—

Beth: I have good taste.

Sa’iyda: You’re a snob. It’s fine. But I think that we knew exactly who we were coming into this relationship as individuals. You knew who you were and I knew who I was and we presented that and we accepted each other. We’ve never tried to make each other into who we wanted each other to be, because we know that, one, we’re too old. And two, we don’t want that. We genuinely like each other for who we are and so there’s no need to try to switch each other up.

Beth: Yeah.

Sa’iyda: I think that’s a big one.

What hurdles or obstacles have you overcome together in your relationship? These can be within your relationship, or things that you’ve faced together.

Beth: I’d say lockdown.

Sa’iyda: Yeah.

Beth: During lockdown. I lost my job so I couldn’t keep my apartment and we’d been planning on moving in together anyway, but that really escalated it.

Sa’iyda: It moved it up significantly.

Beth: Right. And so I moved into an existing space that was admittedly very small. It was a tight squeeze, and so learning how to navigate that space and the personalities of a 6-year-old at the time…the two of us, who were really well bonded at the time, but…

Sa’iyda: Yeah. Still learning each other.

Beth: Right. And it was about eight months of not leaving that space, and that was very challenging.

Sa’iyda: That was really difficult. And when you’re still trying to get to know each other and you have nowhere to go when that’s not going well, I think it really was a make or break situation

Beth: There was no personal space and that was hard.

Sa’iyda: Yeah. There was nowhere to go. But I think also it was trying to figure out the dynamics of our relationship too. I think that was a hurdle we had to overcome together and apart, because like I was saying before, we know who we are as individuals so well, but we’re very different. Inherently as people, we are very different. And so it was trying to figure out how to compromise but not lose our senses of self, I think, has been the biggest challenge. And I think it still comes up. I don’t think it’s something that we’ve solved, but I think we’ve learned better now how to navigate it. But just how do we move past the things that are important to us as individuals, if it’s not important to the other?

Beth: Yeah.

Sa’iyda: Your theoretical love of the outdoors and my theoretical love of sitting inside with a good book or TV. How do we make those two things work? Because you’re not a country mouse, you’re a city mouse who likes being outside. And I’m a city mouse who very much likes being in the city. That was a huge hurdle that we’ve had to overcome and we’re still trying to overcome. And my love of all things pop culture and mainstream and your utter disdain for it because you’re a little bit of a snob, but…

Beth: I have good taste.

Sa’iyda: You’re a little bit of a snob.

Beth: Well, we both love theater. We both love music, but they don’t always align.

Sa’iyda: Right.

Beth: I love musicals, but you love musicals, and then I like regular plays.

Sa’iyda: Well, I mean, I like regular plays, but I have to see them. I can’t read them. They’re harder to see. Musicals I can listen to. It’s easier for me to attach to something if I can listen to it.

Beth: Right. I guess that’s not a thing.

Sa’iyda: No, but I think that’s valid because that is a good, tangible, difference or my love of ’90s pop music and your utter disdain. But you are at the very least trying to understand which I appreciate.

Beth: I now recognize all the voices of One Direction.

Sa’iyda: I’m very proud of you.

Beth: And I am accepting that it’s okay to know these things.

Sa’iyda: I mean, it’s not like it’s something you need to put on a resume unless it was going to get you a job, I guess. You found appreciation for Harry Styles and Taylor Swift. You’re welcome.

Beth: Yeah. That’s true. I didn’t know who Harry Styles was, though, because I’d never listened to One Direction. But I quite appreciate him, love Taylor Swift. It’s very surprising to me.

Sa’iyda: You’re welcome.

Beth: You said I’m a snob. You might be a little right.

Sa’iyda: I know I am. Thank you.

Where do you locate your relationship on the monogamy / polyamory spectrum? What philosophies do you have around how you handle monogamy / polyamory? How do you feel this impacts your relationship?

Beth: We’re both monogamous and in a monogamous relationship. I think we both accept that other people are poly and live in poly relationships. We’re not people who don’t believe in it. We’re just not that. We both will say when somebody’s attractive.

Sa’iyda: Yeah. I can’t imagine wanting to. Like I’ve said, it’s so hard to break one person in. I can’t imagine having to do it more than once.

Beth: Oh, you’re funny.

Sa’iyda: Listen, I got you the way I like you. I don’t want to have to do it again. Yeah. I think it’s all good.

What’s your living situation like (together, separate, long distance with long visits, something else), how often do you see each other and why?

Sa’iyda: We’re together all the time.

Beth: We are. It’s very hard to take time away from each other because we both work from home, and we don’t have room for offices.

Sa’iyda: Right.

Beth: The couch or nearby table in the same room is our office. We’re together 24/7. And sometimes I know it’s important to get away, especially for me. I like having time and alone time. Sometimes I just want to go into the bedroom and just close the door and chill or go outside for a walk. And now that we have a dog that’s easier, but yeah, there’s, again, not really personal space.

Sa’iyda: Yeah, I mean, that kind of happens. And also, thanks to COVID we were forced together for so long that now I think we’re finally feeling like we can begin to separate a little bit, but I genuinely really enjoy being around you.

Beth: Thanks.

Sa’iyda: It’s a lot sometimes, but I think that’s just because I spend so much time at home working. I feel like even though we’re in the same room, I’m not actually paying attention to you most of the time.

Beth: Right, right.

Sa’iyda: And we’re sitting next to each other, but we’re not necessarily paying attention to each other.

Beth: Right. When we have the opportunity to go out, which isn’t very often because we have a kid, but if there’s an opportunity, it’s really… We feel like we never get to do that, and it’s very exciting, even though we’re together all the time, like you said, we get to see each other in a different life. It’s not just sweatpants, but if we dress up and go out, it’s a really great opportunity.

Sa’iyda: Yeah. And I mean, also, I think just for me, I like the time that we spend actively paying attention to each other at night, after Jackson’s gone to bed and we sit on the couch and watch whatever we’re going to watch. It’s weird for two people who are literally together all day to still want to be together. But it feels like so much of our time before 9:00, 9:30 at night is not our own, even if we’re operating in the same space.

Beth: Yeah.

Sa’iyda: It’s like, oh, here’s a few hours that we’re actively being attentive to each other.

Beth: That’s true. I remember my last relationship, we had completely different schedules. She would go to work really early in the morning and come back around 4:00 and I would go to work around 9:00, 9:30 and come back anywhere between 7:00 and 10 o’clock at night. Our schedules didn’t align and we hardly ever saw each other. I’m enjoying this.

Sa’iyda: Yeah, me too. That’s how my previous relationship was too. We parallel played, I like to say, which is weird for two adults in a relationship. Yeah. I like us being able to have some active time together, even if it is just sitting on the couch and watching “Say Yes to the Dress” or whatever show we’re watching at the time.

Beth: Again, something that you’ve gotten me into.

Sa’iyda: Well, we are also engaged, Beth. And have been for most of our relationship. Just saying. Just putting it out there.

How do you all share expenses or work out finances? How do you share or split up labor in the relationship? Can you talk about why that is?

Sa’iyda: I guess I’ll take the lead on this one. Do you want me to?

Beth: Sure.

Sa’iyda: I take on the bulk of the finances just because I’m the one with the weirdly steadier job considering that I’m a contract writer. I just have steadier sources of income. And so most of the bills get paid out of my money. I pay the rent and I pay most of the groceries and internet, gas, whatever, most of that. I pay the bulk of it. But you do financially contribute. It’s not like you don’t. But given your job in casting, which is weird, because it’s basically freelance.

Beth: It is. It’s very much freelance.

Sa’iyda: You still financially contribute. It’s not that you don’t

Beth: Yeah. And in terms of stuff around the house or duties around the house, a big part of the responsibility is the child and I’ve followed your lead on that because you’ve been a single mom for so long. But during COVID that started to shift. As you were working, I took on the bulk of responsibility over Jackson in terms of making sure that he was occupied. We would play together. I would supervise him during his online school at home and then when there was no school, I was taking him to the park daily. And that time together, that was before we had even been together a year. That time together really bonded us. And very quickly I stepped into the role of stepmom because he let me.

Sa’iyda: Yeah.

Beth: But in terms of day to day, you cook, I clean the dishes.

Sa’iyda: Yeah. You take out the garbage.

Beth: Yeah, like a good butch.

Sa’iyda: You handle the pets.

Beth: Yes. We have three pets.

Sa’iyda: We split the laundry; neither of us likes to fold it. We have Mount Laundry, which we affectionately call it.

Beth: But we at least have clean clothes.

Sa’iyda: Yeah, and we tag team when we clean the house. I’ll sweep and then you mop, and I’ll clean the bathrooms and…

Beth: I’ll clean the kitchen.

Sa’iyda: You’ll organize the table. Then it becomes chaos again, but you will organize it.

Beth: We do our best.

Sa’iyda: I think our division of labor feels fairly consistent. We’ve split picking up and dropping off the boy at school. I mean, I did have to ask for that, but…

Beth: You kept saying you liked it.

Sa’iyda: I did, but I was also very tired. I realized that you weren’t going to read my mind until I asked for what I needed.

Beth: That’s important. Yeah.

Do you have kids, pets, plants, all three? Do you not currently have, but want any of these things? Why? Are you in agreement?

Sa’iyda: I think we’ve talked pretty extensively about the kid. He’s mine from a previous relationship. He is eight and a half. It’s very important. But I think in the two years since we started dating, he has become yours too. He’s wonderful and hilarious and brilliant and a total pain in the ass and that’s why we love him.

Beth: Yeah, so much. And he gives us so much love.

Sa’iyda: Yes. We’re at about 90% mutual agreement that he will remain an only child, but we’re not entirely closing that door.

Beth: No, that was a big conversation because I had always wanted to be a parent from the beginning, I guess you could say. And it took me a while to realize that I’m already a parent and I don’t need anything else. That’s been a difficult transition, but I think it’s a really good one.

Sa’iyda: Yeah. I mean, and like I said, we’re not entirely closing the door just yet, but there’s a lot of factors as to why we feel that way. It’s the financial end of things, because two uteruses can’t make a baby, unfortunately. That’s a thing.

Beth: Also I think the stage that we are in life. That’s really important.

Sa’iyda: I know. I jokingly say I don’t want to have a toddler, a teenager and a menopausal or perimenopausal spouse. It’s a lot of hormones coursing through this house, but… Yeah, I think we know what we want out of the next part of our life. And so that’s been a big part of it. We also have three pets.

Beth: I came in with two cats and together we got an adorable puppy. There’s a lot of personalities in this place. We’ve got the three humans and the three animals’ personalities, and somehow we manage it. We make it all work.

Sa’iyda: I never thought that I would settle down with a cat lesbian being a dog lesbian myself, but…

Beth: And vice versa.

Sa’iyda: Crazier things have happened. And now I love those furballs.

Beth: And that puppy is…

Sa’iyda: He’s adorable. Lots of poop. Forgot about that part. And I don’t know about plants. I kill things. I kill plants. Give me a human, I’ll keep it alive. Give me a plant, it’ll last a week.

Beth: If we had better light, I’d turn the balcony into a succulent heaven. That’s what I would do.

How would you describe the sex you have together (if you have sex)? Do you believe in lesbian bed death, and has it or do you think it will visit your relationship? What haven’t you done together but want to?

Beth: We are extremely sexually compatible.

Sa’iyda: We are. Yes.

Beth: Our relationship started as a non-relationship. But there was a lot of…somebody once described us as fucking and processing.

Sa’iyda: Yes. Yes.

Beth: And I think sex is very important in a relationship, and evidenced by our relationship that when we’re busy with life and maybe feeling a little bit distant from each other or haven’t been as connected as we have been before, sex is an opportunity for us to connect and in a very intimate and powerful way. And I think that always brings us back to ourselves and to each other.

Sa’iyda: I mean, when your relationship starts out as a sexual relationship that turns into something more, I think it’s always going to be a fundamental part of the relationship and I think we can both see the holes in our relationship when for whatever reasons we haven’t been having as much sex as we would like to have. I think that given your medications and stuff like that, sometimes you’re just… It’s not that you don’t want to, you just don’t initiate. And so I just will be the one who does after a while.

Beth: Yeah. But also in terms of lesbian bed death, I think it’s absolutely a thing, but I don’t think we should call it lesbian bed death. I think in long-term relationships, sex changes. Libidos change. And that’s something that can be hard to adjust to. But as long as you communicate about it, then I think you can get through anything.

Sa’iyda: Yeah. Is there anything that we haven’t tried yet that you want to? I feel like we’ve tried quite a lot.

Beth: Oh no. We’ve tried a lot.

Sa’iyda: I can’t think of anything.

Beth: I can’t think of anything either, but if something were to come up, we would probably try it.

Sa’iyda: It’s true. I would. I mean, I think there’s things that I’d like to get back to.

Beth: Oh really? There’s stuff you’d like to come back to?

Sa’iyda: Well, I just think for reasons we’ve gotten very used to our sex routine.

Beth: Yes.

Sa’iyda: We’ve got a whole drawer full of sex toys.

Beth: I was thinking about that the other day. I would like to get back to that. I think also you get into the routine because there isn’t a lot of time, and we know each other so well that know that—

Sa’iyda: We can hit the greatest hits and then go to bed.

Beth: Yeah. And we don’t have a lot of time where there isn’t a child around. We don’t really have the opportunity to take a lot of time.

Sa’iyda: Right. Morning sex is really not an option because usually we’re woken up by a wiggly creature who’s like, “Mom, Aren’t you going to get up?” We don’t want to scar the boy.

Do you think your relationship will more or less continue to exist as it currently is? Why?

Beth: I think so. We feel like an old married couple, but I think as we do more, we have more adventures together, we get outside more, maybe we do a little bit of traveling and that will just bond even further, because we’ll have more shared experiences.

Sa’iyda: I think as we have more time together, I think we’ll start to find those things that we like to do without each other. You’re wanting to start hiking with our neighbor friend and I want to go back to yoga and things that we couldn’t do, obviously, because of the pandemic that now we have the opportunity to do. I think that will also bond us because we’ll have the opportunity to miss each other.

Beth: And we’ll have things to tell each other that are different. Like going to dinner or coming together for dinner after you’ve made it, and I’m about to clean it up and saying things like, “So, how was your day?” When I was there the entire time.

Sa’iyda: The entire time, yeah.

Beth: We’ll have stories to tell each other, we’ll miss each other. We’ll think about each other while we’re doing these things. And I think having alone time is really important to a relationship.

Sa’iyda: I mean, yeah. I don’t think our relationship is going to change drastically. The seeds I think we’ve planted will grow a little bit stronger.

Beth: And we have a very strong foundation. I’m excited to see where we go from here.

What would you say are your most fundamental differences?

Beth: They seem superficial, but they’re very important. I would say that our core values are the same and our worldview is the same.

Sa’iyda: Right. That’s not the question.

Beth: No, but that’s important. Our difference is I like to travel and adventure and all things worldly and you like to stay home. Or even if we were to do some adventures, what we would want to do on those trips are different.

Sa’iyda: Right. Yeah.

Beth: And that can be very hard.

Sa’iyda: Yeah. I think that’s the better way to explain it because it’s not that I don’t like to travel, it’s that I’ve never really had the opportunity to.

Beth: That’s true. We want to go to Italy for our honeymoon and I think we’re going to have a blast and other places that I’d like to go to, I just don’t know if you’d have fun.

Sa’iyda: Yeah, I don’t know.

Beth: That, and the pop culture thing, I grew up really not liking it. It wasn’t aesthetically, or whatever the word is, auditorily pleasing to me. And I’ve had to learn to respect or deal with it because it’s on all the time in the apartment.

Sa’iyda: Respect sounds like a good word to use there.

Beth: Right. I don’t have to like it, but you do and, I mean, I love you. It’s not that I like what you like.

Sa’iyda: No.

Beth: What do you think our differences are?

Sa’iyda: I mean, yeah. I think the biggest thing to me is just our actual likes and dislikes are very different. Otherwise, I don’t really think that we have too many, but I think our likes and dislikes are different and are so vastly different that on paper we may not look like we work. But at the same time we do, because sometimes for us, it’s asterisks next to some of those things. It’s like we both like theater, but you tend to like more straight plays and I tend to like musicals or…

Beth: We both like movies.

Sa’iyda: Right. But we like different kinds of movies. You spent a New Year’s Eve watching Holocaust documentaries and—

Beth: I was very depressed, to be fair.

Sa’iyda: Either way, that’s the exact opposite of what I would do when I was depressed. If I was depressed, I would watch “Legally Blonde” or something.

Beth: Right. I like dramas and you like comedies, but even then you like drama and I like comedies, but we just like different kinds. Deciding on something can be difficult.

Sa’iyda: Yeah. But I think we do a good job.

Beth: There’s a lot of compromise and that can be hard when we feel like we’re compromising all the time. To meet somewhere in the middle. But as long as we leave space for us to enjoy the things that we enjoy on an individual level.

Sa’iyda: Because there are times where you’ll decide that you want to watch something that I don’t want to watch and you’ll watch it on your laptop or… I don’t know, but…

Beth: But you’ve also started watching some shows that I’m inclined to, and that you wouldn’t have.

Sa’iyda: Yeah, that I wouldn’t have watched. Sometimes I watch them from behind my fingers, but I still enjoy them. Yeah. And I am a creature of habit and I think I’ve turned you on to some of my habitual things. But sometimes we’ll just pick something out and be like, “Oh, I don’t know how we’ll enjoy this,” but then we end up either enjoying it or not.

Do you all have any shared dreams/goals for the future or each other? What are these?

Beth: I think that we both have artistic goals that are very compatible and can and are intertwined. I’m making a documentary film and you—you’re gesturing for me to continue.

Sa’iyda: Continue.

Beth: I’m making a documentary film about how queer women find connection or community and identity through representation on television. And it’s something I’ve been working on for a number of years. And you’ve come on board as a co-writer, being a writer yourself, who can read into my mind and know…

Sa’iyda: What you’re trying to say.

Beth: You have just elevated the project.

Sa’iyda: Thank you.

Beth: You’re welcome. And you being a writer and very much wanting to be a young adult writer.

Sa’iyda: Yes. One day I’ll finish that book. One day I’ll start it over again.

Beth: You will. You will.

Sa’iyda: And I think we have talked about… Because we both have theater backgrounds and I think it’s about time that maybe we put that money to good use. We’ve talked about potentially a theater company. You had your acting studio and expanding that maybe one day in the future and directing. I still have my dreams about the truly queer production of “Company” that I would absolutely love to do one day.

Beth: And I’m so on board. I absolutely see us as a family working on theatrical projects together.

Sa’iyda: I think the sky’s the limit for us, which is very exciting. It’s nice to be with someone—artistically and creatively—which translates into our dreams and goals for the future, that we’re so aligned and always have been.

What piece of pop culture do you share or what piece of pop culture reminds you of your relationship? What’s your movie or your show or your book or your song?

Beth: Oh boy, this is a big issue in our relationship.

Sa’iyda: I don’t think it’s an issue.

Beth: But I don’t like pop culture.

Sa’iyda: But we consume TV together.

Beth: Yeah. That’s true.

Sa’iyda: We consume movies and music together. There has to be something.

Beth: No, that’s true. I think music is a big part of… What was the question?

Sa’iyda: What piece of pop culture do we share or what reminds you of our relationship?

Beth: There are songs, like when we first got together, you made me playlists. You made me a mixtape.

Sa’iyda: I did. I wooed you with a mix tape, it’s true.

Beth: Yes, exactly. And I wooed you with music. I found out that you liked Taylor Swift, so I took out my ukulele and very poorly sang to you.

Sa’iyda: You did. You sent me that video of you brushing your teeth to Welcome to New York.

Beth: That’s right. That’s right.

Sa’iyda: Which I thought was very sweet.

Beth: There are numerous songs that could be “our song.”

Sa’iyda: Yeah. I think there’s different things to different phases.

Beth: There are, as you said, different points of our relationship. For instance Halsey’s…what’s it called?

Sa’iyda: Beautiful Stranger.

Beth: Halsey’s Beautiful Stranger was absolutely the beginning of a relationship. And from there, I think the next one…there are two for me, at least.

Sa’iyda: Okay.

Beth: One is Lover by Taylor Swift and the other one is Mirrorball by Taylor Swift.

Sa’iyda: You sense a theme here?

Beth: Yes. See what you did?

Sa’iyda: I did. I did. I think for me, yes, those and also it’s really hokey, but the song My Girl by the Temptations. I think for me, that was huge…it was the weird song that happened to come on a playlist I was listening to and I was like, “Oh, that’s what the love songs are all about. Her.”

Beth: Oh.

Tell us a funny story about your partner!

Beth: Oh Lord.

Sa’iyda: You go first and then I will come up with one.

Beth: Funny story about you. There’s so many.

Sa’iyda: Pick the least embarrassing one.

Beth: I feel like these little things are popping into my head, but…

Sa’iyda: Yeah. There’s moments, but I don’t think it’s a full story. I don’t think there’s a beginning, middle and an end to it.

Beth: I mean, I’ve fallen a lot. You’ve gotten some good pratfalls out of me.

Sa’iyda: Yeah. There was one time where you fell, not the time you got the bruise because that was painful, but there was one time you…oh! Bowser’s castle.

Beth: Oh, Bowser’s castle.

Sa’iyda: That is a funny story.

Beth: This is a good funny story. For both of us.

Sa’iyda: Yes. I think we could wrap it into one story. Our son is very into LEGO Super Mario. And so it was his COVID activity, I guess, or one of his COVID activities.

Beth: And the bane of my existence.

Sa’iyda: Yeah. For Christmas 2020, we had gotten him Bowser’s castle, which was the big centerpiece of that first set of things that came out. And we had spent most of Christmas day putting it together.

Beth: And it was very emotional.

Sa’iyda: It was very emotional. Well, also because the instructions are on an app, and so that was tricky. And then Jackson poured all of the LEGOs out of the bags, even though you’re supposed to go bag by bag. That was very tricky. But eventually we did it and we were very, very proud of ourselves. And then Beth doesn’t pick up her feet when she walks.

Beth: Nope. It’s a problem.

Sa’iyda: It’s a problem. And she stepped and didn’t pay attention where she’s going and her foot came up in the rear and just decimated Bowser’s castle.

Beth: It was horrible.

Sa’iyda: It was. Pieces were just in bits and shambles and Jackson looked at her and looked at me and was like, “This better be fixed by the time I wake up in the morning, because it’s bedtime.” And we were like…

Beth: Yes, sir.

Sa’iyda: Duly noted. We broke out his tiny Thomas table that he was using for school, his Thomas the tank engine table. And we set out with the app in hand to try to put Bowser’s castle back together. It was Christmas 2020, so we put on “Bridgerton” in the background, season one, to try to keep us awake and…

Beth: 2:00 in the morning.

Sa’iyda: No, I think it was later than 2:00.

Beth: Was it 3:00?

Sa’iyda: It might have been 3:00. It might have even been 4:00. It was pretty late. I think we watched almost all of “Bridgerton,” if not all of “Bridgerton.”

Beth: Yeah, and we still didn’t finish.

Sa’iyda: No.

Beth: We couldn’t figure it out. And so I was like, “Oh no, Jackson’s going to be very upset.” He gave us very clear instructions.

Sa’iyda: Yeah. You don’t mess with the seven year old who tells you, “This better be fixed.”

Beth: But when he woke up, he just quietly finished it, and thank God there was no additional drama.

Sa’iyda: That’s true. Well, that’s our interview. That was fun.

Beth: I love you.

Sa’iyda: I love you too.

Interview With My Girlfriend: Amanda

Hello there and welcome to the second installment of Interview With My Significant Other, a new A+ series in which Autostraddle team members interview a signficiant other. Here at Autostraddle in spring of 2022, we’re in a historic era. There has never been a time in history in which more of the Autostraddle team have been in romantic relationships. So, to take advantage of this time, and so that we can all revel in the broad range of ways that queer relationships can look and be, we developed fourteen questions for our team members to answer in conversation with their significant others. We asked them how they met, to tell us their hopes for the future, about finances and sharing labor, and yes, about sex.

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Hello it’s me, Laneia, to say that this is an incredibly long interview (9k+ words, sorry we are verbose??). Are you in line at a coffee shop? Save this for later. Are you seated comfortably with snacks and nothing to do? Read on. We also made you this little soundtrack of what it sounded like to be us for the last two and half years which, if you hit play now, will probably end around the same time you’ve finished this article. SERVICE, BABY.

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How’d you meet / get together? (Include how long you knew each other before becoming romantically involved.)

Amanda: I put an ad on Lex that was successful on Tinder first.

Laneia: Oh, I have not heard this part.

Amanda: I was at the point where I was like, I don’t give a fuck anymore. I’m just gonna be really explicit about not looking for a relationship. So I wrote a bio on Tinder that I thought was perfect. Explicit, also funny and charming.

Laneia: Uh-huh, and humble.

Amanda: And humble, right. But people on Tinder won’t talk to me first. I don’t know if it’s because they can see my picture? They’re like, “We’ll match, but you have to say something.”

Laneia: The vibe on Lex is very much like, “You come out with your ad first and then if I like it, I’ll respond to it. I’m not putting up an ad though.” Very wait-and-see.

Amanda: So I put it on Lex and I got a few messages, but I didn’t reply to the people who didn’t link their Instagram accounts. Then I went back to Lex a few weeks later, to read the ads, and I found yours and I was immediately like, “[EYES EMOJI]” That was the only one I responded to.

Laneia: In a twist, though…

Amanda: In a twist of fate, I realized that you had actually been one of the people that messaged me before! I was like Oh no, now I want this, but I’ve already ignored this person. So I think I said something like, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. My bad,” whatever. But like, your Instagram account wasn’t linked, I don’t know who you are!

Laneia: Also my first message to you was so earnest! I was trying to say that I thought we were after the same thing, but it definitely didn’t come off as cool as that.

Amanda: It was extremely fraught. It was like, “Hmm! Very interested! But like! Not if you’re not and like, okay, bye!” When I read it now it totally sounds like you, in a little panicky state. But at the time it just sounded like a LinkedIn message. Like, “Hey, hoping we can connect!”

Laneia: Exactly. God.

Amanda: Meanwhile, my ad was like, “We’re gonna have sex.”

Laneia: “We’re gonna go to Target.”

Amanda: “We’re gonna go to Target!”

Laneia: “And then I am taking you home, don’t get it twisted!”

Amanda: It was Christmastime, and we made plans for the 28th to meet at an underground bar, a speakeasy and… that was it, done deal. We were there for hours.

Laneia: I did not wanna talk about anything real and you were like, “So what’s going on? Why do you only have like four pictures on Instagram?” I wasn’t gonna talk about my kids. I wasn’t gonna talk about the divorce. I wasn’t gonna talk about any of that shit. I just wanted to hang out with you, simple drinks.

Amanda: Oh no, that was never gonna happen with me.

Laneia: No, it was never an option. And you had a lot of dating stories to tell which, I think you were trying to give me something to look forward to?

Amanda: Right. Cause it was like, I was in the middle school of divorce and you were in the elementary school of divorce. I just wanted you to know that it is possible to date when you’re in your mid thirties and you’re gay in Arizona, and it doesn’t suck. And then we made eye contact— you bring this up all the time, that we made eye contact in the mirror at the back of the bar.

Laneia: Oh god I was like, to myself, Donnnn’t fucking do that. Do not have that thought. Don’t have that feeling, whatever the fuck THAT was.

Amanda: Well our conversation was so easy, and I felt like we were attracted to each other. We walked out, we were walking like arm-in-arm, ’cause you were so cold. I drove you home, I put the car in park, I took my seatbelt off. I’m thinking we’re at least gonna — we’re gonna put our mouths on each other. And then I’ve never seen somebody get outta my car that fast. I mean, I thought my seatbelt was off fast. You were basically hanging out of the car while it was moving.

Laneia: I could’ve cracked the passenger side window trying to sling that seatbelt off and run away.

Amanda: And I was like, I mean, I was truly stunned, but I was also thinking, She’s got a kid in there, it’s probably 1:30 in the morning. I messaged you on Instagram when I got home and said something like, “I’m not sure if I got things wrong, it seemed like you were into it and then you ran away,” or whatever and—

Laneia: I was so grateful you messaged. I don’t think I ever would have, I was so embarrassed.

Amanda: Well I knew what you felt, to be freshly divorced and not really sure of what to do. And it was probably overwhelming. Like I cracked you open a little bit.

Laneia: Yeah I was just terrified. And then how long did we know each other before becoming romantically involved?

Amanda: The next time we saw each other, a few days later. You came to my house and you brought a nice bottle of whiskey. I remember being at work and getting the message on Instagram that you were like—

Laneia: It was probably very horny.

Amanda: Oh it was. I mean, it stopped me in my tracks at work when I read it.

Amanda: And that’s exactly what happened. Did we play Bananagrams? I think we did.

Laneia: We did, yeah.

Amanda: I think you won.

Laneia: You let me win.

Amanda: Well you were a guest in my home! So yeah, we definitely had sex.

Laneia: We definitely had a lot of sex. I fell off the bed nearly! And you didn’t even laugh at me.

Amanda: Why would I laugh at you?? I think when you know somebody long enough, you can. Like, now that would be funny. And we had a moment then, too, where we—

Laneia: Oh my God, you—

Amanda: [Laughing] Can I bring that up?

Laneia: So the thing is! [Laughing] Um, you were on top of me and our eyes locked.

Amanda: Yep.

Laneia: And I, I can’t even explain what happened.

Amanda: We saw, like, all the way down.

Laneia: It felt like I saw everything, yeah — everything that we had ever been, and ever would be — in like, a second.

Amanda: And there was nowhere to go.

Laneia: No. We were having sex with the lights on! I couldn’t — and I hadn’t had sex with the lights on in years at that point — and like, it was, I mean, it was terrifying.

Amanda: Yeah. When I think about it now and all the things I know about you, I was… I was a lot.

Laneia: You were a lot! And I was trying so hard not to have any feelings, at all. ‘Cause it was, well, I didn’t trust myself yet!

Amanda: I was like, here’s somebody that’s intellectually on my level, who’s sexually on my level. And it was the first time I dated someone like, even in their thirties—

Laneia: [Laughing] —I was gonna say, close to your age??

Amanda: [Laughing] Within a few years.

Laneia: Like we had the same graduation songs. You’d never really had that experience before.

Amanda: [Laughing] —OhhhhKAY! [Laughing] Um but yeah, if I think about it now? How much that was for you? Like, if you were telling me this now about another person, I’d be like, “Ok that? Is too much!”
But it felt like you trusted me a lot.

Laneia: I did yeah. But god, it was overwhelming. It was so overwhelming.

Amanda: I don’t… Those things don’t scare me.

Laneia: They scare the shit out of me!

Okay, so what are your big 3 astrological signs? How do we feel about that?

Amanda: I’m an Aries sun, a Capricorn moon, and a Capricorn rising. So my feet are firmly on the ground at all times, and then I just have passion about that. I’m really passionate about staying grounded.

Laneia: I’m an Aquarius sun and rising, and my moon is Aries. And I think that means I’m fine. No notes.

Amanda: I like that I recognize some of the ways that your emotional reactions are like, that’s how I would feel.

Laneia: If you didn’t have these Capricorn bumpers slowing you down.

Amanda: Yeah ’cause you’ll go there. You’ll go to that level.

Laneia: I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Amanda: You’re definitely up, floating around. You’re having all of your thoughts and all of your little scenarios all the time. And I noticed this very early on, you’re extremely whimsical.

Laneia: You’re the only person who’s ever said that to me.

Amanda: You’ll go flying out into the ether about some things and it’s like, “Okay let’s get you back down here with us,” but then you also have these thoughts that are like, where the fuck would you even come up with something like that? You sent me a text once that was like, something about a salamander and cupcakes. It was very Aquarius energy. I’ve never really known an air sign as intimately as I know you.

Laneia: Oh—

Amanda: I know.

Laneia: —I really like being known.

Amanda: Mmhmm, and there’s a lot to know there.

Laneia: You know you have to have a solid sense of whimsy yourself to be able to appreciate mine as much as you do.

Amanda: That is what people say about me.

Laneia: [Laughing]

Amanda: The sense of whimsy? Solid. Unbreakable sense of whimsy on that one.

What do you enjoy most about your relationship?

Amanda: Oh you’re easily the most intellectually stimulating person that I’ve ever been with. I feel like we are on the same level. Even things that you’re smarter about than I am — I obviously love that.

Laneia: Right, same. Yeah I want you to tell me everything you know.

Amanda: We’re both just really big fans of each other. And then we also have incredible sex. I think it would be one thing to have all that intellectual stimulation — the ability to have conversation, deep conversations, all the time — but sometimes that means giving up the other part, you know? I just think we keep that balance really well. And we’re interested in this, in us — we’re not interested in wasting time trying to have the upper hand.

Laneia: Yeah there isn’t any ego here.

Amanda: And we have a lot of hard conversations, which I also really appreciate. The whole thing is, I mean, it’s the best relationship I think I’ve ever been in. It’s the healthiest.

Laneia: [WATERY EYE EMOJI] Oh !

Amanda: [Laughing] Do you not agree?

Laneia: I do! I just don’t think you’ve ever said that!

Amanda: Well! We’ve never interviewed each other about it! I’ve told other people that.

Laneia: Although this is a very lesbian thing to do. It’s kinda shocking that we haven’t done this before without needing it for content. This relationship does feel like the healthiest and most… It’s the most honest thing. Um, it might be the most honest thing I’ve ever done, actually.

Amanda: Intentional, also. That was a big thing for us, in the beginning. We said the word intentional a lot.

Laneia: Like in the word cloud of our first year, the biggest one was for sure INTENTIONAL.

Amanda: And then PANDEMIC. It also feels like there’s nothing that happens that we can’t talk through.

Laneia: Oh yeah, no.

Amanda: And you’re beautiful. I like never getting tired of that, you know?

Laneia: !!!

Amanda: It’s never like, “Oh, there she is again.” You know how you get used to how someone looks all the time?

Laneia: Yeah, I don’t feel used to how you look — it’s always still, like when you come to my front door? You know how you think you’re gonna be ready for it? I’m like, “Oh my God, look at you! Did you see yourself on the way up that sidewalk? Jesus!”

Amanda: Oh yeah. You tell me all the time to look at my cute face.

Amanda: Look at your cute face!

Amanda: And I have to stop what I’m doing, go to the mirror—

Laneia: Listen, when I give an order—

Amanda: Trixie salute.¹

Laneia: Trixie salute! You also have opinions that I trust and want to hear. Like generally speaking I actually don’t want other people’s opinions on things—

Amanda: [Laughing]

Laneia: But I do from you! I feel like we see the world on the same level, but from different angles. Like I wanna know what you saw so that I can get a better picture of the whole thing — your take on a situation helps me understand it better, pretty much every single time.

Amanda: You’re good about that too, with me. I’m not used to people expressing their opinion and not having it be this passive-aggressive way of saying that this is what they think I should be doing. So much of my other relationships have been that way, where it’s about people trying to change each other. It’s almost like you’re leading someone somewhere every time you give your own opinion, and I really don’t like that.

Laneia: Yeah.

Amanda: I think that happens when people feel like they can’t say what they really want. And in this relationship, especially, you’ve been so good about being open to hearing what I want and like actually hearing what I want, even if it’s not what you want. I remember the first few times I called you to cancel plans and I was like, sobbing. Because I didn’t wanna disappoint you, and I was so used to my needs being secondary in other relationships. I wanted to be everything you wanted me to be. And you’ve said to me many times that you don’t want me to be any kind of way.

Laneia: Right.

Amanda: And that if I need something just to ask for it. That permission, and without punishment, has been huge for me. You saying that means the world to me. Because I do want to be the kind of person that’s able to say what I need, without apologizing, or feeling like an inconvenience.

Laneia: The only way that you could disappoint me is if you weren’t true to yourself, like that would be devastating.

Amanda: I think being divorced has really helped me, in that it set me free to be who I want to be. So by the time that I met you, I felt like this is exactly who I want to be. And all you’ve done is encourage that version of myself, all the time.

Laneia: And you created a space for me to keep finding out who I want to be, because you knew I didn’t really know yet.

Amanda: Right. That was actually a big thing when we started dating — I was very nervous for you, because you were coming out of something huge, and it’s life-changing, divorce. I mean, you lose all sense of self. I didn’t know what size pants I fucking wore. My ex-wife bought all my clothes. I had to rebuild all of it. And when I came out of my divorce, I quickly found myself in something else and I just put all of my eggs in that basket, like “Okay great, great. I’m done.” Because there’s such a fear of scarcity, of not being wanted, not being attractive, or cool enough.

Laneia: Like you’ve already missed your window.

Amanda: Exactly, I mean the last time I fucking dated before I got divorced I was on Myspace. To come back out into a world where you’re relying on apps — the language is different, you have to learn so quickly. I didn’t want to rush in with you, and have you just supplant all of that onto me, and think, “Okay, whew, I’m done now.”

Laneia: I didn’t want to do that either, and I was so afraid I would.

Amanda: I was afraid you would too, and not because of like—

Laneia: No, I know. It’s just so fucking easy to do!

Amanda: I’ve really tried to maintain my own personality through this, which I never do — like I’ve always just merged with someone else and become a version of myself that I don’t know, and don’t like. But with you? I’ve told so many people that you make me feel bigger than life, you know? Like you let me be as big as I want to be. You’ve always just stoked that fucking fire.

Laneia: I love that about you.

Amanda: You’re never jealous of any interactions I have, you never wish that I wasn’t engaging with other people so I could give you more attention.

Laneia: Oh my god I love watching you be a whole person out there. And I love watching you flirt with other people.

Amanda: I do not FLIRT with other people!

Laneia: You do a little! It’s not — you don’t make it weird! I just mean, like before the pandemic, when we’d go out, you got a lot of attention. And I did love to see it!

Amanda: I saw a tweet the other day that was like, “I’m not flirting, I’m just hot and talking.”

Laneia: Ok yes exactly! And that has nothing to do with me! I just like to watch, and when people get flustered I’m like, “I know, me too!”

Amanda: Well I never thought I was flirting with anybody else. I do talk to people—

Laneia: You have this eye thing that you do.

Amanda: Oh come on!

Laneia: It’s casual but it’s intense! I don’t know, again this has nothing to do with me! You just have this—

Amanda: This is when I find out? On this day of my—

Laneia: Yes on the day of your daughter’s wedding.² You just have this extremely flirty eye contact that you— yes! That’s it, THANK YOU. Okay, point proven!

Amanda: Well that’s for you!

Laneia: Yeah you don’t go quite that hard with other people.

Amanda: I don’t know, if somebody is reciprocating eye contact, then I’ll just do it back.

Laneia: “I dunno, if I happen to be hot and talking? Who am I to blame?”

Amanda: “What am I supposed to dooo?”

Laneia: “What would you have me do MUZZLE MY EYES!” Imagine you with those tanning bed cones over your eyes, not the glasses but the cones.³ Do you know what I’m talking about?

Amanda: All I can think of is that scene in American Psycho, but no that’s a gel mask.

Laneia: I’m talking about the little cones you get, they’re disposable for when you don’t have the glasses.

Amanda: Wait a second, you’ve been in a tanning bed?

Laneia: Oh I’ve been in a tanning bed. I’ve spent countless days in tanning beds in Tennessee. I had a punch card Amanda.

Amanda: Of course.

Laneia: It was in the back of a video rental store, in the same building as the gas station where everyone got their chicken biscuits in the morning before going to school, to high school. I got a Romeo and Juliet poster from them, like the—

Amanda: Oh I know, 1996.

Laneia: I had it framed.

Amanda: You fucking would.

---

¹ Trixie Salute is referring to a promotional image used used for Trixie and Katya Live, in which Trixie Mattel is seen standing in a convertible with her hand to her forehead, ostensibly shielding her eyes from the sun, but Laneia made a cropped version of this into a custom Slack emoji for Autostraddle, which she uses to, among other things, convey affirmation or confirmation, in the form of a salute.
² See there’s no real reason to reference The Godfather here, and yet.
³ Exhibit A

What hurdles or obstacles have you overcome together in your relationship? These can be within your relationship, or things that you’ve faced together.

Laneia: I think a major hurdle that we are still overcoming is trust. And not because either one of us has broken that trust with each other, but because other people have. Or I guess life has.

Amanda: I mean, even if I knew my marriage was probably not the best situation for me, I still trusted that we were gonna work through it eventually. So believing that somebody will show up for you, somebody will—

Laneia: Work through it with you.

Amanda: Exactly. That did not pan out. So when these hard things came up for the two of us—

Laneia: It was hard to trust that the other person would actually want to be there.

Amanda: But we kept just trying, and having really honest conversations about it.

Laneia: After the last time that happened, it changed my trust for you a lot, or for this, I guess. It gave me an opportunity to like, humble myself a little bit? I mean, there’s definitely a less insane way of saying that, but—

Amanda: No, let’s go for insane.

Laneia: You basically were like, “When I say this shit to you, quit explaining yourself. Quit being in your head and be here with me. Listen to what I’m trying to say to you.” And I did, and I could see where I’d been wrong and how it had been hurtful, because I wasn’t hearing you. I wasn’t listening. It felt like you were almost giving me a gift, like, “Here’s how you can show up for me, if you really care to.” And then you gave me the opportunity to do it, which is like! It was humbling. I was grateful for the chance to do something better.

Amanda: There are so many reactions people can have to an argument, and for me that argument isn’t the point — it’s the friction that needs to happen so we can get to the part where we figure out what to do next time. I’m trying to say that this is how something made me feel, even if it’s hard for you to hear. Even if it doesn’t make sense.

Laneia: Right, that’s where I got stuck, because I was like, “Wait, I can explain though!” You didn’t want that.

Amanda: Well, and humans get upset, even if there is an explanation, right? Like you just have to be there to listen.

Laneia: God, yeah. That was so hard for me! It’s still hard.

Amanda: It’s hard for a lot of people! It’s easy to take it personally, when someone is telling you that something you did hurt them. Because it’s like, “Well I would never try to hurt you!” And I’m not saying you were trying to hurt me, I’m just saying you did.

Laneia: Right.

Amanda: It felt like we moved through that really gracefully, and it might not have been that graceful if either one of us was holding onto something or wanting to show the other one up, or to win. But we’re both more interested in doing this, intentionally.

Laneia: Sometimes in therapy I’ll have a whole spiel about something and by the time I get to the end I’m like, “Fuck so I guess I should just be saying this to her, yeah? Not you.” Because I’ll do a lot of thinking, and trying to figure out what you meant by this, or why something is happening, because for me it’s easier to try to figure it out on my own and just never bring it up to you. But the thing is actually that I have to trust you to hear what I’m going to say — like I have to give you the chance to show up for this, and trust that you’ll be just as intentional and present as we’ve said we’ll be. It’s just wild! How it’s all about TRUST !

Amanda: Tale as old as time.

Laneia: Roads weren’t made to not go down.⁴ You know?

Amanda: That’s what I’ve always said. It’s on my koozie.

---

⁴ Again, the gossamer thread of relevancy connecting this Kacey Musgraves reference to the rest of the conversation is imperceptible at best, but we’ll allow it.

What’s your living situation like (together, separate, long distance with long visits, something else), how often do you see each other and why?

Amanda: Well I live in an apartment in Phoenix, and you live in a house in the suburbs. We see each other on the weekends and on Wednesdays, sometimes.

Laneia: We’re not living together right now, and that’s very much on purpose.

Amanda: We never wanted to live together out of necessity.

Laneia: Right, number fuckin one, I don’t wanna get married because I need health insurance. I don’t wanna live with somebody because I can’t afford to live alone.

Amanda: We never want that to be the driving force. It has to be intentional. But, you know, that could change

Laneia: We could live together.

Amanda: I’m sure we will.

Laneia: It seems inevitable. And honestly, there’s something comforting about that and also extremely annoying to me.

Amanda: [Laughing]

Laneia: Because it’s like, “Why though? Why is it inevitable?”

Amanda: I think that’s just what people do.

Laneia: I think this is, it’s like—

Amanda: Here we go.

Laneia: [Laughing] I talk to my therapist about this all the time! And she’s like, “You realize this is a normal next step for people? They eventually live in the same house together.” Like she’s explaining the concept of relationships to me, anew, each time, and I’m like, “Right okay, that’s how everybody— that’s how y’all do it. I get that.” But then I’m on the outside being like, “But wait, wait, one second.”

Amanda: Also in terms of how long we’ve been out of our marriages, it’s pretty fresh. We were with those people for a long time. I didn’t have my own things, in my own style, in my own choices, in my house, for 10 years. And even before I got married and was living with her, I was 20-something and had a bunch of random-ass furniture and could barely afford the rent. Now I can afford to live here. I’ve furnished it entirely since the pandemic. I love it.

Laneia: It’s wonderful.

Amanda: And I just, I want to keep having that for a little while. When I go to your house? I love — and this has been really fun to see — every time I go there, more and more of you is there. Like it’s yours now, it looks like your house. It’s so comforting to be there because of that.

Laneia: That’s how I feel at your house!

Amanda: It’s like, “This is all her.” Remember the first time I was in your bedroom?

Laneia: Oh I can replay that entire time in my head. Like, second for second. I can remember the path we took around the room. What you picked up. I remember pointing out the pinch pot to you that Slade had made when he was little and you were like—

Amanda: I was overwhelmed.

Laneia: It was really sweet.

Amanda: ‘Cause that was all you. We really understand each other’s ephemera.

Laneia: Yeah. Oh! Yeah, that’s true. And I want you to have yours! I wanna see it!

Amanda: And it’s like, living together? I mean, that would change all of that. I know that you’ve said, when we’ve talked about it before, that if I moved in you would take everything down and—

Laneia: Everything’s gotta come down! Yes. ‘Cause that would be fun, too.

Amanda: It would be fun. The other thing that we’ve talked about — I mean, it was a pipe dream, but like, buying a house somewhere else. That, to me? That seems more like us than me moving into your house right now. I’m also very aware that Eli is there, and it’s his house. He’s still in high school and his life has been changed by the divorce—

Laneia: And the pandemic.

Amanda: Exactly, and I never really wanted to move in there and be like, “Hey son,” you know? That’s my stepdad voice.

Laneia: [Laughing] Your stepdad persona, I wish I knew what he was wearing. Is it like a t-shirt and cargo shorts?

Amanda: It’s a tank top and denim cut-offs.

Laneia: OhKAY!

Amanda: And probably this hat.⁵

Laneia: What kind of shoes?

Amanda: “Hey, son.” Those like—

Laneia: Are they the woven—?⁶

Amanda: Yeah.

Laneia: [Laughing] Oh my goddddd !

Amanda: You already know! Um yeah, so I’ve always really considered that he’s still in high school and, you know, when he graduates, if he moves out, if Slade moves out, that would be a different thing too! You’ll be on your own for the first time ever. You probably wanna enjoy that.

Laneia: Yeah like when’s the perfect time? I don’t know.

Amanda: I don’t know, but I do think about that. ‘Cause honestly, there’s nothing — there’s nothing — like living by yourself.

Laneia: I — ok, honestly I’m always like, “What would it be like? What would it actually be like, to be fully alone?” Earlier last week I thought Slade would be working from his girlfriend’s house, and I was so jazzed. I drove Eli to school and on the way back I was talking to myself, because that’s what I do, and I was like, “What are we gonna do today!!” I was SO excited. And the other thing is that I don’t feel comfortable not wearing a bra in front of them, even though they’re my children. If I’m wearing a tank top, I don’t just wanna be like NIPPLES, so that day I was wearing my loose tank top, no bra, jogging pants, no underwear. I’m in house shoes, shuffling around, talking to myself. I’ve got music on, and I have a plan. And then I hear Slade’s key in the door and I was like—

Amanda: Deflated.

Laneia: And it’s not that I don’t wanna see him! I love him, whatever! But yeah, I did have another moment of just wondering what it would be like. If you were there I would just keep talking to myself though, and not wear a bra.

Amanda: I would just, Trixie salute.

Laneia: So yeah, we don’t live together. We see each other when we see each other. And I’m…?

Amanda: It’s fine. Like it really is okay with me.

Laneia: Yeah I’m really happy. Obviously, there are some times that I’m like, Fuck, oh I wish she was here. Or when you leave I always go through a period of — it’s not long—

Amanda: Mourning.

Laneia: Yeah I just, I’m looking out the window, imagining you in a ship sailing away. It’s very, very sad. Sad.

Amanda: Well, I just got in my apartment and drove it away.⁷

Laneia: [Laughing] Right.

Amanda: I got into my apple.

Laneia: [Laughing] You got into your apple. Honked.

Amanda: And it’s that horn that’s like, henh-henh

Laneia: And then it’s the sputtering thing, like, it’s not a smooth drive. It’s like— [laughing] do you know what I’m talking about?

Amanda: [Laughing] Yes! I know what you’re talking about, get OUT OF HERE god.

Laneia: I can’t I didn’t bring my apartment.

---

⁵ Exhibit B
⁶ Exhibit C
⁷ Amanda Driving Away In Her Apartment is an ongoing imaginary situation wherein Amanda, having been affronted and thus feeling quite cross, gets into her apartment, which is actually the Apple Car from Richard Scarry’s Busytown, and drives away, rather slowly, as apartments are lumbering and not aerodynamic in the least. So in sum, Amanda is the Lowly Worm, the apartment that she’s driving (??) is an apple, and we’re sure you’ll agree this is perfectly normal business.

How do you share expenses or work out finances? How do you share or split up labor in the relationship? Can you talk about why that is?

Amanda: Um, we don’t really track anything like that.

Laneia: Well not living together makes it really easy to not worry about how we’re splitting finances.

Amanda: But it’s not like one of us pays more than the other one, when we go out or take trips. That always ends up evening out on its own. We’re not keeping track.

Do you have kids, pets, plants, all three? Do you not currently have, but want any of these things? Why? Are you in agreement?

Amanda: Well, you have a lot of plants and you have a lot of kids. And you have one pet. I had a pet, I have a couple plants, no kids.

Laneia: No kids. Are you, did you check?

Amanda: What? That’s why I haven’t done 23 And Me. I don’t wanna find out—

Laneia: You’re just not ready to face it yet.

Amanda: I don’t wanna have that conversation.

Laneia: We’re all on our own timeline, and I respect it.

Amanda: And we’ve talked about, well in a fantasy way, having a baby, but that’s not really our plan.

Laneia: It’s not the plan. I feel sad about it, if I think about it.

Amanda: Well, because this is a bigger thing. You’re — and we’ve talked about this —we’re both kind of sad that we didn’t meet earlier.

Laneia: Yeah. Even though it’s well established fact, very much known, that if we had met earlier, this would not be what it looked like, at all.

Amanda: No.

Laneia: You would’ve been a whole mess. I would’ve been a whole asshole. It wouldn’t have worked, but also it’s like, I wish I could have known you in first grade. I wish I could have had lunch with you. I wish I could have sat with you on the bus, on the field trip to that museum in Nashville. I wish that you had been on the plane with me to Florida the first time that I flew with Slade. Like, I wish—

Amanda: At any moment.

Laneia: Any moment— I wanna know you then. All of it. And it breaks my fucking heart. ‘Cause I, I loved you. You know? Like I loved you then. I didn’t know you— does that? Do you know what I mean? Like not in this esoteric, cheesy way, but like I have always loved you. Like I have always loved you, not knowing that you even existed.

I also wish you were the one that I could have been like, “I’m so exhausted from this pregnancy.” I just wish!

Amanda: Yeah. That’s the one — I really wish I could’ve been with you when you were pregnant. I would’ve loved that.

Laneia: You would’ve loved it. Um yeah, so because of how things are, I’m not having any more children.

Amanda: And I’m not having any children.

Laneia: And I feel a lot of ways about it! I feel like I’m short-changing you.

Amanda: No, but not really. I don’t feel that way about it. I’ve thought about having kids in other relationships, with that person, and it was always kinda like, “Yeah, if it happens, that’ll be her decision, and she’ll be driving it.” You were the first person I was like, “That would be really cool actually, to raise a kid together.” Because we would’ve been so on the same page about things, and supportive of how the other person was. The ways we’re different and the things that we’re interested in, making room for all of that would be really fun.

Laneia: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: Also just, I would love to have sex with you while you were pregnant.

Laneia: You’ve never had sex with a pregnant person.

Amanda: No. And the biggest reason is, I just wanna make you — pregnant — feel amazing. Like if that could be my job—

Laneia: Like a doula, but for sex.

Amanda: But just for you.

How would you describe the sex you have together (if you have sex)? Do you believe in lesbian bed death, and has it or do you think it will visit your relationship? What haven’t you done together but want to?

Amanda: Fun, intimate. It’s never the same. Even if we did the exact same thing, it’s never the same. It feels very free. How would you describe it?

Laneia: Um, it feels… bold.

Amanda: Oh? Like in what way?

Laneia: I don’t feel timid about it, which I guess is the same thing as feeling free. It feels safe, in that I can be vulnerable but also in charge, without breaking any expectations. I also love that sometimes our sex does begin very organically, but other times it’s very much like, “So, are we gonna fuck?” Because I hate the idea that if we talk about it, then that somehow takes away from it. Like if we admit that we think about it and plan it.

Amanda: Right. We also spend our time together very intentionally. So we want to get all the things done, have the experiences, and sometimes that’s one of them! I also love that we can be like, “Hey, it’s feeling a little disconnected right?” I don’t know if we’ve ever actually said those exact words, but if it feels like there’s a distance between us, we both value the way sex brings us closer.

Laneia: I do wanna say, you know how people talk about getting to a certain age and that’s the ‘prime’ of their sex life? I’d felt like that was true for me in my thirties, but honestly that was mostly because of the masturbating I was doing. It wasn’t so much the sex I was having, but I was having an incredible time masturbating. Just knocking it out of the park. Stronger orgasms, more of them — I could go for hours. But the actual sex was… I mean, it was fine? I’m 41 now, and the sex that we’ve had for the past two and half years has been stupid. Like, very good.

Amanda: It’s quality.

Laneia: It’s quality sex! Okay what about Lesbian Bed Death, has it ever darkened your door?

Amanda: Usually by this point in my past relationships, we are not having sex. And if we are, it’s not great. Like ships passing in the night, you know? Wanting to have sex, but really only having sex with that person because they just happen to be the one you’re in a relationship with. That’s never happened with us. We’re having sex because we really want to do it, with each other.

Laneia: Right, when I want to have sex, I want to have sex with you. Not just to get off, but I want to be like, skin-to-skin, face-to-face with you. Actually it’s not even about getting off really? I just wanna hang out with you, naked.

Amanda: Also the attraction has never wavered.

Laneia: You know how in the beginning, or maybe this is just my experience, the sex that you’re having with someone is kind of an elaborate situation — like, you still haven’t broken that fourth wall. People are still maintaining the newness, the facades. And then after a certain point things start feeling very… familiar.

Amanda: Old reliable.

Laneia: Yes! You kinda settle in, the song-and-dance is over, which is fine! But then it’s almost embarrassing if you try to bring it back? Do you know what I mean?

Amanda: It’s like, “Don’t try to have any mystery with me! I know everything about you.”

Laneia: “Are you… trying to be sexy with me right now? Unnecessary!” But with you — and I’m not saying this exactly right, I sound nuts — in terms of how we interact with each other, that kind of thing still…

Amanda: Well I know exactly what to do.

Laneia: Yes!

Amanda: And it’s not really sexual at all, it doesn’t have to be.

Laneia: It’s— you’re doing it right now! That’s it!

Amanda: Got it.

Laneia: Stop it! Gah.

Amanda: The sex we have is very sexy. You just said to me earlier that you wish there was a mirror—

Laneia: I do! I wish there was a mirror, on the ceiling.

Okay! Moving on, is there anything that we haven’t done together that we want to?

Amanda: We talk a lot about having sex pretty much on every surface, and I don’t think we’ve gotten to that.

Laneia: Have we had sex in a car? Not just making out in the car?

Amanda: No, that’d be fun.

Laneia: I do love car sex. You know what I love? Car sex on a back road in Tennessee.

Amanda: Book a flight!

Laneia: Oh but that would also have to be in my mom’s car.

Amanda: It would have to be?

Laneia: Unless we rent a car? But that’s so expensive.

Amanda: Oh I thought that was part of the fantasy.

Laneia: No! Jesus. “So one thing, it does need to be my dead grandmother’s Lincoln, soooo.” Honestly I feel like I should say like, a third person being involved? But when I really think about it I’m like, “Who? Based on what?”

Amanda: I never have that desire.

Laneia: I was watching a New Year’s video with Trixie and she said she wanted to try having sex in drag, and not because she even wanted to, but because she didn’t want to get older and wish that she had’ve. I think that’s kind of where I am with having sex with more than one person at the same time.

Amanda: The threesome I had was not anything to write home about. One person’s gonna be left out, and I have a feeling that if we had a threesome, it wouldn’t be with another person who looks like me. I don’t know that I have the, uh, the stamina to do what I do with you to another person.

Laneia: Why do androgynous girls never want another androgynous girl around? What’s that about?

Amanda: Because we’d have to arm wrestle about it and I don’t want to do that. Not naked anyway. Um, yeah. I don’t know! I tried to have sex once with someone that looked like me and it was really awful. We just kept trying to top each other. There was no communication.

Laneia: Wait wait, I think this would be an interesting time to take a brief tangent. So I don’t identify as femme, but I’m definitely read as that. How do you identify? We’ve never actually talked about that.

Amanda: Um, yeah I’ve never said what I identify as, but I would identify as androgynous. I walk that line. I’ve had a lot of sex with straight women, and in my experience that’s what they’re responding to, that mixture.

Laneia: So if there’s another androgynous person, you just wouldn’t be attracted to that. Where I could be attracted to a more feminine person, that’s possible for me. In theory.

Amanda: I could see how another androgynous person would be attractive.

Laneia: Sure.

Amanda: I just don’t ever get that yen for them.

Laneia: There’s a certain kind of pixie dust around an androgynous person for me, which… I think is fine.

Amanda: I think whatever you’re attracted to is normal.

Laneia: Yeah but sometimes I’m like, Okay what kind of internalized femme-phobia do we have here.

Amanda: You did try dating a couple of femme women before.

Laneia: It was truly like the first day of school. Just sitting next to somebody and being like, “Hi.”

Amanda: “Hey, did you bring your lunch or—”

Laneia: “Is it Lunchables or like, does your mom make— oh she makes the sandwich? Okay cool.”

Amanda: “That’s cool. Neat.”

Laneia: “Oh really? No yeah, I love margaritas.”

Amanda: So yeah I’ve also like, ‘tried my own kind.’ There was something pulling us together and I followed it and yeah, it just, wasn’t for me.

Laneia: When you say you were both trying to top each other, what do you mean by that? Like, in practice, what does that look like.

Amanda: She was… Well she was younger than me, and sort of new to all of this, and she was trying to use all her tricks on me — tricks that I already know. And it was very much like, “…Don’t do that to me. I have your number, I know what you’re doing.” She treated me in almost a precious way? It was just all this stuff that I know she had used on other women and I was like, “Okay we are not doing that. We’re gonna have to go in a different direction. You need a whole different bag of tricks for this.”

Laneia: Ok now I can’t stop thinking about what kind of ‘tricks’ I even use. I don’t know what my tricks are! I guess I’d know it if I saw it? Now I wanna have sex with a femme so I can be like, “This is crazy! This is not working for me!? What about you? I don’t know yeah let’s keep going!”

Where do you locate your relationship on the monogamy / polyamory spectrum? What philosophies do you have around how you handle monogamy / polyamory? How do you feel this impacts your relationship?

Amanda: Well we have a monogamous relationship. You’ve brought up several times that it would be fine if I wanted to fuck other people, but I really don’t have a desire to. I’m actually a pretty hardcore monogamist, and I think people are surprised to learn that about me. I think I give off the energy of someone who has sex with a lot of people, but yeah I like to be in relationships with just one person.

Laneia: Same, and when I say that I wouldn’t have a problem if you wanted to sleep with somebody else, that was in the beginning. But also, honestly?

Amanda: I know.

Laneia: It’s fine? Like, I feel like it’s fine.

Amanda: I don’t share that feeling.

Laneia: [Laughing] I just feel like, whatever you’re getting from me, you couldn’t get that from someone else. So if you wanted to have sex with someone it’s because there’s something about them that has nothing to do with me. Your face right now is like—

Amanda: Well, I just don’t feel that way, and that’s probably why I’m not in a poly relationship. I can’t separate that out.

Laneia: [Laughing] Honestly I can’t either! It’s very hard for me to have sex and actually enjoy any aspect of it with someone that I don’t feel safe around. And I don’t feel safe around a lot of people. But like, in theory, there’s a freedom that I’d love for you to have, if you wanted it. It’s not something I’m interested in doing myself, but… I don’t know, I sound crazy. Basically, if you were to sleep with someone else, that in and of itself wouldn’t necessarily be a final straw for me. It’s very case-by-case to me. But I know that you don’t share that take, and I respect that, explicitly.

And then how do we feel this impacts our relationship? It means we’re not having sex with other people.

Amanda: Yeah.

Laneia: The ultimate impact is that we are only fucking each other.

Amanda: The… deep impact.

Laneia: The dee— Oh my god Amanda.

Amanda: Too bad it’s not a video interview!

Do you think your relationship will more or less continue to exist as it currently is? Why?

Laneia: Well as somebody who is divorced, I love a question about the future.

Amanda: I think our relationship will ultimately be like it is right now, except that we just continue to get deeper. I feel like we’re interested in a relationship that’s growing. You and I are both in therapy, and we were before we met, and we’re very interested in bettering ourselves, all the time. So I think to come together in a relationship for us is a choice that we’re making.

Laneia: It’s not about convenience.

Amanda: It’s not, and it’s not desperation or needing to be with someone.

Laneia: There isn’t really a final achievement either.

Amanda: I think that’s from divorce. We’re really enjoying this relationship as it is, and we live in the moment with it. When it changes it’s because we’re both pushing that change, and it’s usually emotional. Like we know each other in a more intimate way, we have the kind of conversations that we’ve never had before. That’s more interesting to me than an endgame scenario where we’re married in this many years. I don’t need to be married to have a complete life. I tried it, and it turns out, that wasn’t the case.

Laneia: But also yeah, I don’t think about a future where I’m not with you anymore. We just keep choosing each other, and choosing to do this together, and I love that.

Amanda: But it is fun to fantasize about things like buying a house together, but that’s a big step! Like, legally — we both know about property now because of divorce and—

Laneia: Oh god, all that shit.

Amanda: And I know it sounds sad to say that there’s an element of like, “Well you just never know,” but I don’t feel sad about that. I think people hear that and think that we’re just assuming that we’ll break up, but I’m actually not assuming anything. And I feel good about that.

Laneia: Yeah I actually feel safer this way, where the plan is just to keep doing this for as long as we both want to be doing this. And if this ends it won’t feel like it was a waste of time, and I’m not looking ahead wondering what I’d do without you.

Amanda: That’s the other thing about divorce — I think we experienced a similar situation where our life kinda wasn’t our own life. We couldn’t be who we wanted to be. So we’re both very passionate about being our true selves all the time. I never wanna feel like, If this person leaves me, I won’t have anything. Which is what happened before: it felt like everything was gone. I lost friends, I lost everything. And that’s not even possible in this relationship, because we’ve both given each other so much room to move and be exactly who we want to be.

Laneia: Right, and it’s not even hard to do. It’s actually very fulfilling to give you space, and to take space for myself.

Amanda: Neither one of us has ever pressured the other person into feeling like this is gonna end in marriage, or that it needs to in order for either one of us to feel comfortable in the relationship.

Laneia: Yeah I feel like I was like railroaded into my last marriage, into the marriage aspect of it. You’ve not come anywhere close to that kind of thing.

Amanda: I don’t ever want you to feel railroaded. I have a lot of respect for where it is right now.

Laneia: I do too, I feel really protective of it. The only thing that I think would be fun about getting married would be like, the playlist.

Amanda: Well, let’s just be perfectly frank. We would have a fun fucking wedding.

Laneia: It would be so cute! Your suit would be adorable, so hot. My dress would be amazing. Gorgeous.

Amanda: It’d be at a venue.

Laneia: Oh my god watch me never get married in a house or a backyard again! Absofuckinglutely not. Who gets married in nothing but residential locations?!

Amanda: More than once!

Laneia: Repeatedly!

What would you say are your most fundamental differences?

Amanda: When I’ve told you how I felt about something, your instinct is to explain why that thing happened, and that’s not how I would listen to that. So we process information differently. But I think we share a lot of values, so that those differences actually end up meaning that we just take a different road to the same place.

Laneia: Exactly. And I like to sleep with white noise in the background.

Amanda: That is a fundamental difference, yes. That fatigues my ears, but I may or may not have had a traumatic brain injury.⁸

Laneia: The fact that you literally don’t know, is the best part of that. It’s not even for show: you truly may or may not have had a traumatic brain injury! We’ll find out one day.

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⁸Amanda was thrown from the back of a motorcycle in 2018 and taken immediately to an emergency room, where she learned just exactly how they check to see if your tailbone is broken. (It involves a single finger in your rectum.) (Her tailbone was not broken.)

Do you all have any shared dreams/goals for the future or each other? What are these?

Laneia: I would love to get a house with you out in the desert somewhere.

Amanda: That seems very achievable, too. I’d love that.

Laneia: I also want you to get a car that you feel safe in.

Amanda: I want you to make all the repairs to your house that it needs.

Laneia: Yeah, I would love to get somebody to come take a look at my HVAC.

Amanda: I have that dream for you as well. And it’s not a euphemism. Otherwise I’d be takin’ care of it—

Laneia: Amanda.

Amanda: —myself!

What piece of pop culture do you share or what piece of pop culture reminds you of your relationship? What’s your movie or your show or your book or your song?

Amanda: We have so many songs. I think the first thing that we shared was that Harry Styles album. Like I can go right back to that time.

Laneia: Oh yeah, that was so fun! We’d just barely met still, and you started singing like a crazy.

Amanda: I’m a passionate car singer!

Laneia: The way you sang “Falling”! It was very endearing. You also said, “You’ll never be able to hear this song and not think about this.” And I was like, “Yeah not now!”

Amanda: We really got into 70s music, hard, because of that first summer, and the pool. I’ve been listening to that music my entire life, but when I hear it now, it’s us. And I’m not even thinking about one day, it’s just the feeling of that summer, of being out there, and your face. I can see the whole thing.

Laneia: When Harry Met Sally reminds me of you now, and I loved it before I met you! But now there’s no way around it, it’s you. Weirdly Fleetwood Mac, also.

Amanda: Exactly! And I’ll say this: there are Fleetwood Mac songs that were already attached to specific moments in my life, but when I hear them now, you’re all I think about.

Tell us a funny story about your partner!

Laneia: I’ve dreaded this one since I first saw these questions! It’s too hard! Like, to pick one thing would mean having to explain—

Amanda: First of all it would be like, “Let me get you to understand this inside joke. Okay. Do you have it now? Okay, now imagine this other situation, months later, after we’ve mined the inside joke and we thought we’d forgotten about it, and then—” Yeah, you make me laugh every day. We delight each other.

Laneia: If I were to pick something that you do, that’s funny every time? It’s the singing, that whole act. It never gets old. I’m your number one fan. And I love you in the morning, it’s very silly.

Amanda: I’m ready for the day! I love being that way in the mornings and then you’re — you’re not quite ready to go yet, in the morning. It’s a version of you that’s funny in a completely different way, it’s very no-nonsense, no filter. And your hair is very sticky uppy in the back, so that’s cute. We also do a lot of bits.

Laneia: Oh that’s one of the best things about being with you. The bits are respected, a respected practice.

Amanda: I think it’s remarkable that we remember all of them! But yeah it’s the wordplay, the inside jokes. We love to roast movies.

Laneia: Nineties movies especially. Not old films though — I don’t feel like I have any business roasting old films.

Amanda: Well you’d have to do it in a transatlantic accent.

Interview With My Wife: Stacy

Hello there and welcome to the FIRST EVER installment of Interview With My Significant Other, a new A+ series in which Autostraddle team members interview a signficiant other. Here at Autostraddle in spring of 2022, we’re in a historic era. There has never been a time in history in which more of the Autostraddle team have been in romantic relationships. So, to take advantage of this time, and so that we can all revel in the broad range of ways that queer relationships can look and be, we developed fourteen questions for our team members to answer in conversation with their significant others. We asked them how they met, to tell us their hopes for the future, about finances and sharing labor, and yes, about sex.

First in the series, we have what may be one of the longest-running Autostraddle couples, Heather and Stacy, who are, famously, wives. If this resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you in the comments!

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How’d you meet / get together? (Include how long you knew each other before becoming romantically involved.)

Stacy: You were recapping Skins, which is a show I loved, and I thought your recaps were really smart and funny. So I tweeted at you and you tweeted back, and then we started emailing. You were living in Georgia at the time and I was living in New York. After we’d been chatting a few months, you told me you were coming to the city for work and we made plans to meet up.

Heather: Were you thinking of the meet-up as a date?

Stacy: Well, everyone at work said it was a date.

Heather: Yeah, my sister said it was a date.

Stacy: We went to a nice dinner! We stayed out until 4am! We hung out the next day, too! We were in the VIP line at the US Skins premiere party and someone pulled a knife and the cops broke up the whole event!

Heather: That’s the funniest thing to me about our meet-up story. Not the knife guy. You and I are not people who stay out until 4am. We are definitely not people who make plans two days in a row. We were both behaving very out of character, but neither of us knew it. You even skipped watching a Miami Dolphins game for me in those early days, and in the eleven years I’ve known you since then, you’ve only missed half a Dolphins game and that’s because we couldn’t get it to stream in the airport.

Stacy: Yeah. I really liked you.

Heather: Which I didn’t actually know until I was back home. You wrote a post on one of our friends’ blogs about our adventure and you said it was the best weekend you’d had in a long, long time. I was like, “Oh my god, she LIKES ME.” You did not let on in person. But then also you thought I was trying to hook up with you that second night we hung out, when we were lying in my hotel bed for like three hours laughing at memes and GIFs, and you bounced so fast.

Stacy: I don’t do one night stands.

Heather: Me either!

Stacy: I didn’t know! We didn’t talk about it!

Heather: The first time you kissed me, months after we met, I did an air-punch and said “yessss!” And you said, “You’re an idiot; you could have kissed me at any time.” But we didn’t talk about that either. It was like ten months after we’d been talking basically every day that I casually said, at dinner one night, “Blah blah blah we’re dating” and you were like, “We’re dating?” And I was all, “Are we not dating?”

Stacy: Classic lesbian conundrum.

Heather: Right. Are we buddies who like the same TV show or are we going to get married?

Stacy: Both!

Heather: Here’s something I also never told you in those early days: I didn’t own a phone! I just simply did not talk on the phone, or text, or anything. One night we were G-Chatting and you asked to talk on the phone, and I was like, “How about tomorrow night?” And the next morning I went out and bought a phone.

Stacy: That’s so… you.

Heather: Yeah, so anyway, I liked you, too.

Okay, so what are your big 3 astrological signs? How do we feel about that?

Heather: So I am a Saggittarius sun, Aries moon, Aquarius rising — which I know because Rachel Kincaid did my birth chart one time.

Stacy: I’m an Aries and that’s all I know.

Heather: I think my big three mean I cancel plans a lot, blurt out self-righteous things at awkward times, and people think I’m at least a little odd. My dad did tell me at his last wedding that he had seated me at the Black Sheep Table, so this all seems true to me.

Stacy: I think mine means I’m a fiery bitch.

Heather: It does not! Hang on, let me just Google what it means when a Saggittarius and an Aries are married. Oh, this little chart says we’re a 90% match!

Stacy: Whew. I’d hate to find out we were incompatible according to… Thought Catalog.

Heather: Stop that.

Stacy: I can’t, I’m a fiery bitch, it’s written in the stars.

Heather: Okay so it says we’ll find it easy to understand each other, that our bond will be unbreakable, that we’ll have flare up fights but then easily forgive each other, that neither of us are into big romantic gestures, which is true. It also says we might have trouble making traditional commitments. Psh. It only took us ten years to get married.

Stacy: This also says we’ll share a common bond over being Zodiac explorers. That must mean that I love the Fincher movie about the Zodiac killer and you’re terrified of hearing anything about serial killers, so while I watch it, you’ll be hiding out somewhere else in the house.

Heather: Yes, that’s definitely what that means.

Stacy: Astrology!

What do you enjoy most about your relationship?

Stacy: I love spending time with you more than anything in the world, but I also love that we have so many individual interests that don’t overlap, and that we support each other in our individual pursuits. I love that we never intentionally try to hurt each other, that when we argue we’re working toward a common goal for both of us to be happy and fulfilled. Like we’re never trying to just get our own way, or to “win” an argument. And I love to win.

Heather: Me too.

Stacy: Not as much as I love to win.

Heather: Incorrect! I love to win the most!

Stacy: I love how much we make each other laugh. And it’s interesting because we have a very similar sense of humor, but I think I’m more caustic than you, more acidic and dry than you.

Heather: You have a very Daria Morgendorffer wit. But you’re also really silly.

Stacy: Yeah, I’m a dork.

Heather: We both love stories.

Stacy: It’s why we fell in love actually. Love, Actually…

Heather: … is all around us.

Stacy: Ugh.

Heather: When either of us get into any kind of story — novels, TV, movies, video games, comic books, whatever — we cannot get enough of it. And when we’re both into the same story, we can literally talk about it all day and all night for months on end. I love listening to you talk about stories, all of it, from the technical aspects — like the other night when you were so mad at the editing when we were watching The Princess Diaries — to the cultural impact to the way you’re personally relating to the characters. Because I was raised by wolves, I really did learn to be a person, and still learn so much about myself and the world, through stories — and so it’s really important to me that you experience stories similarly.

Stacy: Same. When I watch something I love, I always want you to watch it too, so I can hear you talk about it.

Heather: I also love that we can be in the same space doing different things. I love doing what I’m doing while you’re doing what you’re doing, and just looking over and seeing you there. It feels good to just be in the same space with you, and I love it when you’re doing what makes you happy.

What hurdles or obstacles have you overcome together in your relationship? These can be within your relationship, or things that you’ve faced together.

Stacy: God, so much. Starting with: I tried to push you away all the time when we first started talking.

Heather: We both brought a lot of personal baggage into our relationship. We both had really tough puppy lives and a lot of trauma we had to work through, individually, if we were ever going to have a happy and healthy relationship. But, weirdly, I wasn’t able to work through a lot of that stuff until I met you, because being with you, it has made me feel safe in a way I’ve never experienced, and powerful in a way I never believed I could be. And I needed both of those things to start processing and coping with everything that has happened to me in my life. You gave me safety and freedom to really grapple with what I’ve been through, and the strength to start overcoming it.

Stacy: You’ve had to be so patient with me. I have a lot of anger inside me, and I haven’t always had healthy ways of dealing with and expressing it — and while I never direct my anger at you, it is always there, and anger is the one thing you struggle with the most. My impulse might be to punch a pillow if I see some upsetting news, which of course I do every time I open Twitter, or to thump my hand down beside me on my desk if I lose a bunch of work for some reason. But because of the way you grew up, any kind of physical manifestation of anger is really triggering to you.

Heather: Right, and I am the opposite, in that I just keep all my anger stuffed way down inside me until it becomes depression or despair, which is its own issue. So it’s like, for both of us, how do we allow ourselves and each other to be angry, process anger, and express anger — and how do we do it in ways that don’t hurt the other person? We’ve also had to work as a team in big ways to deal with my health issues.

Stacy: You’ve had to learn to accept my help in ways you never anticipated, which hasn’t been easy for you.

Heather: Yeah.

Stacy: You’re terrified of being a burden, which you will never be to me, and I just want you to let me help you! I feel like that’s the thing I’ve probably said the most over the past two years: LET ME HELP YOU.

Heather: Yeah.

Stacy: Even now, you don’t really want to talk about it.

Heather: Nope! I sure do not! I never want to need help! Which is not a reflection on your ability or desire to help me — but, again, I grew up like one of those Disney orphans, like a little north Georgia Mowgli. My first word was “Toby,” which was the name of my grandparents’ dog, and my second word was a whole sentence, which was “Heather do it.”

Stacy: You have always been exactly who you are. One other thing we’ve had to sort of perpetually overcome is our relationships to our careers. I work all the time, and especially pre-Covid, I was in the office sometimes 20 hours a day. I’d see you for a second in the morning and at night, and, if we were lucky, we’d see each other on the weekends. Our jobs are exhausting in different ways.

Heather: Right, like, my job requires a lot of emotional labor and energy that I think most jobs don’t. And everyone has a finite amount of emotional energy to give, so I sometimes — before Covid — would run out of it before we were able to spend quality time together. And I hated that. I hated spending my best self on things that weren’t making our lives better together. That’s less of an issue now because I’ve had to start guarding my time and energy so much more since I got Long Covid.

Stacy: That’s another thing we’ve become great teammates on: navigating all the different ways people relate to you now. Because, um, well — not everyone has been great about it.

Heather: No. And that’s been tough. You have been my anchor and my strength. It is so much easier to stand up for myself with you beside me. You’ve also had to sacrifice a lot to keep me safe. Every career decision, every social decision, you’re always weighing that against the risk for me.

Stacy: That’s not a sacrifice. You’ve had to overcome a lot of my mood disorder stuff, which I’ve worked through a lot with therapy and medication. And we’ve worked through a lot of family trauma together because the ways we’ve experienced life, as kids, made the way we handle conflicts as adults very different. My fear of losing the people I love at any time for any reason.

Heather: And my fear of not being good enough, or loving enough. Not being good enough at love.

Stacy: Which is just — you are the best at loving.

Heather: Adding it to my Twitter bio. “Your friendly neighborhood soft butch, Autostraddle editor, best at loving.”

What’s your living situation like (together, separate, long distance with long visits, something else), how often do you see each other and why?

Stacy: Well, we live together with our four children, who are cats.

Heather: Our two sons and two daughters.

Stacy: Just four cats we gave birth to and who have everything any children could ever want to be happy, including seeing us every second of every day, inside our house, where we’ve been for two years now.

Heather: Sometimes we text from different rooms. Or tweet at each other while sitting beside each other on the couch. And recently I called you from the bedroom because you accidentally locked me inside it.

Stacy: Because we have to keep Beth March, our daughter, away from Quasar, our other daughter, because they hate each other and Beth can open doors.

Heather: And that’s our living situation!

How do you all share expenses or work out finances? How do you share or split up labor in the relationship? Can you talk about why that is?

Stacy: We split it based on our salaries.

Heather: Yeah, our expenses are proportional to the amount of money we make. And in terms of labor — well, emotional labor, I feel like is completely evenly split. Neither of us take up the most emotional space or do the most emotional work, it ebbs and flows and always feels even to me. For household labor, we really lucked out because I love to clean. It’s a stress relief for me. It makes me feel great to clean. But, like, a big Saturday cleaning stresses you out. But then you do the daily cleaning, like every night you go around and pick up all the loose mugs and water bottles and stuff, load up and run the dishwasher, and empty it first thing in the morning. And you do the hardest housework, which is cleaning the bathtub drain.

Stacy: That’s not the hardest; it’s just the grossest!

Heather: That makes it the hardest! Also, when I was in my acute phase of Long Covid, or when I’m crashing, you basically did everything. Not basically. You did everything.

Stacy: And I’d fuckin’ do it again!

Do you have kids, pets, plants, all three? Do you not currently have, but want any of these things? Why? Are you in agreement?

Stacy: We are in agreement that we do not have, have never wanted, and will never want human children.

Heather: Yup! I love human children, I’m great with human children.

Stacy: I wish human children all the best.

Heather: You can drop off your children with me for a couple of hours.

Stacy: As long as they don’t touch our stuff.

Heather: We do have a lot of expensive toys. I would have a heart attack if I saw some peanut butter hands grabbing at our PS5. I won’t even let the cats mess with my Legos.

Stacy: Maybe if somebody didn’t put literally everything he sees in his mouth. Which is also why we can’t have plants. You’d probably love to have a thriving indoor garden if Socks hadn’t already tried to poison himself with flowers.

Heather: In addition to temporarily paralyzing himself twice.

Stacy: Right, our hands are already full with our cat children.

How would you describe the sex you have together (if you have sex)?

Heather: So when we got together, and as our relationship has grown and deepened, we’ve had to talk a lot about what we’re willing to share and not share on the internet. My job, the way I write, it’s very open, very real, very vulnerable — and while everything I do share with people is the full truth, I don’t share all of who I am and what I do in my writing. And one of the things we decided, early on, is to not talk about our sex life.

Stacy: And, look, I love it when queer people talk and write about their sex life! Not just because it destigamtizes queer sex — and pleasure for not straight people, in general — but also because I think it’s cool that people who love to talk about sex have a place to do it! I think maybe my Catholic guilt and shame around sex is at play here.

Heather: And probably my Baptist guilt and shame as well.

Stacy: I want gays to talk about sex! I just can’t really, in public.

Heather: But have you heard of our cats?

Do you think your relationship will more or less continue to exist as it currently is? Why?

Stacy: I don’t think any relationship stays the same, even if people want their relationships not to change. Even if, for some reason, you’re not growing or changing as a person, your relationship will face plenty of outside pressure that’s going to force you to grow and adapt. I’m not the same person as I was when we met, and you aren’t either — and that’s a good thing. Our relationship has gotten better and better over time because we’ve gotten better and better at being the people we want to be, for ourselves and for each other. I love that you give me freedom to grow. I love that you’re not threatened by the ways I change. And I love that you keep growing as well.

Heather: I also think that for all the hard things Covid has done to my body and brain, I have also become so much more aware of what I’m doing and feeling and why I’m doing and feeling it, and so much more deliberate in the ways I spend myself and my time, and I want to take all that knowledge and apply it to our lives even if things ever do go back to a more “normal” pace. If you’re back in the office every day, if I am able to work more, if we’re able to go back out in the world and be in social spaces. I’ve become a better person and better partner since I got sick, and I would love to know what that looks like in the wider world.

Stacy: But I do think we’re going to keep having fun in the same ways, making each other laugh, being generous and gentle with each other. I think we’ll just keep getting closer. I hope we will.

Heather: I’ve always suspected we’re going to come out of this pandemic like those twin toddlers who speak a language only the two of them can understand, and our friends are gonna be like, “Uhh…” I mean they kind of already are with us. Like that really annoying thing where a couple takes half an hour to jointly tell a story about a piece of mail getting delivered and at the end they’re laughing so hard and everyone else is like, “So, you… got some mail?” I traveled a lot in my single life, and there’s a million reasons we’ve only been able to travel a little bit as a couple. I hope we can travel all over the world in the future.

Stacy: I want to take you to Iceland so bad.

Heather: Me too! Gimme those hot springs!

What would you say are your most fundamental differences?

Stacy: I think we’re way more different than we are alike.

Heather: Oh, absolutely.

Stacy: You are full of loving energy, warmth, and optimism — and none of those are my natural state of being.

Heather: You are full of warmth for me.

Stacy: Just for you.

Heather: You’re more of a realist because you’ve had to deal with some really, really hard things in your life, and being clear-eyed helps you feel like tragedy is not going to catch you off guard.

Stacy: At least that’s how I justify it to myself.

Heather: But also you never rain on my parade. You never try to temper my optimism. You never try to keep me from hoping with my full heart. You always support that, you always lift me up and encourage me in that.

Stacy: The only time I try to temper your optimism is when it’s in relation to my own success.

Heather: Which is nuts because you are verifiably incredibly successful in your career in a very tough industry. And you’re only going to continue to—

Stacy: Moderately successful.

Heather: Very successful.

Stacy: Moder—

Heather: Oh my god, we’re doing it right now. I think you just will never love the art you create as much as I love the art you create.

Stacy: That’s because hardly any art is perfect and I need to be perfect.

Heather: Let’s see, how else are we different? I’m very tall. And you’re average height.

Stacy: I am not! I am short as fuck!

Heather: But you have the energy of a tall person! You have the energy of a woman who’s 5’9″!

Stacy: I do not have taller energy than Villanelle.

Heather: How tall is Villanelle?

Stacy: 5’8″.

Heather: You just know that off the top of your head.

Stacy: Yes. How tall is Candace Parker?

Heather: 6’4″.

Stacy: Okay then.

Heather: We have very different taste in women. You like femme-y women who have surprise dyke energy. A feminine woman who takes up space.

Stacy: Yes! With her hands in her tailored suit pockets, making a man look like a fool.

Heather: And I like powerful, brilliant, older women. I’ve never really understood our youth-obsessed culture. Like. Give me a woman who has lived some life. Give me a woman. It’s funny, you do love women who can make men look like fools, but you hate it when I get in fights with men on the street, which I am always ready to do.

Stacy: That’s because you are not a fictional trained assassin; you are my wife and I don’t want you to get hurt! Men can be violent and volatile and terrible!

Heather: One huge difference between us is that you love new things. You would watch a new movie, a new TV show, read a new book, eat a new meal, wear a new outfit every single day if you could. You love to try new things. I love routine, and once I find something I love, that’s it. That’s what I’m ordering off the menu, those are the socks I’m going to buy for the rest of my life.

Stacy: I like fancy milkshakes and you like plain chocolate milkshakes.

Heather: You like bloody, stabby TV—

Stacy: Especially if it’s a feminine woman in a suit taking up space with the stabby-ness.

Heather: And I like cartoons.

Do you all have any shared dreams/goals for the future or each other? What are these?

Stacy: I want — and I think this is what you want, too — us both to feel fulfilled creatively, whether that’s in our careers or hobbies or both. I want us to be as healthy and comfortable in our bodies as we can be. I want us to always feel safe with each other. I want us to be content and always growing. I would say I want us to be happy, but—

Heather: There is an undercurrent of depression that will always run through both of our lives.

Stacy: Right. Just clown show happiness is not either of our natural ways of being.

Heather: I want a washer and dryer inside our house. And I want us to eat a dinner prepared by Melissa King.

Stacy: Oh my god.

Heather: And I want us to continue to use our resources to do the most good that we can in the world in our fleeting time living these wild and precious lives.

What piece of pop culture do you share or what piece of pop culture reminds you of your relationship? What’s your movie or your show or your book or your song?

Stacy: Well, we first bonded over Naomily. That will always be a touchstone. Fuckers. And we loved watching Killing Eve together. Also fuckers. But usually I like stuff that’s dark and heavy and you like stuff that makes you laugh and think, stuff that heals your inner child. Except sports. We love sports. All women’s sports, and you tolerate football.

Heather: We also don’t really listen to the same kind of music, but I do have a lot of fond memories with you and Beach House. “Teen Dream,” especially.

Stacy: We had some good times to that album. Of all the music I listen to, you like chillwave vibes the best.

Heather: For sure, and of all the country music I listen to, you only like Dolly Parton.

Stacy: I don’t want to disregard an entire genre of music, but I just don’t have the same experience with country music as you do. I grew up in Wisconsin, staying up all night watching MTV2 and downloading music off of Napster.

Where do you locate your relationship on the monogamy / polyamory spectrum? What philosophies do you have around how you handle monogamy / polyamory? How do you feel this impacts your relationship?

Heather: I’ve heard a lot of people say recently that you can only be monogamous if you believe in The One or if your partner can meet all your sexual / emotional / spiritual needs. But that’s not how I experience monogamy. I don’t think the universe set you apart for me, and to be everything I’ll ever need. I chose you and I choose you, every day, and I will keep choosing you for the rest of my life. I don’t expect you to meet all my needs, just like you don’t expect me to meet all your needs. That’s bonkers. You are, simply, my person, the one I’m going to keep fully investing my time and my feelings and my efforts and my shared story with. For always and always.

Stacy: You are my person too.

To wrap up, tell us a funny story about your partner!

Heather: I’ll go first. So, as we said, you are a lot smaller than me, which means my legs are like twice as long as yours. When we were first dating and I was visiting you in NYC, I heard a Mister Softee ice cream truck drive by and freaked out. I hadn’t seen an ice cream truck in decades. So I went running out the door with my shoes half on, tripping all over myself — and next thing I knew, I saw your tiny little body whizzing past me, hair flying in the wind, and you were yelling, “Tie your shoes! You’ll fall and break your face! Tie your shoes!” You ran half a block and chased down that ice cream guy for me, screaming the whole way for me to just stop and get myself together and you’d hold the ice cream guy until I was safely able to get to the window.

Stacy: I just want you to have everything you ever want!

Heather: I know.

Stacy: It’s hard for me to choose a single funny story about you because you make me laugh so hard every single day. You are just effortlessly so funny. It’s pretty wild that, two years into being in the same house with each other every second of every day, you still make me laugh more than anyone. Lately what’s made me laugh the most is when something amazing happens in whatever WNBA game we’re watching and you jump up and go berserk like a little kid. You completely lose control of your body and screech and flail all over the place.