Originally drafted on October 10-12, 2025, May 11 & 30, 2026, and June 3, 2026.
Revised June 4, 2026.

Right after my husband left me, one of the first thoughts I had that left me doubled over in the shower crying was that I would never have to experience another relationship without the reciprocity of affection I so desperately craved during my marriage, because I would never let myself get that far again into a relationship that didn’t meet my emotional needs.

And some short time later, I don’t remember if it was hours or days or weeks, I had a second revelation, which is that I no longer had the excuse of my marriage to prevent exploring being with women. 

For many years during my (presumably monogamous) marriage, I would have fleeting thoughts of vague wistfulness, realizing that if my husband and I were together for the rest of our lives that I’d never experience being in a relationship with a woman. This was always the realm of fantasy, quite literally, but something that I never really allowed myself to dwell on or take seriously beyond “well maybe in another lifetime,” the breezy way in which we dismiss the path not taken. 

A few months into my separation, I began to tell my close inner circle that while I was in no position to date anytime soon and likely wouldn’t be for months, I was planning on dating women once I put myself back out there. And in fact, I think I put off dating longer specifically because I knew I wanted to prioritize dating women. I had, and still have, so much anger and resentment towards men in general that if I had wanted to date them at all, I kind of didn’t give a shit about inflicting my wounded and traumatized ass on them. But if I were new to dating women, I didn’t want to be as messy and unhealed as I was in the period before my divorce was finalized.

If you had asked me what my sexuality was in my 20s and 30s, I probably would have told you I was “mostly straight.” Obviously, the word “mostly” was quite the load-bearing adverb. There was some quote I had encountered from a Jake Gyllenhaal interview years ago around the Brokeback Mountain release where he said he thought he was straight but if at some point he realized he was gay, he would be open to figuring out what that looked like. That deeply resonated with me when I read it. 

I never really took my sexuality seriously, because it didn’t even really occur to me that it might be something worth exploring. Over the last several years, both my ex-husband and I have had many friends who have come out as some flavor of queer and/or transitioned gender identities, and in nearly all of those circumstances the relationship those individuals were in at the time did not survive in their original form. I think I never even allowed myself to consider how accurate that “mostly” part of “mostly straight” was because there was almost certainly a subterranean part of my brain that was unwilling to risk the security of my marriage and the material benefits of being married.

Because the reality is: I was not wrong to have had this fear, even if I was never self-aware enough about my desires to recognize or vocalize such barriers. If I had ever taken my sexuality seriously, it almost certainly would have spelled the end of my marriage, along with all the downward mobility I ended up experiencing anyway once my ex-husband left me. My only regret, therefore, is that I didn’t figure this out long before I got married. I carry some sheepishness and shame that it was only in the aftermath of my unexpected divorce that I had the psychic space and opening to take my deeply repressed queer identity seriously. 

Over and over through last summer while I was still in the house that my ex and I owned, I’d be sitting on the couch or moving around the world and feel a very strong sense of “maybe God wants me to be a queer woman.” As I started to share what was going on with people in my inner circles, no one among my close friends or family got weird about it. Most were actually incredibly affirming and supportive. I know how profoundly lucky I am that I live in a time and place where this is possible, which is also part of what makes being on a late bloomer journey all the more bewildering. Because it’s not like I grew up with religious trauma or homophobic parents.¹ 

So why did it take me until 40 to start figuring this out? I have several essays worth of partially-baked thoughts in my drafts about how badly repression, childhood insecurity, and compulsory heterosexuality can do a real number on you, even someone as devoutly feminist as I have been since birth. I am currently identifying very comfortably as a queer woman among my friends, family, and the women I’ve dated recently. I strongly suspect that a year from now I will comfortably claim a lesbian identity, but I’m not quite all the way there yet. Queer feels expansive enough to accurately describe where I’m at (and my politics), but lesbian feels like something I have to earn.  

Being on a later in life queer journey is such an indescribably strange and weird experience. There is a lot of joy (kissing women is a thousand times better than kissing men, and even though I’ve been on a real rollercoaster with my first few months of dating women, I don’t miss a single thing about dating men), but there is also a lot of grief. I am haunted by two lines of thought: the first being whether I would have ever figured out my sexuality if my ex-husband had never left me, but the second being whether I could have saved myself the trauma of divorce if I had figured out my sexuality at a much younger age and never married a man in the first place.

No late bloomer queer journey looks alike, but something that many people have in common is the sense of turning into a detective of their own past, going back and looking for clues that we might have missed. Sometimes it comes from a cute place (like, my god look at that outfit for an art teacher at the beginning of this essay. GAY AS HELL!!!!) but sometimes it also comes from a fear of “if I could have missed all these signs, what else could I be deluding myself about?” 

It is also apparently a very common late bloomer characteristic that you have HUGE ALLY ENERGY years before you realize that it’s not just a heightened sense of justice for people you care about but also, eventually…. for yourself. In middle school I did my best to resist intensely homophobic teachers. When a deacon from my church died of an AIDS-related illness, we made an AIDS Memorial Quilt block. When I was barely able to vote, I did a little bit of voter advocacy for Cincinnati’s Campaign to Repeal Article XII. Weeks after the Obergefell case, my ex-husband and I carried a banner for his synagogue in Cincinnati’s Pride parade. I look back on all that now, and try not to dwell on “how could I have missed this?” but to marvel and thank my younger self for her work in clearing a path I had no idea I’d be on one day.

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