Meet the couples who are redefining what it means to be in a relationship, including those in gay-straight and same-sex platonic marriages.
Samantha Wynn Greenstone knows her husband is gay, okay?
She knew he was gay when they met in a San Diego production of Fiddler on the Roof. She knew he was gay when he proposed. She knew he was gay when they got married in November.
He’s not bisexual. She’s not in denial. That hasn’t stopped them from being in a committed monogamous relationship for nearly 10 years.
“If anything, I think we are taking the sanctity of marriage to a whole new level,” said Greenstone, 38, smiling widely as she sat beside her husband, Jacob Hoff, 32, at their home in Los Angeles.
That morning, Hoff made Greenstone her new favourite breakfast: an English muffin with egg, cheese and avocado.
“It’s kind of been one of her pregnancy things, English muffins,” he said. “Before pregnancy, we ate no bread. We were gluten-free people.”
Yes, she’s pregnant. Yes, it’s his. And yes - if you must know how they conceived - in Greenstone’s words, “we birds’d and we bees’d”.
Hoff and Greenstone are part of a small but growing community of people who are opening up on social media about their nontraditional permutations of partnership, amending “marriage” with clarifying adjectives such as “platonic”, “queerplatonic”, “aromantic” or “mixed-orientation”.
For months, Greenstone and Hoff have been making content about their “lavender marriage”.
The term has its roots in the Lavender Scare of the mid-20th century, when a moral panic stoked by US Senator Joseph McCarthy and an executive order signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower led to a purge of workers suspected of homosexuality from the federal workforce.
“There were … thousands of people who lost their jobs, lost their livelihoods, many lost their lives. It was really frightening,” said Regina Hillman, an assistant professor at the University of Memphis School of Law. “And then there were some people who found a way to exist during that time and not lose their job.” One possibility: enter into a lavender marriage, a seemingly heterosexual partnership meant to conceal your own homosexuality.
“We are a little different than the conventional definition, because I’m openly talking about it,” Hoff said. “We’re like the Version 2.0.”
Maybe you could say the same of Barry Diller, who recently confirmed that he is both gay and happily married to Diane von Fürstenberg. Or Tricia Cooke, who spoke openly about being a lesbian married to Ethan Coen while promoting their movies Drive-Away Dolls and Honey Don’t!
Hoff and Greenstone have turned their marriage into a career. Social media is Hoff’s main source of income. (Greenstone also works as a personal assistant.) They spend much of their day making videos and responding to sceptics, supporters and other curious commenters.
“We found a whole group of people who had never heard of us before who were just like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m in this relationship and I didn’t know that there were others like me out there!’” Greenstone said.
“You also get the people who are like: ‘I have a gay best friend. Do you think we’re in love?’” Greenstone said. “And we have to be like …”
“No, honey,” her husband answered.
‘We kind of all blew each other’s mind’
This is the first committed relationship Hoff has ever been in, though he says that he has “sampled” the proverbial offerings of the world. “They were literal samples,” he said. “There was never a full meal.”
Both parties felt a deep connection when they met, but neither had marriage on their minds. That began to change after Greenstone saw a spiritual healer - they do live in Los Angeles, after all - who told her that she and Hoff shared a “spiritual umbilical cord”.
Greenstone asked Hoff via text whether he had feelings for her that ran deeper than friendship. He did.
Early in their relationship, they went to see a therapist. “She told us she’s a straight woman who’s married to a woman,” Hoff said. “And we kind of all blew each other’s minds in that session, because she had never really seen this dynamic before.”
Greenstone said some of their most supportive commenters online are conservative. “It’s a safe package for them,” she said.
They’ve also gone out of their way to court viewers from across the political spectrum. One of their most controversial videos was from last year, when they explained their decision not to reveal who they were voting for in the presidential election.
“We didn’t want any audience member to feel isolated,” Greenstone said. When asked about President Donald Trump’s positions on transgender people, she clarified that she has always shown unwavering support for trans rights.
“We have trans people that voted for Donald Trump that support us,” Hoff said. “So we’re not going to isolate ourselves from those people.”
They know that people have questions and that some will never be satisfied with their answers. But they’re steadfast in their happiness and love.
“It feels the way that I felt as a kid when I first watched Titanic,” Greenstone said. “It’s what our love story feels like.”
Joe Kort, who wrote the book Is My Husband Gay, Straight, or Bi?, says that stories like Greenstone and Hoff’s are increasingly common among his therapy clients.
“More and more and more, that’s happening,” he said.
“A lot of straight women are so tired of patriarchy and they know that gay - and even bi - guys are going to be less patriarchal,” he said. “That’s what I’ve seen.”
Kort has heard women in mixed-orientation relationships say that gay men are more emotionally available and open to their input. And he stresses that not all of these partnerships are sexless. “Gay men are able to have sex with a woman if that’s his person,” he said.
Kort himself has never been with a woman. He has been with his husband for 32 years. He has worked with gay men as a relationship therapist for 40 years.
Some of Kort’s gay clients feel alienated from gay culture. Others say they’ve always wanted a traditional heterosexual family unit regardless of their own orientation. Kort acknowledges that the process of making a mixed-orientation marriage work can be “brutal” and that the number of people interested in entering one is small.
“I tell them, ‘Be careful who you’re telling, because you’re not going to get a lot of support for this,’” he said. “It’s almost like they have to go into the closet as a couple.”
Still, he encourages people to reserve their judgments and explore what works for them. “I always say this to every couple of these mixed orientations: ‘Maybe you’ll discover together a way to make this work that doesn’t even exist on this planet yet,’” he said. “Who knows? And people do.”
An asexual tradwife?
In late 2023, April Lexi Lee told her parents that she was going to marry her childhood best friend.
“They were shocked, but at the same time, not surprised,” Lee, 28, said as she smoked a cigarette outside of her parents’ apartment in Singapore. She was visiting her family while her wife, Renee Wong, 27, was holding down the fort at their home in LA.
Lee and Wong had been close since they met at age 12. During the pandemic shutdowns, when Wong was in Singapore and Lee was in California, they were spending hours on FaceTime every day.
Then Lee’s TikTok algorithm started delivering her videos about “Boston marriages”, a term from the 19th century for pairs of women who lived together without men.
“We didn’t even know it was an option, and then we were like, ‘Wait, this makes so much sense,’” Lee said.
Lee and Wong started cohabitating and sharing finances. Marriage wasn’t on either of their minds until Wong had a health issue that required surgery.
“It became really clear that we are family, but on paper we are nothing,” Lee said. She looked back at the times when they were on separate continents. “I would want to be able to be at the border and say, ‘My wife is in here.’ Not just ‘my best friend’.”
Lee and Wong are both on the asexual spectrum. Lee has been happily celibate for years. Wong, who identifies as “solo poly”, occasionally dates outside their marriage.
Since making content about her aromantic relationship, Lee has received hundreds of comments from married or divorced women who said that her relationship resonated with them. “I have chills when I think about it,” Lee said.
She also isn’t surprised that more people are exploring new structures of marriage.
“I feel like there is a lot of tension between the genders right now, particularly a lot of women feeling like men aren’t doing it for them, like they’re not showing up for their needs,” Lee said. “And then on the flip side, a lot of men feeling resentful that they are never enough for women and feeling that rejection.”
Perhaps counterintuitively, Lee said that marrying Wong allowed her to step into a more traditional feminine role.
“When I’m with Renee in LA, I am a tradwife,” she said. Lee cooks every meal, washes every dish and cleans every litter box. And Wong has been enjoying exploring a more masculine role in their partnership, bringing home the bacon via her career in talent management. Lee says that these dynamics could change at some point. But so far, so good.
And if that doesn’t make sense to you, Lee doesn’t particularly care.
“I’m confident in my decisions and the life that I’ve chosen for myself, that I am happy in it,” she said. “I don’t really need anyone to understand.”
A platonic divorce
Platonic marriage implies the existence of platonic divorce. This is something Lizz Cannon, a 51-year-old lawyer in Tampa, knows well.
From 2000 to 2007, Cannon was legally married to a man. Early in their relationship, they had agreed that they weren’t meant to be lovers. For most of their marriage, they lived with another man with whom Cannon was romantically involved. “We didn’t have that term ‘platonic partner’ back then, just like we didn’t have the term ‘polyamory’,” Cannon said.
When people found out that she and her husband were platonic, they often assumed that they were just friends. “We would sleep in the same bed, naked together, curled up together,” she said. “You don’t really do that with your friends.”
In 2007, her husband decided to leave their home in Boston to pursue a career in New York. Cannon and her other partner were devastated but supportive. Eventually, Cannon filed for divorce.
Today, Cannon has a new primary partner and an active polyamorous love life. When she visits New York, she’ll often stay with her ex-husband and his new fiancée. “I love his fiancée,” Cannon said. “I freakin’ love her.”
Cannon still sometimes refers to her ex-husband as her “other husband”. The new fiancée doesn’t mind.
“Even she can see it,” Cannon said. “She’s like: ‘This is not friendship. This is something else.’”