Willow and Tara were one of the first lesbian couples to kiss on mainstream TV. Willow met Tara at a university Wicca group and fell for her, which precipitated Willow’s realisation about her sexuality. The depiction of their relationship on Buffy the Vampire Slayer helped me, then 18 years old, start coming to terms with my own queer identity.
When I joined the Buffy online forum, the show had just killed off Tara. Fans were in a state of crisis. Most of the message-board members were furious and devastated over Tara’s death. I was, too, but soon I was distracted by other feelings.
I met Rachel on a “word association” thread on the board. She was fun and easy to talk to, and we replied back and forth so frequently and enthusiastically that we annoyed the moderators, and they soon closed the thread.
We shifted to email and began an intense correspondence. We were the same age, I lived in Sydney, Rachel in Melbourne, and as we shared our inner and outer worlds we became very close friends very quickly.
As my feelings for her deepened, I began to revisit old Buffy episodes, which now held new meaning. I watched Willow and Tara slow dance to Melanie Doane’s I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You in season five, and their first kiss several episodes later. As Willow sobbed to Michelle Branch’s Goodbye to You in season six, I cried too, imagining the prospect of not having Rachel in my life.
A couple of months into our email correspondence, I went away backpacking. From internet cafes, I exchanged emails, fan fiction and, finally, photos. I stared at her beautiful face and realised I’d fallen in love with Rachel before I’d set eyes on her in real life. That’s when we made plans to speak over the phone. Thanks to exorbitant long-distance calls and the limits to technology in 2002, we hadn’t heard each other’s voices until then.
The first time I spoke to Rachel, from a payphone in Spain, I was so spellbound by her voice that I ended up being robbed during the call. Normally highly vigilant, I didn’t notice my belongings were missing until we had hung up.
That day in Spain, after hanging up the handset (and filing a police report over my stolen belongings), I knew for sure. Really, I’d known it all along, but hearing her laugh, her American accent softened by years in Australia – to the point that people call her Canadian or Irish – and her thoughtful and curious questions made me certain.
It took us another month to admit our feelings for each other – another important phone call, this time after meeting in person – and two devastating airport farewells before we started our lives together in 2004. We were celebrated by a veritable cheerleading squad of queer friends from the message board, who used Buffy content to express their excitement long before gifs and memes became mainstream. The moderators felt guilty for closing the thread where we first exchanged messages, and started a new “word association” thread, named after Rachel’s username.
Our love story began just as Willow and Tara’s ended. Since then, Rachel and I have married each other multiple times: an Australian commitment ceremony in 2013; a British civil partnership, which we then converted to marriage when it was legalised in the UK; and an illegal protest wedding at an Australian marriage equality rally in 2017.
We’ve been together for 20 years now. If we were to compare our relationship to 20 seasons of a TV show, we’ve had a lot of comedy and romance. And while there has been drama, we’ve always made it through together.
Neither of us expected to find our own Willow or Tara on the board, but thanks to Buffy, we found a relationship that is magic.
Roz Bellamy’s debut memoir, Mood: A Memoir of Love, Identity and Mental Health, is out on 10 October through Wakefield Press (RRP $34.95)
Do you have a romantic realisation you would like to share? Email australia.lifestyle@theguardian.com with “The moment I knew” in the subject line, and a brief description of your story, to be considered for future columns
