She thought she’d be married forever—until she met a woman named Emily. What came next involved heartbreak, horniness, and a summer of queer self-discovery in Italy.
When I found myself crying on the bathroom floor, yet again, I couldn’t help but think of Eat, Pray, Love. Maybe you know the scene—at the beginning of the book, Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor and thinking to herself, I don’t want to be married anymore. And while I wasn’t thinking that (not yet anyway), I knew my husband and I were in danger and I could feel a black, menacing cloud just outside my line of vision, taunting me.
Several months earlier, I’d met a woman.
Up until this point, I’d always identified as straight. Not straight-ish, not queer, not even really queer-curious. Straight. I was 34 years old. I began dating my husband when we were in college, and when he asked me to marry him—on a backpacking trip in the Ecuadorian Andes, overlooking a valley in shades of green I’d never seen before—I was queasy but hopeful.
We were together for nearly 14 years, married for seven. Ensconced in our community of friends in Austin, with our dogs, I sometimes felt a deep, uncomplicated sense of gratitude spill out of me like the rays of the sun. Mostly, I never really analyzed our partnership. I’d married my best friend, the person I most wanted to hang out with at any given moment—what else was there to think about? It was true that sexual intimacy had begun to feel fraught for me in the last couple of years, and it was also true that I’d gotten used to having some of my emotional needs met by female friends. But in my mind this was the normal course of a hetero marriage.
After a decade in Austin, my husband and I decided to move back to the small Southern city where we’d gone to college. I’d been anticipating this decision for years, having always thought of this city as our true home, but still, leaving our friends and our home in Austin felt unfathomable.
A couple of weeks before the big move, on my husband’s last day of work, I picked him up at his office. He introduced me to his newest coworker, Emily. Immediately, I could feel an energy between us, which I didn’t interpret as a crush, even when I asked my husband about her later over margaritas. “She seems really cool,” I said, picturing her boyish build and pretty face.
A few days later, I knew—I had my first same-sex crush. Emily came to our going-away party at a bar, and we danced together, our bodies miraculously in sync. The thought, I could be gay, popped into my head, unbidden. But where had this come from? How could my sexuality have shifted seemingly overnight?
All I knew when I met Emily was that nothing about my crush felt casual. Though I’d never cheated on my husband, I was suddenly willing to risk everything if it meant I could kiss this woman, a stranger. Two days before we left Austin for good, I called Emily through Instagram (“Are you seriously calling me through Instagram right now?” she laughed) and asked if she wanted to meet me at a park. At night. I remember telling her my husband and I had an “arrangement,” a lie that flew out of my mouth as easily as my own name.
My line of thinking went something like: I’ll just meet her this one time, we’ll make out, and I’ll get it out of my system. No one has to know! It can be this beautiful memory for when I’m on my deathbed and thinking back on all my adventures. One time I lived on a vegetable farm in the Cascades! One time I hiked the Grande-Randonnée in the South of France! One time I kissed a woman in a park at night!
When I think about this night now, my mind tends to focus on the good parts. The full-body electric jolt when I saw her. The cicadas’ song pulsing through the trees. Her hands in my hair. My hands on her face. The most perfect first kiss imaginable. How is this real? How are you real? I remember thinking, over and over. I may have even said those words out loud.
I don’t like to recall the other parts because they’re not nice. How I lost track of time, and my husband got worried and came looking for me (we shared each other’s location), and found Emily and I making out in the park. We went home and cried and talked for most of the night, and then we packed moving boxes in the gray morning light. We’d both contracted COVID at our going-away party, along with about a dozen other friends, most of whom were now too sick to help us move. I thought then that that was the worst it was going to get.
After The Kiss and The Move, my husband and I tried to get back on track. But something inside me had shifted, and it was stubbornly refusing to shift back. I couldn’t stop thinking about Emily. I couldn’t stop watching Call Me By Your Name and Blue Is the Warmest Color in the bathtub and crying.
One day I came home to find my husband sitting at our kitchen table, red-eyed and rubbing his forehead. “I think what makes the most sense is that…you and Emily have a friendship. And maybe sometimes you meet up, and there’s a sexual component to the relationship,” he said. I immediately started sobbing with relief and hugged him, his body as familiar to me as my own. I’d loved this man since I was 20 years old, and I wanted to keep loving him. We’d met a couple of polyamorous couples recently. Maybe there was a way we, too, could get certain needs met from other people.
Never mind that I’d stopped wanting to be physically intimate with my husband. Never mind that each time we had sex, it somehow felt akin to an assault. This is when the jagged bouts of weeping on the bathroom floor began.
So we tried polyamory (which was fun for about two seconds), coupled with therapy. Emily and I struck up a long-distance courtship that completely consumed me. The first time we met up to have sex, the first time I had sex with a woman, it lasted nearly 36 hours. We brought all this food—lovingly prepared salads and dips, fancy cheeses and olives—and barely touched any of it. I called a friend on the way home, and though she was thrilled for me, she also sounded slightly concerned. “Do you think this will change your marriage?” she asked me. “No way,” I replied. “I think it’s totally possible to have our relationship and have sex with people on the side.” She could hear something in my voice that I couldn’t, at least not yet.
The end came eventually. After months of therapy, painful conversations, and trying and failing at polyamory—the latter of which, as it turned out, was not the answer to my gayness—my husband and I separated. If I thought about it now, the real end was that night in the park with Emily. Not because I kissed someone else (please), but because of how fiercely I’d turned inward, some deeper part of me already attuned to the knowledge that this was a place my husband couldn’t come with me.
Every day after we separated was like falling deeper and deeper into a mass of quicksand, until I could barely move. I struggled to form sentences, to eat, to breathe. Hadn’t I just been married to my best friend? How could I be gay and divorced and alone now?
I wanted to get away. I knew I couldn’t rely on travel to magically solve my problems—but I also knew that solitude in a foreign place could be clarifying, even creatively generative, if I let it. Though I had very little disposable income, I had a remote job and a willingness to go anywhere I could find a house- or pet-sitting gig. I started trawling Facebook groups, and one of the first posts I saw was for a dog-sitter for two months in Conversano, Italy. Italy. As in, the first country Elizabeth Gilbert traveled to in Eat, Pray, Love. I had to laugh—like scores of white female divorcees before me, I would go from crying on the bathroom floor to eating carbonara in a trattoria in Italy.
A tiny, sleepy town in Puglia—the region that forms the heel of Italy’s boot—Conversano is often bypassed by tourists in favor of flashier destinations along the coast. On our first video call, my host was quick to warn me, “You should know that very few people speak English here. It’s not like Rome or Tuscany.” Who cared? It was only two months, and I’d be in Italy! I knew I’d get lonely, but what was a little loneliness compared to the horror show of losing my husband/my first girlfriend/my life as I knew it?
Set back a few miles from the Adriatic Sea, Conversano in the summer was all sunbaked streets, dusty shops, barren alleys. The historic center’s white limestone buildings were blinding by day but pleasantly aglow at night, when families strolled along the cobblestone. I quickly settled into a routine, spending my days wandering, writing, and taking the bus to the sea to swim and read in the same rocky cove. I felt pleasantly numb, a welcome change from the manic highs and lows of the last year.
It took all of a week or so to become lonely enough to get on the apps, which I’d briefly done back home, for the first time ever, before it made me too depressed. In Italy, though, the apps would provide necessary contact with the outside world.
I began swiping like a madwoman, eager to flex my gayness (and in Europe, no less!). First, I matched with the Sexy Chef. A personal chef from South Africa, she worked for a wealthy family who spent their summers in Puglia, preparing all their meals and also catering to their non-food-related whims. One night, during her rare time off, she picked me up in the family car to go eat pizza. The Sexy Chef had major Gwyneth Paltrow vibes. She was self-possessed, languidly calm. As we sipped our spritzes in a small piazza—teeming with life at 10 p.m. on a weekday—I felt intimidated.
“So, when did you know you were queer?” I asked her, trying to find common ground. She wrinkled her nose, and I could tell she found my question distasteful. “I don’t really think about labels. I dated a woman in high school. But most of my relationships have been with men, and I’m really just attracted to the person.”
But that is queer, I thought, feeling annoyed with her for not wanting to call herself gay. Of course this reaction had nothing to do with her. When I was first coming out, it felt imperative that I find a label and stick to it in order to help digest my swift exit from hetero-land. “Queer” felt right, but also not enough, and “lesbian” felt scary, but also enticing.
Next, there was the Italian. The Italian and I chatted for hours every day for a week. The day before we planned to meet up, I asked her where she’d learned English. There was a long pause, and then she replied, “Haha! Thank you, but I’ve been using Google Translate! I can only speak a little English.” I was undeterred (I was horny).
Before our date, I put on a new yellow backless slip dress and danced around to Chappell Roan. It was the holy summer of Chappell, Muna, and boygenius. I was dating women in Italy; I was feeling myself. The Italian pulled up to my apartment in her tiny car, puffing on a cigarette. Immediately, I was caught off-guard—not because of the cigarette (it’s Italy), but because she was at least 10 years older than in her app photos. Seriously, what hope is there for the rest of us when even hot Italian masc lesbians are putting misleading pics on their profiles? I thought.
Things went downhill from there. We could barely communicate, obviously. We also had zero chemistry and quickly grew bored, then borderline hostile toward each other. I asked her to try just talking to me instead of Google Translating everything, because I speak French and a little bit of Spanish, and also I’d been going hard on my Duolingo Italian. And also maybe we could just kiss? “You speak French? I hate French!” she translated into her phone.
My friends back home and I started calling this time my “Eat, Pray, Pussy,” using the phrase as a noun. “How’s your Eat, Pray, Pussy going?” they would ask me. I hadn’t hit it off with anyone, but that was almost beside the point. The point was I was having fun—which, after the year I’d had, wasn’t frivolous in the slightest.
I kept dating. There was the Nerd. The first time we met up, in a town neither of us had been to, she immediately enveloped me in a warm hug and then charged off down the street. “I did some research and found a few places I thought we could try, if you don’t mind,” she tossed over her shoulder. The Nerd was a language teacher at a prestigious New York high school who visited Europe every summer. She taught French and Spanish, spent her spare time picking up other languages (German and Arabic thus far), and was now in Italy to learn Italian.
She took me to a gourmet grocery store with an enormous cheese counter where we sat outside, drank salty white wine, and devoured plate after plate of meats and cheeses the counter guy kept bringing out to us. The Nerd had charmed him with her massively infectious smile and—no surprises here—already excellent Italian. We talked a lot about how, growing up in the ’90s and aughts, pop culture had taught us that being a lesbian meant you were ugly, which was the worst thing a woman could possibly be. It will always feel insane to me to hold the homophobic culture of my past with the progressive culture of today.
For a brief moment, there was the Sad German. The first time I saw the Sad German, sitting at a café, my immediate thought was, Oh, this woman is not okay. The sadness was coming off her skin in huge waves; you could almost smell it. In short, she’d come to Italy for a woman who’d promptly dumped her as soon as she arrived. The Sad German couldn’t stop crying, which made getting to know her difficult, so we cut the date short.
A couple of weeks before I was set to leave Italy, I matched with the Austrian. For our first date we went on a boat tour of Polignano a Mare, a picturesque town perched on limestone cliffs, overlooking the turquoise waters of the Adriatic. On the tour, our guide blasted Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent the entire time, and we couldn’t stop laughing. She spent the night—it was the first time I’d had sex with a woman since Emily, and it was nice. Not earth-shattering, not identity-shattering, but nice. I used to dissociate so hard during sex it was a wonder I didn’t float away like a child’s lost balloon. Not anymore.
By the end of the summer, truth be told, I’d had enough of Italy. After the Austrian, I lost the momentum of my earlier app-dating. I still couldn’t really speak Italian, despite my best Duolingo efforts, so I stopped speaking. I was like a ghost, drifting around the cobblestones, still mourning my old life even as I embraced my queerness. With its walled medieval center, Conversano had started to feel a bit like a beautiful prison.
Luckily, I’d decided to spend a long weekend in Paris before I headed home. And in a spur-of-the-moment text, I invited the Austrian to join me for part of it, and she said yes. (The last time I’d been to Paris was on my honeymoon. But I didn’t want to dwell on that.)
After being cocooned in small-town solitude all summer, it was a shock to walk out of the Belleville metro stop and be confronted with Paris, the Paris of Before Sunset and Amelie. The smell of freshly baked baguettes hit my nostrils and I wanted to weep. None of this compared to the moment when, after lugging my suitcase up six flights of stairs, I walked into my Airbnb and saw the lush expanse of the Parc de Belleville and the panoramic view of the city, Eiffel Tower included. I did start weeping then. I was in Paris! I was gay and in Paris! I was gay and in Paris with a woman who had packed multiple dildos for the occasion! I felt like the dyke Carrie Bradshaw.
The Austrian and I had fun while she was there, holding hands at the Centre Pompidou, making out in cafés, biking around the city, going to queer bars. But I was happiest when she left, so I could be in my favorite city alone. As I walked around Paris those final days, I could feel my thoughts drifting and disappearing like little clouds, as they had all summer. Some thoughts had started to stick, though.
I could see now that I hadn’t been one person in my marriage and another when it was over. Those selves weren’t disparate; they were me. The intense sorrow of the recent past didn’t negate the happiness of my marriage, and my straight marriage didn’t negate my Very Gay present. For the first time in a long time, I felt my future unspooling under my feet, mysterious years that almost surely contained more blistering heartbreak, more unfettered joy. I didn’t need to go to Italy or Paris to feel some clarity about my situation or begin truly embracing my gayness. But I was very glad that I had.
Main Image Stefano Madrigali
All other images courtesy of Justine Harrington
