the individual’s sense of self worth. There is almost nothing more important to
most people than to feel a successful and valuable member of one’s own group
and lesbians are no different in this regard.
As a result, issues involving relationship establishment, maintenance and
endings are, at the very same time, individual and cultural. The lesbian
subculture in the United States has its own unwritten code of relating. Although I
focus this article on American lesbians, in my experience, lesbian groups in
Western Europe and Latin America, follow much the same practices. I can not
generalize beyond the cultures with which I have had direct experience. Celia
and Cheryl would find themselves at home in the lesbian groups in these other
countries.
Actually there is tension between individual differences and cultural
commonalities that must be maintained. That is, every lesbian is different from
all others and defies generalization and yet there are clear cultural commonalities
as well. This tension is not resolvable, but informs the work of a psychologist. In
this article, I will attempt to walk this tightrope without a safety net.
In order to consider the reasons why lesbian couples break up and how they do
so, we must carefully and contextually define our terms. That is, we must go
back to the beginning to ask the most basic questions.
1. What is a lesbian?
2. What is a lesbian couple?
3. What, how and why do these relationships end?
These may seem to be very obvious, especially to readers of this magazine, but
let’s just be sure. The obvious can often conceal, in its very assumptions, the
less obvious. There are few strategies more effective than hiding in plain sight.
Let me begin then with the really obvious first question. Among the many things
that lesbians are, they are first girls and then women in a culture that demands
that females be compulsively focused on the care and maintenance of
relationships, that the very definition of female involves an embeddedness in
relationships, for better or for worse. More accurately, it should be said that this
quality, like most other human characteristics, functions for better and for worse.
This focus creates a sensitivity to others that is the core of compassion and
humanity, but can do so at a high price to oneself and can become compulsive
and driven. As with many qualities, it is in the balance that is achieved.
Although it is certainly possible for lesbians and heterosexual wo men alike to
resist these cultural demands and to identify with another gender role, most
lesbians are not socialization failures in this particular regard. Furthermore,
lesbian is the only coupled arrangement that involves two of these socialized
women, so the concern with relationships is squared. This arrangement has both
