Women Who Love Women: Unwinding The Personal Ties That Bind
WOMEN WHO LOVE WOMEN
Unwinding the personal ties that bind
perience feelings that are part of ending. Sex-
By CONSTANCE CRUMP
NEWS ARTS WRITER
Carol Becker is dedicating her new boo^to the woman with the broken heart. Her book, “Unbroken Ties: Lesbian Ex-Lovers,” will be published next spring by Alyson Publications, Inc.
Her interest in writing on unwinding the ties that bind women who love women grew out of personal experience.
“My lover and I had sat with friends during their break ups,” Becker writes, “but the end of my own relationship felt like being cut loose on an uncharted sea of pain.”
Becker is professor of human development at California State University, Hayward and has an active private practice in Berkeley and San Francisco. She talked about her forthcoming book on a recent trip through Ann Arbor on her way to her home territory in the Upper Peninsula.
Listening to the stories of the 40 women she interviewed in depth for the book confirmed her feeling that there’s a need for a rounded view of what happens when lesbians break up.
“I wanted to know how lesbian lovers separated,” she writes in the book’s introduction, “what they felt and did after the break up, what kinds of relationships they maintained with ex-lovers and what influenced the extent of contact between ex-lovers.”
She didn’t try to compare breaking up for lesbian couples and for heterosexual couples -that’s another whole book, she says. “Lesbians are bonded by being stigmatized as a minority,” she observes. “It encourages creation of community ties.”
Over the two and a half years from January, 1985 to May of this year, she collected 98 stories of ex-lover transitions from 40 lesbians. Most were white and middle class, ranging from 24 to 66 years old. A quarter of her subjects were women of color; half were from working class backgrounds.
After nine years of teaching research techniques in clinical psychology, Becker was excited about analyzing her own work. From 800 pages of data, she picked out the salient themes, pulling out pieces of the women’s stories that showed those points.
“My editor, Meredith Moran, helped me find my voice,” Becker says. “I was used to saying things in an academic way. Fortunately, there’s a trend in professional literature to show yourself and your ideas, a movement to put the people back in psychology.”
Becker discovered some basics in building friendships with ex-lovers:
“You have to let go of the old relationship, experience feelings that are part of ending. Sexual relations with ex-lovers sometimes lead to the same messes as before. Finding a balance between contact and separation is important. And it is important to see your ex. Otherwise, you're hooked into the old dynamic, a kind of freeze frame.”
The friendship must be well-defined, Becker points out. “Boundaries are needed,” she says. “You have to get clear about what’s special about that relationship.
“You can learn from the pain. It brings you to a new self-discipline. Talk about the break-up, especially with friends. You can trash your ex-lover with friends who support you.”
Becker says feelings of hope and progress help recovery. It’s possible, even probable to develop a satisfying relationship with an ex-lover, but this can mean anything from an “absent friendship” to a family friendship. An absent friendship, Becker says, is fictitious. The “friends” don’t spend any time together, even though they talk about being close.
What happens when children are involved? Various things, according to Becker. Among the 40 women she interviewed, 25 percent of the split-ups involved kids.
“One of the things I hope to do is show the diversity of experience,” Becker says. “I hope readers can find some people in the book they can identify with.”
PHOTO • IRENE YOUNG
Carol S. Becker collected 98 stories of ex-lover transitions from 40 lesbians interviewed.