“I married two gay men,” Diane von Furstenberg told the outlet. Variety. She refers to her husband, Barry Diller, who comes out as gay in his memoirs, Who knew (Simon & Schuster, 2025) and Prince Egon von Fürstenberg. The relationship between Diller and the fashion designer has been called a cover-up, despite them having been married for 24 years. “I read for decades about me and Diane as best friends instead of lovers. We weren’t just friends. We’re not just friends. It was simply an explosion of passion that lasted for years. And yes, I liked boys too, but that didn’t conflict with my love for Diane,” the billionaire explained in his memoirs.
Early October Washington Post published an article entitled He’s gay. She is straight. They are happily married (He’s gay. She is heterosexual. They are happily married) who talks about “a small but growing community” of people who talk about “their non-traditional couple exchanges” on social networks. In doing so, they use adjectives such as “platonic,” “queerplatonic“, “aromantic” or “mixed orientation”. This is how, for example, Jacob Hoff and Samantha Greenstone define their relationship in the report. “Jacob and I are soul mates. “We have a mixed-orientation relationship, which means two people with different sexual preferences meet and discover that love is love, a love that transcends,” he says on his social networks.
“I’m gay, and as a gay person, you can maintain your identity as such even if your relationship doesn’t reflect that. We have a monogamous relationship. It goes beyond a visual, lustful connection. It’s a deep connection,” Hoff says The New York Timeswho last year published an article about her marriage to Greenstone. Their love story is not far from the one that appears in the eighth episode of the fifth season of Sex in New Yorkin which Bobby Fine, a piano bar legend, marries Bitsy von Muffling. “Is it for money? For company?” the protagonists ask themselves sarcastically, given that throughout the episode they continually joke that the boyfriend is gay. Before the wedding, and to everyone’s surprise, Bobby and Bitsy claim to have a wonderful sex life. Together, of course. Some time later, in a chapter in which Charlotte’s character talks to her friends about her fertility problems, a very pregnant Bitsy interrupts the conversation.
The reason for mixed orientation relationships
Andrea Proenza Zoroquiaia, author of Cartographies of amorous desire (edizioni in mare, 2025), comments that relationships between gay men and heterosexual women are not something new. “Historically it has functioned as a safe passage to access the symbolic privileges of the heterosexual couple. Because, despite the progress of the last few decades, the truth is that a gay man or a single woman still does not occupy the same symbolic place as the man-woman duo,” he says before clarifying that he does not think these relationships are a response to the heteropessimism contemporary (the current that believes that the love market is increasingly complicated for heterosexual women), but rather to the conservative reaction that crosses the social and the romantic, and which seeks to reaffirm emotional hierarchies.
“If we look at the past, we see that these types of bonds can satisfy at the beginning thanks to the social recognition or even complicity between the two parties; but, in the long run, they generate frustration and unhappiness, because they do not give us what we expect from a romantic partner. So it does not seem to me that they are looking for an alternative to the fed up of heterosexual men, but rather an attempt to fit into the puzzle of heterosexuality on their own terms, without realizing it, since At the beginning you are trying to put together the pieces of the wrong game,” explains to ICON.
Ivan Gomez Beltránhistorian and doctor of Gender and Diversity, attributes the fact that more and more couples of this type exist to various factors. “It could be linked to a certain crisis of traditional bonds and seeing how they limit us to very specific and limited forms of affection. I think these ways of relating tell us about the social context of disconnection and depersonalization through the individual needs they generate,” he explains. “Sociocultural conditions are different from those lavender weddings of the 19th century, which were implemented as a social protection mechanism against exclusion, while current relationships have more to do with the need to give entity to other ways of bonding, as well as to find spaces of emotional intimacy that are not limited by the relational social code,” he says.
It highlights that in a time of so much uncertainty and sociopolitical upheaval, connections are spaces of safety and comfort. “This uncertainty coincides with processes of dislocation of the traditional heteronormative couple, based on monogamy, romantic love and methods of relationship and communication strongly based on gender socialization. Finding affection and intimacy with the same intensity with which we were previously told was only possible in the couple implies facing the hierarchization of affections”, he explains.
Gómez Beltrán also finds it interesting that many of the men who build are homosexual, because a heterosexual man does not consider a marriage in which there is no love understood in a traditional way in search of union, stability and legitimacy in the world. Perhaps because, for heterosexuality, the legitimacy has always been there. “This is an interesting fact when we talk about the construction of heteronormative masculinity and how intertwined it is with the manifestation and expression of affection and with the possibility of exploring other ways of relating. I believe that men and women are not exploring the space of intimacy and affection in the same way due to different gender socialization,” he underlines.
Juan Carlos R. de la Blancahealth psychologist, sexologist and couples therapist, underlines that men in these relationships could find the affection they seek in women, without exposing themselves to some problematic dynamics present in part of the gay environment, such as hypersexualization, excessive veneration of the body or certain behaviors shared with heterosexual men due to similar gender socialization.
The big question
The question that arises spontaneously is obvious: is there sex in these unions, is there passion in them, or is it a sort of legally legitimized couple friendship? Jacob Hoff and Samantha Greenstone have it and, in fact, when they announced Greenstone’s pregnancy they had to clarify, in response to the doubts of their followers, that yes, it was the result of their intimate relationships. “We have relationships. I can maintain my identity as a gay man, even if my partner is a woman, because that’s how I feel. I’m gay. When I go out into the world, I’m not attracted to women. That’s what it means to be gay!” he says.
And another question: do these couples indulge in gray hair or is there fidelity in them? Let’s move on to respond to a fictional novel that reflects many couples’ realities. In Thesis on domestication (by Camila Sosa, published in 2019 and made into a film in 2024) the protagonist of the novel marries a successful homosexual man with whom she has an open and sexually active relationship. “During the last few years the spirit of the time made the institution of marriage and the monogamous couple do a pirouette without ending up falling together, and it is curious how this novel’s approach immediately shows the farce behind the utopia: polyamory neither threatens nor resolves the domesticity of their bourgeois and boring marriage, but rather reinforces it”, writes Carlota Rubio in this regard. Babelia. Also in another small editorial phenomenon, The accident by Blanca Lacasa, its protagonist finds herself living in a platonic love relationship that often goes beyond physical boundaries with a gay couple. It’s clear that the possibility is starting to be part of the conversation, both real and literary.
Editor and screenwriter Tricia Cooke identifies herself as queer and it requires more than Married for 30 years to director Ethan Coen. “She is queer and me, straight and stupid”, he says in an interview with ABC News. They married in 1993, have two children and both have a partner in addition to their marital relationship, which they identify as polyamorous. De la Blanca explains to ICON that the fact that sex is not everything has long been demonstrated by couples who move on the asexual spectrum and for them he turns to Sternberg’s triangular theory of love. “It establishes three components: intimacy, passion and commitment. In their interaction, they could explain all types of human emotional relationships. Every human being needs these three components in his life, even if there are different ways of needing them or expressing them. The important thing is that we don’t need these three components to be provided by a single relationship, but we can get them from different types of bonds. This could explain the success of this type of relationships,” he says. That is, according to this theory, yes: some of these relationships would be maintained over time because the sexual and passionate part is satisfied outside of its boundaries.
“Sexual agreements outside of the relationship require both parties to sit down to talk about what they want and what they would not be willing to allow, establishing red, amber and green lines; this is what, in couples therapy, we call a relationship contract,” adds de la Blanca. It is then difficult not to talk about jealousy, an emotion that, as the psychologist clarifies, everyone feels, to a greater or lesser extent. “What is within our control is deciding what to do with them, how to handle them so that they don’t become reproaches or passive-aggressive attitudes.”
Friendship, temporary artifice or couple Truly?
Andrea Proenza Zoroquiaia says that reclaiming – not romanticizing – bonds like friendship is what is truly revolutionary these days. And in fact several recent books do so, putting friendship on the same level as a romantic love relationship (such as The friend who left meby Nuria Labari, Friendship and its consequencesby Sabina Urraca and Marina Folguera o My friendby Raquel Congosto). “Through these bonds of friendship, romantic love is decentralized and the burden of sex is lifted in an increasingly sexualized society (in this sense, people on the asexual spectrum have a lot to give). Furthermore, friendship has much more to do with networking rather than focusing one’s life on one person,” she explains. Gómez Beltrán underlines that these relationships can undermine the hierarchy of affections, but to do so they must also question it and not simply transform it from one bond to another. “We must question ourselves about the expectations of these bonds since, on many occasions, they are marked by a specific temporality. Unconsciously they are subject to finding a real couple. It would therefore be a sort of band-aid while that person appears who meets the requirements to be able to establish a connection. True“he says.
“I think we continue to articulate other ways of bonding as a temporary artifice that allows us to not feel so alone until then.” I love Disney it completes us emotionally. No matter how much reflection has been done in recent decades, we continue to desire a completeness that we do not seem to find in other relationships, even more so when the social context generates so much anguish, isolation and a sense of loneliness. The question we could perhaps ask ourselves is how intimacy, affection, care and responsibility are connected to the bonds we generate”, concludes Gómez Beltrán. For this reason, perhaps it is sufficient to answer a question as simple as it is abysmal: do you love him?
