Posted by I get it, you love lesbians, and we love you too! Some of us a little too much judging by the angst so many of us carry around about that one time we fell for a straight girl who unsurprisingly (though heartbreakingly so) did not return our warm fuzzy lady loving feelings. It’s cool though, most of us realised eventually that lusting after straight girls is about as healthy for our emotional cardiovascular health as a big greasy McDonald’s meal is for our literal cardiovascular health.
Most of us eventually took this lesson on board, the slow learners left to spend an eternity lusting after straight women for years on end. All the while complaining to their friends/therapist/actual straight girl they are lusting over that straight girl will never love them. Anyway my point is, as lesbians we learnt an important lesson about straight women pretty early on.
After being taught such important life lessons as those stated above by straight girls, I feel it is my duty to give back to a community that has given me and my fellow lesbians so much. I’m just going to cut to the chase and tell you what you’re doing wrong. Here goes ‘I have often thought about switching teams and becoming a lesbian, it looks SO much easier than dealing with men.’
Are you a nice straight girl who is guilty of uttering these words to your friendly neighbourhood lesbian? Maybe to show some solidarity for the cause, that you are really down with the whole gay thing? While we appreciate the being down with the gay thing, you need to stop saying this. No really, just stop. I will tell you why, but if you read no further just take this away: Please. Stop. Saying. This. To. Us.
Firstly, we know that you meant no harm by it so don’t freak out. At best the lesbian you said it to probably took a deep breath, did an internal eye roll and smiled politely while reminding herself your heart is in the right place. At worst said lesbian who was maybe suffering from Inappropriate Straight Girl Lust (which will henceforth be known as ISGL for the purpose of this piece) now has a tangible piece of ‘evidence’ that said straight girl is swingable, and this will be used as evidence when harping on to friends/therapists/strangers at the pub that straight girl will one day love her. Spoiler Alert: She won’t. Sorry.
ISGL isn’t even the most important reason why you need to stop yourself from saying this to every lesbian you meet. Most of us are far enough along in our journey that we realised long ago that ISGL is a path to nowhere but heartache and sexual frustration. That shit ain’t fun.
Below, I will list the reasons why it irks us when you say that, and why you should probably definitely absolutely stop saying it to every lesbian you meet.
1.It’s not all pillow fights, face masks and movie nights
I get that your idea of living in close proximity with another woman who you share a close emotional bond with probably involves all of these things. I have been in lesbian relationships for a combined total of 13 years. I can tell you that in all that time we have never once done face masks together. Crazy right?! We did those pore strips that you stick to your nose and then rip out and look at the tiny rows of clogged pores together 2-3 times. This is probably the closest we came to the female bonding ritual that is body pampering. Unless you count the 2 times I let my partner trim my toenails when I was pregnant and too round to bend and reach them (which I found really creepy and not at all enjoyable).
As for pillow fights they have been known to happen on occasion, but probably not as you imagine. Women need a shit tonne of pillows to get comfortable when they sleep (evidence source: my life). Don’t ask me why, there is some primal inbuilt need for many, many pillows. This only increases during and after one has experienced a pregnancy. So the standard number of pillows in our bed ranges from about 6 (on the low side, assumes no one in the bed is pregnant ) to 14 (someone is pregnant, non pregnant partner is asleep on the couch so the pregnant one can arrange all 14 pillows in a crop circle like pattern as an offering to the pregnancy gods for a decent nights sleep).
So any pillow fights are actual fights, complete with cranky angry voices. No one is in their underwear laughing and playfully hitting their partner with a big fluffy pillow. Some agitated person has the flashlight function on their phone turned on at 1am searching the bed for the pillow that goes on top of their face. After examining the situation under the covers the missing face pillow is found wedged tightly between partner’s knees. Face pillow is aggressively yanked out from between sleeping partners knees, awakening them in a state of shock and fright. Crankiness ensues.
As for the movie nights I can’t really argue that one, guilty as charged. But not while doing matching face masks, you follow?
2. If you change teams you will eventually be expected to have sex with another woman (and like it)
Lesbians actually have sex. With each other. It’s hard to find time for it with our busy schedule of face masks and pillow fights, but we manage. Shocking I know, if you need a minute to compose yourself take it now.
Is the idea of having sex with another female unappealing to you? Do you feel your time could be better spent shoe shopping or eating popcorn with your live in BFF and watching The Bachelor? When you say you’d like to switch teams, do you figure you could just do it when you were really drunk, and only like twice a year? Or better yet maybe never at all? If you answered yes to any of these questions brace yourself because I have bad news. I hate to break it to you but there is a good chance you may be heterosexual. Don’t cry honey, it’s not your fault, you can’t help how you were born. I accept you just the way you are, but I really don’t want you on my team.
Did you do the calculations in your head of how long you would have to endure frequent sex before the acceptable amount of time had passed so you could slip comfortably into a sexless relationship and finally relax? Also a bad sign. Also, the reason you really shouldn’t switch teams.
When I watched the TV series Big Love I found myself really liking the look of the modern day polygamy set up. I mean they all had really nice houses, and there were so many people to share childcare/cooking/household/sex with husband duties. It looked like a dream. I mean more help in the kitchen and only a couple of nights a week with a man in my house, along with several sister wives sounds kind of awesome to me. It dawned on me that this is probably not how a heterosexual woman would feel about sharing her husband with two other wives.
Perhaps this looks so appealing to me because in this scenario I have zero attachment to said husband, I’m relieved to offload him to other women. The pragmatic approach I take when picturing myself in this situation is similar to the one going on in your heads. At face value it’s a solid plan until you look a little deeper.
3. If switching teams were that easy, we would have done it years ago
So this is where I move past the funny stuff and tell you the number one reason you need to stop saying this to us, and it’s because it actually brings up some raw emotional shit from when we realised we were gay. While it may be some novel idea that just occurred to you when you were talking to us in the public toilets in a bar, I guarantee you the idea of switching to your team is not new or novel to us.
We all thought about it a lot in the beginning when we realised we were different to you. Some of us spent longer thinking about it than others. Many of us stopped thinking about what it would be like to be able to consciously choose to bat for your team when we became happier and more comfortable with ourselves. Some of us still wonder how much easier our lives would be if we could make that happen.
I guarantee you we thought about the logistics of changing teams a lot more thoroughly than you did when you made that comment.
Like how long do you have to be with someone before you can dial the sex right back to once or twice a year, perhaps just birthday sex? Maybe like 2-3 years if you hope to trap someone in a relationship where they are fond enough of you and have enough personal investment in the relationship that leaving seems too hard and they just begrudgingly stay? But then you’d really need to put in the work to make them that fond of you to begin with and I don’t know I have what it takes to fake that level of emotional interest and commitment.
What about how to find someone whose personality you are fond enough of (despite having no romantic attraction to them) that you can spend your time living in close proximity to them while remaining reasonably contented. At what point would you turn out like one of those caged monkey’s in experiments who begin to gnaw away at their own tails out of boredom and frustration?
If you find someone who fits this criteria, chances are you would have a pretty strong bond with them friendship wise. You will care for them, even if not in a romantic way. In which case, is it ethical to enter into a relationship with a (presumably) unsuspecting partner who has real feelings and emotions and no idea that you actually lack the capacity (through no fault of your own) to have the same feelings for them? Isn’t that just kind of a sad and awful thought? Doesn’t this paint a really dark miserable picture? Do you really want to consciously choose to put another person through that?
That my straight friend; though you don’t see it yet; is the gloomy end point of what changing teams for convenience looks like. You may not know that because you didn’t get past the pillow fights and face masks when you pictured it. We know it though, because we carefully considered it as an actual option at some point in time and unplayed all the consequences. If not in our heads, then in real life.
If what you really mean to say is you want to experience close intimacy and fun with someone who gets you and adores you, but without the actual crippling fear and terror that comes with putting your heart on the line then we hear you. We’d actually like that ourselves. Unfortunately love doesn’t work that way for any of us. Sorry.
*None of the above applies to closeted lesbians or bisexuals, just straight girls who want one long loveless/sexless/mani-pedi/movie marathon relationship with us because it seems like a fun idea.
Pride and Parenting 