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Love Together:: Longtime Male Couples on Healthy Intimacy and Communication
How do male couples keep their relationship healthy and thriving for fifteen, thirty, even sixty years? Longtime couples share candidly in Love Together how they navigate issues of monogamy, intimacy, affection, communication, money, spirituality, marriage, and parenting. Included here are the first military couple in America to wed, a Catholic theologian, a pioneering Texas pair featured in a 1996 Life Magazine article, a practicing Buddhist couple who recently celebrated their 60th anniversary, two Paris-trained chefs turned international vintners, a Canadian couple who produce a line of gay erotic comics, a Christian pop-singing duo who became parents through surrogacy, a movie industry couple who met the day World War Two ended, and more. With hundreds of years of collective experience, these couples share their life wisdom and offer practical advice for singles who want to find a lasting love relationship. Samples and more at www.lovetogetherbook.com
297 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 30, 2015
As a long-closeted gay man, I had read and watched many coming out stories with avid interest. Those stories were the stories I wanted for myself. They represented what was "normal" for gay men of my time, though it was not a very satisfactory "normal".
Tim Clausen's new book, Love Together tells a different kind of story. His book is a collection of interviews culled from over one hundred interviews with gay male couples. The couples represent a wide range in age, heritage, length of relationship and domestic arrangement. The book tells what "normal" can be like for gay men, that is, "normal" in the sense that it is neither strange nor exceptional.
Several aspects of the book commend it to wide readership.
1. After providing his 26 interview questions in the beginning of the book, the author removes himself from the stories, with no more than an introductory paragraph before each chapter. This brings the reader into an intimate communion with each couple as they tell their own stories without an interrupting narrative or, worse, an explicit Q/A structure. The reader can sense the faint outline of the questions beneath the stories, but the chapters are all in first-person voice and feel natural - not interview-y. I had the sense that I was getting to know each couple.
2. The stories are organized into sections by the increasing number of decades of the relationship, starting with relationships of 10 to 20 years in length to the last relationships of 60 to 70 years. This approach has two effects. First, it provides an anecdotal micro-history of the world of gay relationships since World War II, as the relationships began in different social and political climates with respect to acceptance of homosexuality. As the trajectory of the book reaches back through the different eras of gay openness and rights, the individual stories progress forward in time, many of them celebrating the newly won right to marriage. Some couples, being swept in the crosscurrent of time, describe their surprise in how the deep meaning of their relationship was reflected in their marriage ceremony. The second effect of the longitudinal structure of the book is that the stories became richer as the relationships become more mature. The author recommends reading only one or two stories at a sitting, which advice I followed. I found reading the progression of longer termed relationships at that pace most satisfying. Almost meditative.
3. I saved the best for last, as did the author. Most of the couples' stories are told by only one of the partners, except for the last, which includes interviews with both partners. That couple had just reached 60 years together when one of them died. The last chapter in the book is comprised of a series of interviews with the surviving partner eleven days, one month and six months after his loss. The partner's generosity and the author's sensitivity make this chapter a most touching epilogue to their story and to the book.
This book is of special interest to me, but it speaks to all relationships. It does not offer itself as a how-to guide. Wisely enough, it was not meant to. What it does offer is quiet inspiration and wisdom for gay men who desire healthy models for the ever-growing normality of the "new normal". The supply of these models has lagged behind the fast-changing political and social landscape of marriage, This book begins to bridge that gap.
Tim Clausen's new book, Love Together tells a different kind of story. His book is a collection of interviews culled from over one hundred interviews with gay male couples. The couples represent a wide range in age, heritage, length of relationship and domestic arrangement. The book tells what "normal" can be like for gay men, that is, "normal" in the sense that it is neither strange nor exceptional.
Several aspects of the book commend it to wide readership.
1. After providing his 26 interview questions in the beginning of the book, the author removes himself from the stories, with no more than an introductory paragraph before each chapter. This brings the reader into an intimate communion with each couple as they tell their own stories without an interrupting narrative or, worse, an explicit Q/A structure. The reader can sense the faint outline of the questions beneath the stories, but the chapters are all in first-person voice and feel natural - not interview-y. I had the sense that I was getting to know each couple.
2. The stories are organized into sections by the increasing number of decades of the relationship, starting with relationships of 10 to 20 years in length to the last relationships of 60 to 70 years. This approach has two effects. First, it provides an anecdotal micro-history of the world of gay relationships since World War II, as the relationships began in different social and political climates with respect to acceptance of homosexuality. As the trajectory of the book reaches back through the different eras of gay openness and rights, the individual stories progress forward in time, many of them celebrating the newly won right to marriage. Some couples, being swept in the crosscurrent of time, describe their surprise in how the deep meaning of their relationship was reflected in their marriage ceremony. The second effect of the longitudinal structure of the book is that the stories became richer as the relationships become more mature. The author recommends reading only one or two stories at a sitting, which advice I followed. I found reading the progression of longer termed relationships at that pace most satisfying. Almost meditative.
3. I saved the best for last, as did the author. Most of the couples' stories are told by only one of the partners, except for the last, which includes interviews with both partners. That couple had just reached 60 years together when one of them died. The last chapter in the book is comprised of a series of interviews with the surviving partner eleven days, one month and six months after his loss. The partner's generosity and the author's sensitivity make this chapter a most touching epilogue to their story and to the book.
This book is of special interest to me, but it speaks to all relationships. It does not offer itself as a how-to guide. Wisely enough, it was not meant to. What it does offer is quiet inspiration and wisdom for gay men who desire healthy models for the ever-growing normality of the "new normal". The supply of these models has lagged behind the fast-changing political and social landscape of marriage, This book begins to bridge that gap.
March 25, 2015
Clausen may not be an academic in the strictest sense of that word, but his groundbreaking insights into same-sex, long term couples and their dynamics opens up an entirely new sub-genre of anthropology and queer studies. Fascinating read.
July 16, 2022
A must-read for any man married to another, or who wants to be. One of the challenges of being gay is having to invent your relationships, with no models to follow. This collection of interviews is a priceless corrective, and shows us how realistic our dreams can be.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews