Hello there and welcome to the FIRST EVER installment of Interview With My Significant Other, a new A+ series in which Autostraddle team members interview a signficiant other. Here at Autostraddle in spring of 2022, we’re in a historic era. There has never been a time in history in which more of the Autostraddle team have been in romantic relationships. So, to take advantage of this time, and so that we can all revel in the broad range of ways that queer relationships can look and be, we developed fourteen questions for our team members to answer in conversation with their significant others. We asked them how they met, to tell us their hopes for the future, about finances and sharing labor, and yes, about sex.

First in the series, we have what may be one of the longest-running Autostraddle couples, Heather and Stacy, who are, famously, wives. If this resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you in the comments!

How’d you meet / get together? (Include how long you knew each other before becoming romantically involved.)

Stacy: You were recapping Skins, which is a show I loved, and I thought your recaps were really smart and funny. So I tweeted at you and you tweeted back, and then we started emailing. You were living in Georgia at the time and I was living in New York. After we’d been chatting a few months, you told me you were coming to the city for work and we made plans to meet up.

Heather: Were you thinking of the meet-up as a date?

Stacy: Well, everyone at work said it was a date.

Heather: Yeah, my sister said it was a date.

Stacy: We went to a nice dinner! We stayed out until 4am! We hung out the next day, too! We were in the VIP line at the US Skins premiere party and someone pulled a knife and the cops broke up the whole event!

Heather: That’s the funniest thing to me about our meet-up story. Not the knife guy. You and I are not people who stay out until 4am. We are definitely not people who make plans two days in a row. We were both behaving very out of character, but neither of us knew it. You even skipped watching a Miami Dolphins game for me in those early days, and in the eleven years I’ve known you since then, you’ve only missed half a Dolphins game and that’s because we couldn’t get it to stream in the airport.

Stacy: Yeah. I really liked you.

Heather: Which I didn’t actually know until I was back home. You wrote a post on one of our friends’ blogs about our adventure and you said it was the best weekend you’d had in a long, long time. I was like, “Oh my god, she LIKES ME.” You did not let on in person. But then also you thought I was trying to hook up with you that second night we hung out, when we were lying in my hotel bed for like three hours laughing at memes and GIFs, and you bounced so fast.

Stacy: I don’t do one night stands.

Heather: Me either!

Stacy: I didn’t know! We didn’t talk about it!

Heather: The first time you kissed me, months after we met, I did an air-punch and said “yessss!” And you said, “You’re an idiot; you could have kissed me at any time.” But we didn’t talk about that either. It was like ten months after we’d been talking basically every day that I casually said, at dinner one night, “Blah blah blah we’re dating” and you were like, “We’re dating?” And I was all, “Are we not dating?”

Stacy: Classic lesbian conundrum.

Heather: Right. Are we buddies who like the same TV show or are we going to get married?

Stacy: Both!

Heather: Here’s something I also never told you in those early days: I didn’t own a phone! I just simply did not talk on the phone, or text, or anything. One night we were G-Chatting and you asked to talk on the phone, and I was like, “How about tomorrow night?” And the next morning I went out and bought a phone.

Stacy: That’s so… you.

Heather: Yeah, so anyway, I liked you, too.

Okay, so what are your big 3 astrological signs? How do we feel about that?

Heather: So I am a Saggittarius sun, Aries moon, Aquarius rising — which I know because Rachel Kincaid did my birth chart one time.

Stacy: I’m an Aries and that’s all I know.

Heather: I think my big three mean I cancel plans a lot, blurt out self-righteous things at awkward times, and people think I’m at least a little odd. My dad did tell me at his last wedding that he had seated me at the Black Sheep Table, so this all seems true to me.

Stacy: I think mine means I’m a fiery bitch.

Heather: It does not! Hang on, let me just Google what it means when a Saggittarius and an Aries are married. Oh, this little chart says we’re a 90% match!

Stacy: Whew. I’d hate to find out we were incompatible according to… Thought Catalog.

Heather: Stop that.

Stacy: I can’t, I’m a fiery bitch, it’s written in the stars.

Heather: Okay so it says we’ll find it easy to understand each other, that our bond will be unbreakable, that we’ll have flare up fights but then easily forgive each other, that neither of us are into big romantic gestures, which is true. It also says we might have trouble making traditional commitments. Psh. It only took us ten years to get married.

Stacy: This also says we’ll share a common bond over being Zodiac explorers. That must mean that I love the Fincher movie about the Zodiac killer and you’re terrified of hearing anything about serial killers, so while I watch it, you’ll be hiding out somewhere else in the house.

Heather: Yes, that’s definitely what that means.

Stacy: Astrology!

What do you enjoy most about your relationship?

Stacy: I love spending time with you more than anything in the world, but I also love that we have so many individual interests that don’t overlap, and that we support each other in our individual pursuits. I love that we never intentionally try to hurt each other, that when we argue we’re working toward a common goal for both of us to be happy and fulfilled. Like we’re never trying to just get our own way, or to “win” an argument. And I love to win.

Heather: Me too.

Stacy: Not as much as I love to win.

Heather: Incorrect! I love to win the most!

Stacy: I love how much we make each other laugh. And it’s interesting because we have a very similar sense of humor, but I think I’m more caustic than you, more acidic and dry than you.

Heather: You have a very Daria Morgendorffer wit. But you’re also really silly.

Stacy: Yeah, I’m a dork.

Heather: We both love stories.

Stacy: It’s why we fell in love actually. Love, Actually…

Heather: … is all around us.

Stacy: Ugh.

Heather: When either of us get into any kind of story — novels, TV, movies, video games, comic books, whatever — we cannot get enough of it. And when we’re both into the same story, we can literally talk about it all day and all night for months on end. I love listening to you talk about stories, all of it, from the technical aspects — like the other night when you were so mad at the editing when we were watching The Princess Diaries — to the cultural impact to the way you’re personally relating to the characters. Because I was raised by wolves, I really did learn to be a person, and still learn so much about myself and the world, through stories — and so it’s really important to me that you experience stories similarly.

Stacy: Same. When I watch something I love, I always want you to watch it too, so I can hear you talk about it.

Heather: I also love that we can be in the same space doing different things. I love doing what I’m doing while you’re doing what you’re doing, and just looking over and seeing you there. It feels good to just be in the same space with you, and I love it when you’re doing what makes you happy.

What hurdles or obstacles have you overcome together in your relationship? These can be within your relationship, or things that you’ve faced together.

Stacy: God, so much. Starting with: I tried to push you away all the time when we first started talking.

Heather: We both brought a lot of personal baggage into our relationship. We both had really tough puppy lives and a lot of trauma we had to work through, individually, if we were ever going to have a happy and healthy relationship. But, weirdly, I wasn’t able to work through a lot of that stuff until I met you, because being with you, it has made me feel safe in a way I’ve never experienced, and powerful in a way I never believed I could be. And I needed both of those things to start processing and coping with everything that has happened to me in my life. You gave me safety and freedom to really grapple with what I’ve been through, and the strength to start overcoming it.

Stacy: You’ve had to be so patient with me. I have a lot of anger inside me, and I haven’t always had healthy ways of dealing with and expressing it — and while I never direct my anger at you, it is always there, and anger is the one thing you struggle with the most. My impulse might be to punch a pillow if I see some upsetting news, which of course I do every time I open Twitter, or to thump my hand down beside me on my desk if I lose a bunch of work for some reason. But because of the way you grew up, any kind of physical manifestation of anger is really triggering to you.

Heather: Right, and I am the opposite, in that I just keep all my anger stuffed way down inside me until it becomes depression or despair, which is its own issue. So it’s like, for both of us, how do we allow ourselves and each other to be angry, process anger, and express anger — and how do we do it in ways that don’t hurt the other person? We’ve also had to work as a team in big ways to deal with my health issues.

Stacy: You’ve had to learn to accept my help in ways you never anticipated, which hasn’t been easy for you.

Heather: Yeah.

Stacy: You’re terrified of being a burden, which you will never be to me, and I just want you to let me help you! I feel like that’s the thing I’ve probably said the most over the past two years: LET ME HELP YOU.

Heather: Yeah.

Stacy: Even now, you don’t really want to talk about it.

Heather: Nope! I sure do not! I never want to need help! Which is not a reflection on your ability or desire to help me — but, again, I grew up like one of those Disney orphans, like a little north Georgia Mowgli. My first word was “Toby,” which was the name of my grandparents’ dog, and my second word was a whole sentence, which was “Heather do it.”

Stacy: You have always been exactly who you are. One other thing we’ve had to sort of perpetually overcome is our relationships to our careers. I work all the time, and especially pre-Covid, I was in the office sometimes 20 hours a day. I’d see you for a second in the morning and at night, and, if we were lucky, we’d see each other on the weekends. Our jobs are exhausting in different ways.

Heather: Right, like, my job requires a lot of emotional labor and energy that I think most jobs don’t. And everyone has a finite amount of emotional energy to give, so I sometimes — before Covid — would run out of it before we were able to spend quality time together. And I hated that. I hated spending my best self on things that weren’t making our lives better together. That’s less of an issue now because I’ve had to start guarding my time and energy so much more since I got Long Covid.

Stacy: That’s another thing we’ve become great teammates on: navigating all the different ways people relate to you now. Because, um, well — not everyone has been great about it.

Heather: No. And that’s been tough. You have been my anchor and my strength. It is so much easier to stand up for myself with you beside me. You’ve also had to sacrifice a lot to keep me safe. Every career decision, every social decision, you’re always weighing that against the risk for me.

Stacy: That’s not a sacrifice. You’ve had to overcome a lot of my mood disorder stuff, which I’ve worked through a lot with therapy and medication. And we’ve worked through a lot of family trauma together because the ways we’ve experienced life, as kids, made the way we handle conflicts as adults very different. My fear of losing the people I love at any time for any reason.

Heather: And my fear of not being good enough, or loving enough. Not being good enough at love.

Stacy: Which is just — you are the best at loving.

Heather: Adding it to my Twitter bio. “Your friendly neighborhood soft butch, Autostraddle editor, best at loving.”

What’s your living situation like (together, separate, long distance with long visits, something else), how often do you see each other and why?

Stacy: Well, we live together with our four children, who are cats.

Heather: Our two sons and two daughters.

Stacy: Just four cats we gave birth to and who have everything any children could ever want to be happy, including seeing us every second of every day, inside our house, where we’ve been for two years now.

Heather: Sometimes we text from different rooms. Or tweet at each other while sitting beside each other on the couch. And recently I called you from the bedroom because you accidentally locked me inside it.

Stacy: Because we have to keep Beth March, our daughter, away from Quasar, our other daughter, because they hate each other and Beth can open doors.

Heather: And that’s our living situation!

How do you all share expenses or work out finances? How do you share or split up labor in the relationship? Can you talk about why that is?

Stacy: We split it based on our salaries.

Heather: Yeah, our expenses are proportional to the amount of money we make. And in terms of labor — well, emotional labor, I feel like is completely evenly split. Neither of us take up the most emotional space or do the most emotional work, it ebbs and flows and always feels even to me. For household labor, we really lucked out because I love to clean. It’s a stress relief for me. It makes me feel great to clean. But, like, a big Saturday cleaning stresses you out. But then you do the daily cleaning, like every night you go around and pick up all the loose mugs and water bottles and stuff, load up and run the dishwasher, and empty it first thing in the morning. And you do the hardest housework, which is cleaning the bathtub drain.

Stacy: That’s not the hardest; it’s just the grossest!

Heather: That makes it the hardest! Also, when I was in my acute phase of Long Covid, or when I’m crashing, you basically did everything. Not basically. You did everything.

Stacy: And I’d fuckin’ do it again!

Do you have kids, pets, plants, all three? Do you not currently have, but want any of these things? Why? Are you in agreement?

Stacy: We are in agreement that we do not have, have never wanted, and will never want human children.

Heather: Yup! I love human children, I’m great with human children.

Stacy: I wish human children all the best.

Heather: You can drop off your children with me for a couple of hours.

Stacy: As long as they don’t touch our stuff.

Heather: We do have a lot of expensive toys. I would have a heart attack if I saw some peanut butter hands grabbing at our PS5. I won’t even let the cats mess with my Legos.

Stacy: Maybe if somebody didn’t put literally everything he sees in his mouth. Which is also why we can’t have plants. You’d probably love to have a thriving indoor garden if Socks hadn’t already tried to poison himself with flowers.

Heather: In addition to temporarily paralyzing himself twice.

Stacy: Right, our hands are already full with our cat children.

How would you describe the sex you have together (if you have sex)?

Heather: So when we got together, and as our relationship has grown and deepened, we’ve had to talk a lot about what we’re willing to share and not share on the internet. My job, the way I write, it’s very open, very real, very vulnerable — and while everything I do share with people is the full truth, I don’t share all of who I am and what I do in my writing. And one of the things we decided, early on, is to not talk about our sex life.

Stacy: And, look, I love it when queer people talk and write about their sex life! Not just because it destigamtizes queer sex — and pleasure for not straight people, in general — but also because I think it’s cool that people who love to talk about sex have a place to do it! I think maybe my Catholic guilt and shame around sex is at play here.

Heather: And probably my Baptist guilt and shame as well.

Stacy: I want gays to talk about sex! I just can’t really, in public.

Heather: But have you heard of our cats?

Do you think your relationship will more or less continue to exist as it currently is? Why?

Stacy: I don’t think any relationship stays the same, even if people want their relationships not to change. Even if, for some reason, you’re not growing or changing as a person, your relationship will face plenty of outside pressure that’s going to force you to grow and adapt. I’m not the same person as I was when we met, and you aren’t either — and that’s a good thing. Our relationship has gotten better and better over time because we’ve gotten better and better at being the people we want to be, for ourselves and for each other. I love that you give me freedom to grow. I love that you’re not threatened by the ways I change. And I love that you keep growing as well.

Heather: I also think that for all the hard things Covid has done to my body and brain, I have also become so much more aware of what I’m doing and feeling and why I’m doing and feeling it, and so much more deliberate in the ways I spend myself and my time, and I want to take all that knowledge and apply it to our lives even if things ever do go back to a more “normal” pace. If you’re back in the office every day, if I am able to work more, if we’re able to go back out in the world and be in social spaces. I’ve become a better person and better partner since I got sick, and I would love to know what that looks like in the wider world.

Stacy: But I do think we’re going to keep having fun in the same ways, making each other laugh, being generous and gentle with each other. I think we’ll just keep getting closer. I hope we will.

Heather: I’ve always suspected we’re going to come out of this pandemic like those twin toddlers who speak a language only the two of them can understand, and our friends are gonna be like, “Uhh…” I mean they kind of already are with us. Like that really annoying thing where a couple takes half an hour to jointly tell a story about a piece of mail getting delivered and at the end they’re laughing so hard and everyone else is like, “So, you… got some mail?” I traveled a lot in my single life, and there’s a million reasons we’ve only been able to travel a little bit as a couple. I hope we can travel all over the world in the future.

Stacy: I want to take you to Iceland so bad.

Heather: Me too! Gimme those hot springs!

What would you say are your most fundamental differences?

Stacy: I think we’re way more different than we are alike.

Heather: Oh, absolutely.

Stacy: You are full of loving energy, warmth, and optimism — and none of those are my natural state of being.

Heather: You are full of warmth for me.

Stacy: Just for you.

Heather: You’re more of a realist because you’ve had to deal with some really, really hard things in your life, and being clear-eyed helps you feel like tragedy is not going to catch you off guard.

Stacy: At least that’s how I justify it to myself.

Heather: But also you never rain on my parade. You never try to temper my optimism. You never try to keep me from hoping with my full heart. You always support that, you always lift me up and encourage me in that.

Stacy: The only time I try to temper your optimism is when it’s in relation to my own success.

Heather: Which is nuts because you are verifiably incredibly successful in your career in a very tough industry. And you’re only going to continue to—

Stacy: Moderately successful.

Heather: Very successful.

Stacy: Moder—

Heather: Oh my god, we’re doing it right now. I think you just will never love the art you create as much as I love the art you create.

Stacy: That’s because hardly any art is perfect and I need to be perfect.

Heather: Let’s see, how else are we different? I’m very tall. And you’re average height.

Stacy: I am not! I am short as fuck!

Heather: But you have the energy of a tall person! You have the energy of a woman who’s 5’9″!

Stacy: I do not have taller energy than Villanelle.

Heather: How tall is Villanelle?

Stacy: 5’8″.

Heather: You just know that off the top of your head.

Stacy: Yes. How tall is Candace Parker?

Heather: 6’4″.

Stacy: Okay then.

Heather: We have very different taste in women. You like femme-y women who have surprise dyke energy. A feminine woman who takes up space.

Stacy: Yes! With her hands in her tailored suit pockets, making a man look like a fool.

Heather: And I like powerful, brilliant, older women. I’ve never really understood our youth-obsessed culture. Like. Give me a woman who has lived some life. Give me a woman. It’s funny, you do love women who can make men look like fools, but you hate it when I get in fights with men on the street, which I am always ready to do.

Stacy: That’s because you are not a fictional trained assassin; you are my wife and I don’t want you to get hurt! Men can be violent and volatile and terrible!

Heather: One huge difference between us is that you love new things. You would watch a new movie, a new TV show, read a new book, eat a new meal, wear a new outfit every single day if you could. You love to try new things. I love routine, and once I find something I love, that’s it. That’s what I’m ordering off the menu, those are the socks I’m going to buy for the rest of my life.

Stacy: I like fancy milkshakes and you like plain chocolate milkshakes.

Heather: You like bloody, stabby TV—

Stacy: Especially if it’s a feminine woman in a suit taking up space with the stabby-ness.

Heather: And I like cartoons.

Do you all have any shared dreams/goals for the future or each other? What are these?

Stacy: I want — and I think this is what you want, too — us both to feel fulfilled creatively, whether that’s in our careers or hobbies or both. I want us to be as healthy and comfortable in our bodies as we can be. I want us to always feel safe with each other. I want us to be content and always growing. I would say I want us to be happy, but—

Heather: There is an undercurrent of depression that will always run through both of our lives.

Stacy: Right. Just clown show happiness is not either of our natural ways of being.

Heather: I want a washer and dryer inside our house. And I want us to eat a dinner prepared by Melissa King.

Stacy: Oh my god.

Heather: And I want us to continue to use our resources to do the most good that we can in the world in our fleeting time living these wild and precious lives.

What piece of pop culture do you share or what piece of pop culture reminds you of your relationship? What’s your movie or your show or your book or your song?

Stacy: Well, we first bonded over Naomily. That will always be a touchstone. Fuckers. And we loved watching Killing Eve together. Also fuckers. But usually I like stuff that’s dark and heavy and you like stuff that makes you laugh and think, stuff that heals your inner child. Except sports. We love sports. All women’s sports, and you tolerate football.

Heather: We also don’t really listen to the same kind of music, but I do have a lot of fond memories with you and Beach House. “Teen Dream,” especially.

Stacy: We had some good times to that album. Of all the music I listen to, you like chillwave vibes the best.

Heather: For sure, and of all the country music I listen to, you only like Dolly Parton.

Stacy: I don’t want to disregard an entire genre of music, but I just don’t have the same experience with country music as you do. I grew up in Wisconsin, staying up all night watching MTV2 and downloading music off of Napster.

Where do you locate your relationship on the monogamy / polyamory spectrum? What philosophies do you have around how you handle monogamy / polyamory? How do you feel this impacts your relationship?

Heather: I’ve heard a lot of people say recently that you can only be monogamous if you believe in The One or if your partner can meet all your sexual / emotional / spiritual needs. But that’s not how I experience monogamy. I don’t think the universe set you apart for me, and to be everything I’ll ever need. I chose you and I choose you, every day, and I will keep choosing you for the rest of my life. I don’t expect you to meet all my needs, just like you don’t expect me to meet all your needs. That’s bonkers. You are, simply, my person, the one I’m going to keep fully investing my time and my feelings and my efforts and my shared story with. For always and always.

Stacy: You are my person too.

To wrap up, tell us a funny story about your partner!

Heather: I’ll go first. So, as we said, you are a lot smaller than me, which means my legs are like twice as long as yours. When we were first dating and I was visiting you in NYC, I heard a Mister Softee ice cream truck drive by and freaked out. I hadn’t seen an ice cream truck in decades. So I went running out the door with my shoes half on, tripping all over myself — and next thing I knew, I saw your tiny little body whizzing past me, hair flying in the wind, and you were yelling, “Tie your shoes! You’ll fall and break your face! Tie your shoes!” You ran half a block and chased down that ice cream guy for me, screaming the whole way for me to just stop and get myself together and you’d hold the ice cream guy until I was safely able to get to the window.

Stacy: I just want you to have everything you ever want!

Heather: I know.

Stacy: It’s hard for me to choose a single funny story about you because you make me laugh so hard every single day. You are just effortlessly so funny. It’s pretty wild that, two years into being in the same house with each other every second of every day, you still make me laugh more than anyone. Lately what’s made me laugh the most is when something amazing happens in whatever WNBA game we’re watching and you jump up and go berserk like a little kid. You completely lose control of your body and screech and flail all over the place.

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