When Terry Donahue and Pat Henschel met in 1947, neither could imagine that their relationship would last practically a lifetime. Nor could they imagine how long they would have to wait before they could openly say who they were to each other.
Terry was 22 and Pat was 18 when they met in Canada. Terry was passionate about baseball and would go on to play catcher in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, while Pat would become her partner throughout a life spent away from the public eye.
When they moved to Chicago together, they began building a home. The problem was how to explain that home to the rest of the world.
For decades, the word “cousin” helped them avoid questions. They could also introduce themselves as friends or roommates. Terry even dated men to keep up appearances with her family.
It wasn’t just a matter of privacy. They had grown up in a time when a couple of women could face discrimination and trouble for publicly showing their relationship. So they learned to carefully separate the life they shared from the identity they presented to the outside world.
And so the years passed.
As the world changed, they stayed together. They kept photographs, letters, and mementos of their relationship, but for a long time those things remained practically out of sight.
The big change came when they were already elderly.
In 2009, Terry and Pat finally decided to tell their family the truth. Terry’s great-nephew, Chris Bolan, then discovered that the two women he had known all his life as relatives were, in fact, a couple.
The revelation was so significant to Bolan that he began filming them. For years, he recorded conversations, memories, arguments, and everyday moments, eventually turning all that material into A Secret Love, the documentary released by Netflix in 2020.
The film showed something that had remained hidden for decades: not only the beginning of their relationship, but also what it meant to grow old after building an entire life alongside the same person.
Terry died in 2019, at the age of 93. By then, she and Pat had been together for approximately 72 years and had finally been able to marry.
Their story eventually reached millions of people precisely because it had remained private for most of their lives.
Pat summed up what she wanted to do with that story simply:
“We want to share our love with the rest of the world”.
After decades of saying they were “cousins”, they were finally able to say publicly what they had been from the beginning: two women who had chosen to spend their lives together.