If this revelation undermined Doyle’s first book, it provided the foundation of her second. “Love Warrior” is the story of how Doyle reconfigured her marital crisis as an opportunity for transformation. “The invitation in this pain is the possibility of discovering who I really am,” she wrote. “Death and resurrection—maybe that’s just the way of life and love.”
Oprah Winfrey selected “Love Warrior” for her book club, and Doyle’s publisher braced for a marriage-redemption blockbuster. Once again, though, the release of a book coincided with a life-altering experience: at a publishing event, she met Wambach, a two-time Olympic gold medallist and a World Cup champion, who was promoting her own memoir. “Suddenly, a woman is standing where nothingness used to be. She takes up the entire doorway, the entire room, the entire universe,” Doyle wrote. “I stare at her and take inventory of my entire life. My whole being says: There She Is.” And then they were stuck, feeling all the feelings, from opposite coasts, in two separate marriages.
“It was absolutely brutal,” Doyle said, one afternoon when she and Wambach were sitting in the bright living room of their house, in Naples, Florida. There were palm trees out by the pool; inside, the furniture was modern and mostly white, and on the wall were paintings by an artist from Wambach’s native Rochester—caricatures of Bob Dylan and Philip Seymour Hoffman, two famous shape-shifters. “I thought, This is my one shot at happiness,” Doyle continued. “And I will never be able to take it.”
Their first e-mails were about recovery; Wambach was one month sober, after a D.U.I. that made headlines. “My face was on the ESPN ticker for a whole week,” Wambach said, ruefully. “That public shaming just knocked it right out of me.” She was living in Portland, Oregon, and was in the process of separating from her wife, Sarah Huffman, a former teammate on the WNY Flash. The two were celebrated for exchanging a passionate kiss in the stands following Wambach’s win at the Women’s World Cup in 2015—a moment of public pride, just a week after a Supreme Court ruling effectively legalized marriage equality. Doyle had never kissed a woman before.
At first, Wambach said, “I was protecting myself, on a soul level. Because they never leave the family, straight women. They never leave the man—you know, like, for me.” But Doyle’s background turned out to be an advantage. “When Glennon started to talk Jesus and Christianity to my mother,” Wambach continued, “Mom was kind of taken aback that, Oh, this person knows more about this subject that I have basically been using as the reason why my daughter should not be with women.”
Doyle does not like to label her sexuality. On Instagram this fall, she posted a photo of a new haircut and wrote, “I like it short and unruly and wild and not so straight—just like me.” In her living room, she asked, “Who’s the boss of what’s a lesbian? And what’s bisexual? I do not feel like I was hiding something for my whole life. I really understand why the ‘born this way’ narrative is important to so many people, but to me it smacks of guilt and shame. It’s, like, ‘Oh, I would be straight if I could, but I can’t.’ Can you imagine if we had that in the civil-rights movement? If Black people were, like, ‘I would be white if I could’?”
Doyle wears a gold pendant of Mary on her neck, and she played with it with her manicured fingers as she spoke. “I have been in and out of Christian circles for so long that I know all of that culture, that language,” she said. “It’s all semantics. Abby talks about leadership with a team, and to me it means the exact same thing as what I talk about in terms of faith. When I say that I’m obsessed about Jesus, what I love so much is the idea of showing up for the world in a way that is sacrificial.” Wambach was that kind of leader, Doyle said, much more than she was: “I am not my favorite kind of person.”
In Doyle’s defense, Wambach suggested that, in effect, the political is personal: “Because of her size, because of her gender, because of her pretty face, in order to get her way she has to go into an alternative mode! Otherwise, she will be walked over and talked over and never get things done.”
“Listen, it’s not like I’m walking around shooting people,” Doyle said. “I’m a good and kind person. I don’t know if I’m nice. Would you say I’m nice?”
“I think you are in your heart,” Wambach replied, which made them both laugh. “I have to remember that you have clinical anxiety, right? And it’s not fair for me to be, like, Why don’t you respond nicer? So it forces me to be emotionally intelligent!”
“See?” Doyle said. “She’s my favorite kind of person.”
Doyle and Wambach are the embodiment of what straight women have in mind when they say that it would be so much easier to be in love with another woman. They exist in what Doyle calls a “forever conversation—the way I always dreamed it could be.” At this point, their relationship provides as much fodder for Doyle’s work as motherhood and spirituality do. Whenever they find themselves on the verge of a certain kind of interaction, one of them whips out a phone to record it. “You know when you’re, like, ‘Oh, here we go again’? Each of us knows when it’s coming, and this is part of our online story.” They have been approached about doing a television series. “Probably once a week for the last four years, some network has written to us begging for us to do a reality show, and never, ever, in a million gazillion years would we,” Doyle said. “We do a slice of that, but all on our own terms.” Reality television relies on people acting out. Wambach and Doyle are done with all that. They prefer Instagram, where people go to see something that they can aspire to.
Initially, Doyle was told that admitting she’d fallen in love with Wambach—just as she was about to go on tour promoting “Love Warrior”—would be career suicide. “There is fear and panic,” she posted on Momastery. “And the advice from many is: Wait, G. Just wait till after the book has launched to reveal this. This is a MARRIAGE book—you can’t break up before it even comes out!” But, she explained to her readers, “I was not called to be successful. I was called to be faithful. I was called to be faithful to truth and vulnerability and to YOU.”
Every weekday morning at nine, Doyle has a Zoom meeting with her team back in Virginia: Dynna Cabana, who is in charge of events and operations; Allison Schott, who handles graphic design; and Doyle’s sister, Amanda, whom she describes as “the boss of me.” (“Glennon thinks in colors,” Amanda, a lawyer, said. “I think in spreadsheets.”) One morning, the four women were discussing Doyle’s recent appearance on Hillary Clinton’s podcast, which they intended to promote on her social-media platforms. “She said, I really need you to call me Hillary, and I was, like, I really need you to have a different request of me,” Doyle said. “I can’t even call my eighth-grade civics teacher Tina.”
“But she’s doing that for likability, right?” Amanda asked.
“No! We had a really beautiful conversation, and she was really vulnerable and precious, and it was, like, a moment.”
Doyle was concerned about how her followers might respond to Clinton’s podcast. “I was up at 2 A.M. thinking about this,” she said. “When we post it, I want this to be a completely safe space for her. Like, if one person says one freaking thing . . . ”
“That will one hundred per cent happen,” Amanda said, nodding vigorously. “Less so on Instagram, but on Facebook you might want to consider just turning off the comments.”
This would be a big step in the Doylesphere; she considers the back-and-forth with her readers sacrosanct. “I’m always amazed by my friends who are writers online who say, ‘Why are you reading comments?’ ” she told me. “It’s, like, That is half the thing!” For Doyle—who has written, “I love people, but not in person”—the Internet provides an ideal medium. Online, the exchanges are immediate, and building fellowship can seem effortless. (Publishing, by contrast, feels to her like “idea generation in molasses.”) She communicates with her readers almost daily, in tones as intimate as if she were talking to dear friends. She often begins videos by saying, “Hello, loves.” A habitual sign-off is “I love us,” or, if she’s responding to something bad, “We will get through this together, like we always have.”
“I just feel so indebted to them,” Doyle told me. “It feels like a very good use of my life and time to keep guiding my little community, because they actually can make change.” She and Amanda started the nonprofit Together Rising in 2012, and since then have raised more than twenty-eight million dollars for causes that have gripped Doyle’s followers: Syrian refugees, children separated from their parents at the border, incarcerated Black mothers who can’t afford to post bail, a single mom who needs breast-cancer treatment. A mantra of the organization is “Transform your heartache into action.” In their living room, Wambach suggested that this idea had a persistent place in their lives. “You see something wrong, you feel it,” she told Doyle. “Like, you’re in bed for two days when kids are getting locked up in cages—and I’m, like, Where’s my wife? And then one day I wake up, and you’re out of bed, you’ve got an easel, and you’re ready to take down the whole system.”
In addiction recovery, the Serenity Prayer encourages people to change what they can and accept what they can’t; Doyle has reëvaluated where that line is. If you abide by her catchphrase and “feel everything,” you may well find yourself moved by the suffering of others. Another of her catchphrases might inspire you to work against it: “We can do hard things.” Doyle came across the maxim when she taught third grade, noticing it on a sign in another teacher’s classroom. Since she started using it in her writing, it has resonated broadly. After Biden won the Presidency, his campaign manager tweeted, “We can do hard things . . . and you just did!” Addressing Congress after the siege of the Capitol, Chuck Schumer said, “In America, we do hard things.” A flurry of comments erupted online. An Instagram follower of Doyle’s commented, “Schumer is Untamed!” Another wrote, “I might have started crying,” to which Doyle responded, “me too :)” There were a great many cheetah emojis. As the conversation continued, Doyle offered a comforting wish: “Just an idea for us: maybe we all go to bed a little early . . . to extra prepare us for whatever comes tomorrow? I love us. We can do hard things.”
