I do absolutely everything with my wife – we’re proudly codependent

As my wife, Whitney, and I got up to go to the bathroom at a restaurant recently, my mum exclaimed: ‘Why do you have to do everything together?’

Our immediate reaction is to feel annoyed because we don’t understand why it’s an issue. Female best friends often go to the toilet together, this is just an added bonus when you’re in a lesbian relationship.

Walking away, we just laughed her comment off. Then once we used the loos, we gave each other a sneaky hug for reassurance and came back to the table.

She’s not the first one to be baffled that we like to do everything together. And I mean everything.

We’re codependent, but we don’t think that’s a scary concept. 

Whitney doesn’t have a driving license and often joins me in the car on errands. On top of that, we’re a femme lesbian couple who constantly shares each other’s clothes. 

We go with each other to every appointment, raise our daughter together, and even miss each other when we’re in different rooms of the house. 

Every morning, we have breakfast in bed together. We can’t bear to be apart. The other day I went to take a nap, but as soon as I got upstairs I instantly missed Whitney and our baby. 

For 16 years, we’ve worked together as content creators, too. 

Even our brand name is conjoined – we are known as ‘Wegan’, which a friend named us in 2008. Yes, we are that couple that also run a joint instagram together.

We recently went to see the film Together, starring real-life married couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco, a horror about codependency. 

To us, the magnetic tug that is played for scares in the film was reality for us, and a nice one. 

It’s something we’ve felt from the very start of our relationship.

I met Whitney in 2006 via Myspace by pure fate. Whitney decided to look up gay girls in the UK and I came up on the first page! 

Whitney added me and I remember thinking I’d never meet this cute blonde girl as she lived in Hawaii and I was studying my Masters at Cardiff University at the time. 

But a few years later she came to study in London and we met for the first time. Just a few weeks after she arrived, we became a couple. It was love at first sight. 

For the rest of Whitney’s semester in the UK, we hung out as much as possible, even relatively long distance as I was in Wales and Whitney in London. 

But it became truly long-distance when she returned to Hawaii. It wasn’t easy, but we knew our connection was strong. 

We would write diary entries to each other about what our days had been like so the other could read it upon waking. 

Whitney lived with me in Cardiff over the summer for 3 months in 2010 and I lived with Whitney in Hawaii for 3 months in 2011. 

A year later, Whitney finally had her visa approved and she moved to the UK to live with me in 2012. Since then, we’ve been inseparable and I think being long distance definitely helped inspire us to be together all the time.

We had a civil partnership in 2012 and ‘upgraded’ it to a marriage in California in 2017.

At our civil partnership ceremony, we even wore the exact same dress and heels from Ted Baker, after trying to coordinate complimentary looks, we decided to just embrace the same outfit. 

We’ve recently welcomed a baby girl, Olivia, into the world and we’re absolutely loving motherhood. 

Of course, Whitney was with me at every appointment and every step of my pregnancy.

With the arrival of our baby girl, we’ve found another level of joy in doing everything together – from nappy changes to late night feeds. 

We bathe her together and take it in turns to bottle feed her, with one of us making the bottle while the other one holds her. 

We even used to look after her overnight together but it became hard to get into a sleep routine so we’ve decided to do that in shifts too.

It was an adjustment to not be going to bed together at the same time but we’ve had to discover a new way of doing things and we know it won’t be forever.

It’s just another way we want to spend every waking moment together. 

This level of codependency often disturbs people, or gets them annoyed, like my mum. 

Have you been in a codependent relationship? Have your say in the comments belowComment Now

We’ve even had a brand that we’re working with ask us to remove saying that we are ‘codependent and proud’ as it could apparently be misconstrued.

It makes us feel judged when people point out that something we’re doing is perceived as strange to others.

At the end of the day, we don’t care about what anyone thinks because we’ve built a life full of love, laughter, and closeness. We’re happy and that’s all that matters.

In Together, the couple’s dependency is seen as something to be terrified of. But for us, it’s not horror – it’s our happily ever after.

We personally think this is what finding your other half should look like. If anything, it’s other relationships that have it wrong – not ours.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk. 

Share your views in the comments below.

Have you been in a codependent relationship? Have your say in the comments below