Design by Yosef Phelan

It’s a slow evening in a London bar: a frantic, mid-century-modern kaleidoscope with too-dim table lamps. I sit across from Lou, a woman I might consider an ex-girlfriend of sorts, drinking a sparkling tea that the waiter talked me into.

Lou objects to my labelling of our relationship. “We used to get drunk, have sex, and then argue,” she counters, and this is perhaps a more realistic recollection: the modus operandi of our short-lived teenage tryst was very much as described. Lou is openly a lesbian now and I am – for the most part – a gay man. My first pit stop on the way to understanding lavender marriages is here: the rehashed recollections of our own cover-up.

Awkwardness is common to many first relationships, but ours was less coy, more existential. When I describe the visceral reaction I’d have when we’d interact sober, Lou laughs: “Oh my god. ‘Dysphoria’ is the right word.” Canoodling on the steps at school, in front of the watchful and approving eyes of our peers, our movements were self-conscious and concerted: though our relationship felt earnest, we both experienced the same horror of being together but feeling alone.

Our situationship allowed us to tick off the adolescent milestones; even complaining about its lows made me feel more normal: for a second, I was a normal boy, moaning about his normal paramour. We experienced the melodramas of the maybe-missed period, the feeling of having your name adjoined, of becoming someone’s counterpart – “Lou and JJ,” though doomed, was at least something.

It’s tempting to chalk it up to coincidence, this sort of pairing, but when I ask Lou why she thinks we came to be, she cites our “spidey senses” – we knew that we were not the same as all our other friends. The price for our very brief admission into the “normal” world was this compromise: “The enemy of my enemy is my lover.”

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Marty Mar is a gay man in his mid-forties based in Arizona who has been married to a straight woman since 2011. He posts content about his lavender marriage with his wife, Brandi, on Instagram to his 80,000 or so followers. In one reel, he addresses whether their marriage is a sham. “My mortgage is real. My kid is real. The taxes I just filed are extremely real,” he says, leaning into the camera.

The lavender marriage is exactly this: one of convenience, a union between partners of mixed sexual orientation that pursues some other virtue beyond the usual trappings of romantic love and sexual intimacy.

The lavender marriage is exactly this: one of convenience, a union between partners of mixed sexual orientation that pursues some other virtue beyond the usual trappings of romantic love and sexual intimacy. Marriage is often a much more practical arrangement than modern Western society may like to admit. While “love marriages” are today’s status quo, we know that marriage is entered into for a variety of sociocultural, economic, and religious reasons – many marriages are arranged for the partners, too, often with minimal input from the to-be-wedded. For many queer people, a truly convenient marriage might be a straight one – a lavender marriage. Those of us who fold to society’s expectations may follow them to the letter, pursuing more abundant, heterosexual pastures.