A Cozt Settee An Intimate Tete-A-Tete—And A Proposition

Daphne Merkin’s love life seemed set, without much adventure left to be had. Then she met a sexually omnivorous  writer she’d long admired—and everything changed

- Daphne Merkin

The proposition happens out of the blue, upending the possibilities, sending me off into a revised consideration of the erotic trajectory available to me, although in another sense it has always lurked on the outskirts of my mind as something I might try, given the right day and the right person.

I am referring to romance with a woman, getting it on with my own sex rather than the opposite one. It’s an idea I’ve thought about off and on since I arrived at the age of sexual consent, and probably even before that. Sapphism in the abstract has always intrigued me, so much so that I published an essay many years ago called “A Closet of One’s Own: On Not Becoming a Lesbian,” in which I probed the contours of this way of coupling and ended up with the thought that heterosexuality and “its impossible anxieties” was the romantic course I was stuck with. “But if it is true to say I love women,”

I wrote, “it is equally true to say that I don’t know how or, more correctly, don’t wish to translate this affection into sexual terms….”

Such were my sentiments several decades back, composed in the wake of becoming a mother and getting a divorce. In the intervening years I have been involved with a number of men, two of them seriously enough to consider marrying, but I’ve remained adamantly single all the same.