First person: Katherine Holden and Helen Kendall have found happiness together - despite not being lovers
Are you two lesbians?" This question has been implicitly and occasionally explicitly asked by friends, family and strangers since we first bought a house together more than 15 years ago. The answer then and now is no. But the question that is never asked is, "Are you friends?" Friendship holds little place among the array of partnerships recognised and celebrated. Perhaps like singleness, divorce and widowhood, it suggests a lack, an absence and possibly a failure. As two friends living together, sharing a home and a partnership, we no longer mind that we are rarely invited to dinner parties together or that it has taken some friends and family members many years to include both our names on Christmas cards. We rarely notice that an explanation is required of our "strange" status of friendship, whereas the newly married are instantly joined together and consequently receive cards and invitations addressed to both parties.
Katherine: These things were not so easy to accept when we first set up house together in 1993. Helen had been my "best friend" since I was 15. She had lived with my family in the late 1960s and, as my unofficial foster-sister, remained my closest confidante. Over the next quarter-century of experimentation and turmoil in various relationships with men, I often looked to her for elder-sisterly support. However, by the time I reached 40, I needed a different focus in my life. Neither marriage nor cohabitation nor, indeed, children were on my horizon, but living alone and the "spectre" of lifelong spinsterhood hardly seemed attractive alternatives.
I was a mature student about to embark on a PhD and money was tight. Helen's youngest son had recently flown the nest and it seemed sensible to pool our resources and share our lives. Of course, we had to make compromises. We lived in different cities. I was keen to get out of the inner city but reluctant to leave my network of friends. I longed for a cottage in the country, Helen preferred the town. But resources were limited and in the end we bought a 1930s house with a big garden near great local shops and with the country on our doorstep.
We are not a couple but I am now no longer single in the sense of being on my own, and we live in a relationship that has no name. In the eyes of the law, I am single and Helen is not my partner, and though we have a strong commitment, neither of us has ruled out future relationships with men, nor the possibility of marriage.
Helen: A relationship like ours with no sex, even though married or gay civil partnerships may share some of its characteristics, has little standing. It seems to belie description and is not recognised as having a viable or long-term existence. But I had a model. My beloved aunt Kitty, a single woman, shared a home and a life with another woman, Mabs, for more than 50 years. These two women offered me time for my concerns; they listened to my worries about what to wear as a teenager, shared my love of dancing and as a young child gave me a refuge from the restraints of my parents. When Kitty died it was her friend Mabs, not her family, who followed her coffin and wept for her loss. In the same way Katherine is my confidante, supporting me when things go wrong, sharing day-to-day concerns and celebrating my successes. Like my aunt's friend, when Katherine had a serious operation in 2003, it was me who stood and watched as she disappeared down the long corridor on the way to the operating theatre, holding tightly to the rings she always wore and fearing I might lose a very dear friend. It was also me who organised celebrations of her academic achievements, her birthdays and her book launch.
I had been married for 12 years but was now divorced and had brought up my children alone during their teenage years. I would have welcomed another heterosexual partnership but this was not to be. So when Katherine and I set up home together, although we had known each other for many years, we knew that we would have to make adjustments, sort out our difficulties, accommodate our different family demands and pleasures, and find a way to live companionably together.
We began by having separate living rooms but always shared our evening meals. Over time the shape of the house, built for one household, slowly changed this arrangement. Increasingly we shared our daily activities and enjoyed each other's visitors. We still have separate studies as well as bedrooms and have had to learn how to give each other space and adjust to different daily rhythms. Katherine is a morning person and I am not. She finds it hard not to chatter brightly at a time when I feel hardly alive, while I sometimes find her sleepiness in the evening frustrating. However, we both greatly enjoy leisurely shared breakfasts at weekends, with eggs from our own hens, holidays together, discussing each other's work and celebrating with each other's families.
My family has grown used to the arrangement, as has Katherine's large extended family, including her elderly parents, three brothers, and numerous nieces, nephews and cousins. A friend of one of my sons at one time said, "I see your Mum's become a lesbian now." My son made it clear this was not the case, though this may not have been easy to explain. Our families are very important to both of us and the inevitable conflicts of love and loyalty have to be included in the friendship that Katherine and I share. We have both learnt to adapt to and develop complementary relationships with members of each other's families that enliven and extend our shared and separate lives in different and important ways.
Katherine: Before Helen and I began to live together, I studied the history of singleness. My obsession with the subject has since grown, from an undergraduate dissertation to a PhD thesis, and is now a book that has been shaped as much by the dynamics of our relationship as it has by my research into the past. I could not have written it without Helen's help. I, too, found models for our relationship. I remembered my great-aunt Norah, an archetypal spinster who lived with my family in the 1960s. Then in her 80s, she was regarded with a mixture of admiration, pity and exasperation, and by me with a secret fear that I might end up like her. We laughed at her eccentricities - she was a theosophist and vegetarian, her nutty rissoles were legendary. But her past sounded fascinating. She had travelled through China and India in the 1930s, and had a flat in London during and after the second world war where my mother frequently took refuge in early adulthood. Photographs of her younger self did not fit the spinster stereotype: she always seemed to be smiling or laughing. Yes she was single, but she was also at the centre of a network of family and friends that seemed to be as sustaining emotionally as many marriages.
I remembered too that my mother stayed with her aunt Lilla and companion Nona while her parents were abroad in India. Nona and Lilla's early 20th-century friendship and lifestyle appeared closer to Helen's and my relationship than many others we have encountered in 21st-century Britain. Women in Norah's situation, and friendships like Lilla's and Nona's, were much more common in the 1920s and 30s, partly as a result of the greater numbers of women than men in the population after the first world war. This gave them a good cover story, one which I can't use even if I wanted to. "We couldn't get married because there were no men," was a common story that made it easier to explain spinsterhood.
Nevertheless, questions about sexual orientation must at times have also hung over Lilla's and Nona's relationship. Fears about lesbianism made women living together cautious about naming or celebrating close friendships - personal papers and letters were often destroyed. This was not always because women who lived together were lesbian but to do with their fear of stigma or being pathologised as frustrated spinsters who used other women as a poor substitute for men. As is still the case today, there was little understanding of the lack of social support offered to relationships between women. Laura Hutton, a clinical psychologist, might have been describing Helen's and my friendship when in 1935 she pointed out that "such partnerships in living get nothing comparable with the hopeful start of every normal marriage, although they may and often do represent what has been called the 'major relationship' of two women's lives". Most importantly, we have made a commitment to one another that bears no certificate but is based on a deep and lasting love and knowledge that whatever happens, our friendship will always be of the highest value in our lives.
Helen Like Katherine, I was aware of fears surrounding relationships between women. As teenagers at school we fuelled our unconscious anxieties about our futures by endlessly speculating on the nature of the relationships between the single women who taught us. Over the past 15 years, we have struggled to find a language to describe our bond of companionship, sharing an emotional but not a physical closeness, which is like but also unlike a marriage.
As in many marriages and families, we shop together, eat together, take turns to cook and sometimes quarrel, but usually end up agreeing on decorations and furnishings. We share the hens and cats but I do most work in the garden and Katherine on the allotment. We found we needed separate outdoor spaces where we could express our individual creativity. But learning to live comfortably together did not happen overnight and has taken years of negotiation and adjustment.
Katherine and Helen We wonder how our difficulties and the major changes we have had to adjust to are similar to those experienced in reconstructed families. The key difference may be that step-families, half-brothers and half-sisters share the terminology of kinship, whereas friendship, still, is identified as remaining outside the family circle and remains quietly uncelebrated.
Katherine Holden's book The Shadow of Marriage: Singleness in England 1914-1960, is published by Manchester University Press. For further details email Katherine.Holden@uwe.ac.uk