What is a lavender marriage?

In 1920s Hollywood, morality clauses began appearing in actors’ contracts, and studio executives discovered a new kind of stagecraft — one that had nothing to do with cameras. Gay and lesbian stars were quietly paired off in marriages designed to protect careers, maintain public image, and keep the machinery of celebrity turning. These were lavender marriages: unions between a man and a woman where one or both partners were gay, lesbian, or bisexual, entered into not for romance in the conventional sense, but for shelter, companionship, or survival. The color lavender had been associated with homosexuality since at least that decade, and the marriages that bore its name became one of the few ways queer people could build a domestic life without risking everything.

The term sounds like it belongs to another era. But lavender marriages never entirely disappeared — and in recent years, they’ve gained renewed attention, as people across cultures continue to navigate the distance between who they are and what their world expects of them.

The question that makes a lavender marriage more than a historical curiosity is whether it can actually work — not as a performance for neighbors and relatives, but as a real relationship, one that sustains both people emotionally. The Gottman Institute has not studied lavender marriages specifically. But over four decades of research into what makes relationships succeed or fail, Drs. John and Julie Gottman have identified mechanisms that operate across every kind of partnership they’ve observed. Those mechanisms offer a useful — and perhaps surprising — lens through which to consider what happens inside a lavender marriage.

What Is a Lavender Marriage?

At its simplest, a lavender marriage is a marriage between a man and a woman where one or both partners are not heterosexual. The classic form, historically, involved a gay man and a straight woman, or a gay man and a lesbian, though the configurations vary widely. Some lavender marriages are entered into knowingly by both parties. Others begin with one partner unaware of the other’s orientation — a discovery that can arrive decades into a shared life.

The reasons people enter these marriages have shifted over time, but they have not disappeared. In much of the world, the challenges of coming out remain formidable. Religious communities, cultural expectations, immigration pressures, professional environments — these forces continue to shape the choices people make about partnership. And some people in lavender marriages genuinely love their partners, even as they recognize that their relationship does not follow the conventional script.

What, then, determines whether such a marriage thrives, merely endures, or falls apart?

The Friendship Factor

John Gottman’s research laboratory at the University of Washington has studied thousands of couples over four decades, and the findings point to something that might seem understated given the drama of most relationship advice: the single best predictor of whether a marriage will survive is the quality of the friendship between partners.

That friendship, in Gottman’s framework, rests on what he calls the Sound Relationship House — a structure built from the bottom up. At its foundation are Love Maps, the detailed knowledge each partner carries of the other’s inner world: their fears, their aspirations, the name of the colleague who makes their workday miserable, the song that makes them cry in the car. Above that sits a system of Fondness and Admiration — the habit of scanning for what is right in a partner rather than cataloguing what is wrong.

Could a lavender marriage build this kind of friendship? There is no reason, within Gottman’s framework, that it could not. Love Maps do not require sexual desire — they require curiosity. Fondness and Admiration do not require romantic passion — they require the decision, made daily, to look for what you appreciate in the person you live with.

The question is whether both partners are willing to do that work — and whether the particular pressures of a lavender marriage make it harder or, in some cases, might even sharpen the intention behind it.

Bids, Turning Toward, and the Emotional Bank Account

If friendship is the foundation, the mechanism that sustains it is what Gottman calls turning toward.

Every day, in every relationship, people make bids for connection — small moments that say, in essence, I want emotional connection now. A bid might be a sigh after a long phone call. A comment about something seen through the window. A hand placed on a shoulder. These moments are easy to miss, and most people do miss them — not out of cruelty, but out of distraction, fatigue, the pull of a screen.

In Gottman’s studies, couples who stayed married turned toward each other’s bids 86 percent of the time. Couples who divorced turned toward only 33 percent of the time. Each bid that is met builds what Gottman describes as an emotional bank account — a reservoir of goodwill that the relationship can draw on when things get difficult.

This finding doesn’t distinguish between types of marriages. It describes a mechanism. And it raises an interesting question for lavender marriages: if both partners are genuinely committed to turning toward each other — to noticing and responding to bids — does the nature of the marriage matter less than the quality of the attention within it?

When Things Go Wrong: The Four Horsemen

When relationships begin to deteriorate, Gottman’s research has identified four behaviors so reliably destructive that he named them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Of these, contempt — the expression of disgust or superiority toward a partner — is the single strongest predictor of divorce.

In a lavender marriage, the conditions that invite the Four Horsemen may take specific forms. A partner who discovers their spouse’s orientation may experience a profound sense of betrayal — not necessarily about sexuality itself, but about having been excluded from a fundamental truth. The partner who has been concealing their orientation may carry years of shame, which can surface as defensiveness or withdrawal. When both partners begin interpreting each other’s actions through a lens of suspicion rather than generosity — what Gottman calls negative sentiment override — even ordinary moments become charged.

But what Gottman’s research also shows is that the antidote to the Four Horsemen is not the absence of conflict. It is the presence of what he calls repair attempts — any statement or action that prevents negativity from escalating. A repair attempt might be humor in the middle of an argument, or an acknowledgment: I know this is hard for you, too. The attempt doesn’t have to be elegant. It just has to land.

What would it take for repair attempts to succeed in a lavender marriage? Perhaps the same thing it takes in any marriage: a foundation of friendship solid enough that both partners still want to reach for each other, even when the conversation is painful.