In Praise Of Love With A Woman

When Ginny Dougary married for the second time, aged in her 60s, it wasn’t to another man, but to a woman. As she writes in this heartfelt story, she is not alone in finding love as a “Late Onset Lesbian”.

It was a wonderful day; clear blue skies, the low winter sun lighting up the sea, even the unusually balmy weather seeming to conspire to give the occasion an extra blessing.

This was my second wedding, in December, with almost 40 years between the two. At the first, barely out of our teens, the tousled-haired boy I met at university and I were pronounced husband and wife. At the second, in our early 60s, my female partner and I chose to be named each other’s one and only. This was in a follow-up ceremony to the one at the Town Hall where, legally, we had to be declared each other’s wives.

I first started noticing articles about a fascinating, apparently new, phenomenon called Late Onset Lesbianism some years ago now, and thought, “Hang on, they’re writing about me” – and with my fondness for a silly acronym, instantly declared that in that case I must be a LOL.

The accompanying photos tended to be of a small number of well-known women, where one member of the couple had either been married to a man with whom she had a family or who had previously been viewed as heterosexual. Susie Orbach, the UK psychologist and writer, with novelist and lesbian Jeanette Winterson; former Great British Bake Off presenter Sue Perkins and her partner Anna Richardson, previously in a relationship with a male film director for 18 years; and Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon, now running for New York Governor, who was in a long-term relationship with the father of their two children before she fell in love with a gay woman, Christine Marinoni, with whom she had a third child, a son, in 2011.