Dykes on Dates: Tips for Topping (Homemade Pizza)

Hi and welcome back to Dykes on Dates, the series where I tell you all about real dates with my real fiancé Kristen (okay, saying real too many times absolutely makes her sound fictional) and how YOU can do them, too. Last week, Dykes on Dates went bowling. This time, we’re topping! Homemade pizzas, that is. I’ve broken down the guide by skill level, and then you’ll find my mini essay on homemade pizza dates after the photo.

The Date: Homemade Pizza

Cost

Varies, can be as low as under $5 if you’re making your own crust and using ingredients you already have in your fridge/pantry. Can be up to $50 depending on the fanciness of your ingredients and if you’re also planning to have a wine or beer pairing. But truly this is a date that can be done on the cheap! And it takes place at home!

Notes on Cost

Depending on which of the crust methods you choose below (pizza baby, pizza dad, or pizza chef), this will vary. Store-bought pizza crust can be as low as under $3 (as it is at my Publix), and buying from an actual pizzeria will usually run higher. Homemade crust is cheapest though the most costly in terms of time. I cannot stress enough how you should use! Ingredients! You! Already! Have! Or maybe spend on one fancy ingredient, like some of the ones I shout out in the forthcoming mini essay!

Additional Planning Notes

Here’s where we’re going to look at the three different skill levels of homemade pizza night, which I have dubbed pizza baby (beginner), pizza dad (intermediate), and pizza chef (advanced). We are specifically focusing on dough/crust here, as that’s generally the most difficult part of homemade pizza. No matter what level you choose or whether one of you is more of the chef in the relationship than the other, the toppings aspect should feel collaborative! If you’re the chef and your partner is the kitchen princess, make it fun and pretend to take their specific pizza order like you’re an actual pizzaiolo. Chop toppings and arrange them in bowls and drop them on the pizzas together! Take turns rolling out/throwing the dough. Drink wine while you do it or try out artisanal sodas. Throw on one of the many Spotify playlists called “Italian cooking music.” Make it as cozy or indulgent as you like.

Pizza Baby

Don’t really wanna fuck with dough at all? That’s cool! You can make what my dad calls “naan pizza,” which is literally just sauce, cheese, and toppings thrown on top of store-bought naan from the grocery store. I have a package in my freezer at all times. Cook time for “pizza” in this instance is like five minutes! It also means you need to precook any raw toppings before putting them on top, because they won’t really get much of a chance to cook in the short time it takes for the naan to warm up. These are also fun because they’re personal-sized, so if you are a vegan who dates a meat eater, you’re each able to customize your toppings easily!

Alternatively, you can also buy a frozen plain cheese pizza and then jazz it up with your own toppings! Maybe one day I’ll rate and rank the best frozen pizzas, but for now, my go-to is CPK. Hear me out: What if you threw some Fishwife anchovies on top of a frozen pizza?! Perfect high-brow/low-brow combo if you ask me!

Pizza Dad

The intermediate option is to buy pre-made raw pizza dough from your grocery store or a local pizzeria. I often buy the pre-rolled dough from Publix or the pizza dough ball (they’re in the bakery section usually). Even if your local pizza spot doesn’t advertise that they sell dough, call them up to inquire! They usually do, and it’s usually tasty. But let’s not pretend that this small shortcut automatically makes homemade pizza “easy.” If you’re used to working with dough a lot, great, you’re probably set! But if you’re not exactly a pizzaiolo yet, there can be a learning curve when it comes to getting a crust that’s crispy in all the right places, not undercooked, and not burnt. I’ve incorrectly estimated the cook time for pizzas many times! And I have a pretty nice pizza stone! It can just be tricky (and, as with most things that involve dough, can be impacted by your environment; working with dough in dry Vegas versus humid Miami made for very different experiences for me!).

Pizza Chef

Okay, yes chef! You and/or your partner already have some pizza making experience or otherwise are down for a challenge. In my opinion, homemade pizza doesn’t get much better than the recipe for King Arthur crispy cheesy pan pizza, but if you/your partner are Sourdough Gays, then they also have a recipe that utilizes unfed starter so you don’t have to discard it! Also hashtag NOT AN AD, but hashtag PROUD SISTER: My lil sis is the lead industrial designer at Halo, which manufactures a sick portable outdoor pizza oven and if you have a pizza oven then you can institute a WEEKLY pizza date night, just saying. Tis what I intend to do when I finally get one this spring.

Homemade pizza humbles me. Maybe that’s why I like it for date nights.

I’m used to impressing Kristen in the kitchen, to pulling off feats, to improvising something complicated for the first time and sticking the landing. For some reason, I haven’t mastered pizza, at least not at the level I’d like to. No, not “for some reason.” I know the reason. Pizza is baking, ultimately, and I am not a baker. Even the store-bought Publix dough has given me grief.

For a while, I didn’t have a rolling pin, using a wine bottle to roll out dough for our pandemic pizza nights in Vegas and then Miami. Kristen bought me a rolling pin and then a pizza stone, too. We upgraded our shitty pizza cutter to a nicer one. These things helped, but I’m still no pizzaiolo. The finished product is delicious, but the path to get there is arduous — except on the nights I opt for simple naan pizza that we eat in front of the television, watching Bravo. That can count as date night, too, especially after a long work week.

But really, homemade pizza date night isn’t about the dough or the grief it gives me or the cook times I can never seem to get right. It’s about the ambiance, the pizza vibes we generate. Kristen has been curating the best “Italian cooking playlist” out there for years now. I have a glass of wine while I cook, which I don’t always do, but with pizza it feels right. Kristen lights candles. I chop and arrange toppings in little bowls whose colors match the hues of the toppings. This part I love; this part doesn’t give me grief. I may be a bottom, but I’m all about preparing to top when it comes to pizza.

And maybe I like Kristen to see me sweat a bit, to see me misgauge the oven temperature or have to a sling a pizza back into heat because the center’s a wet, doughy mess. It’s fun and intimate, you know, to let them see you be a bit of a mess. Plus, between the wine and the Dean Martin, the vibes are immaculate regardless of how long it takes the pizza to cook.

KKU’s Favorite Pizza Toppings:

• Quail Eggs: If your local grocery store doesn’t have them, find an Asian market. Crack them onto the pizza in the last four or five minutes of baking.
• Arugula or Watercress: Add after the pizza is done cooking.
• Fresh Mozzarella: Just throw globs of it on during the last five to ten minutes of cooking and let it get gooey, maybe a little brown in places by turning on the broiler.
• Raita: I make a mean chicken makhani pizza, and drizzling it with a bit of a yogurt sauce at the end is crucial.
• Sliced Pepperoncini: Add after cooking.
• Sliced Pickles: Yes! Pickles on pizza! Also add after cooking.
• Anchovies: You know the ones.

Dykes on Dates is a new series by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya chronicling dates with her fiancé Kristen and offering ideas, tips, and tricks for stoking the flames of romance.

Dykes on Dates: Bowling Is the Epitome of Romance

Hello and welcome to the very first installment of Dykes on Dates! My fiancé Kristen and I are very good at going on dates, even four years into our relationship, and we love it! So I thought I’d bring some date planning ideas to y’all every other Thursday. These will double as date recommendations but also just a diary of the dates Kristen and I go on, which means some of them might be about date idea misfires! We’re all in this together. Each installment, we’ll start with logistics and then move into a mini personal essay of sorts. As always, feel free to make suggestions or requests in the comments.

I’ll also include tips and tricks for lowering the cost of the date. Some, but not all, of my date ideas are catered toward people who drink, but I will include sober options where applicable! Some, but not all, of my date ideas will be set outside of the home, and I’ll also try to include at-home alternatives where applicable.

Not every single date will be for every single couple! That’s why I’m doing this every other week, bringing you a slew of date ideas with a ton of planning details and notes from my own experiences. Kristen and I will be challenging ourselves to try new things, too, so sometimes the dates might not even be our cup of tea! I’m going to be honest and personal in these!

While some dates can obviously be used in more casual dating arrangements, I’m writing from the perspective of an engaged person who lives with my partner of four years, so the point of view is geared more toward long-term queer relationships.

The Date: Bowling

Cost

Varies, can be as low as $15 or as high as $100, depending on how long you want to bowl, rates at your local alley, and whether you’re ordering food and drinks, etc

Notes on Cost

Many bowling alleys will run specials and happy hours that lower the cost of games, drinks, and food. If you and your partner really like to bowl a lot, then I recommend paying by the hour versus paying by game, because games go FAST when there’s just two people. But if you wanna be more casual/leisurely about it, you can absolutely pay by game, which can be as low as $2.50/game. If you do drink, the most cost effective way to do it is to split a pitcher of domestic beer!!!!! You know I’m choosing Bud Light, but my fiancé is a Miller Lite dyke.

Additional Planning Notes

Don’t forget to wear socks and comfortable clothes! One time I wore a cute dress to bowling and immediately regretted it! It absolutely fucked up my game!!!!

Alternative Options

A modified at-home version of this game could look like temporarily transforming your space into a bowling alley. Set up a simple tabletop bowling game or even channel cosmic bowling with an LED glow bowl set that, sure, is meant for children, but who cares!!!! Then just serve things like popcorn and frozen mozzarella sticks or order a pizza. You can even order a $3 pitcher online to serve beer or nonalc beer if you really wanna bring some accuracy to the setup.

Dykes on Dates

Kristen and I go bowling every few weeks, but we might start going more regularly because of how much we love it for date night. Our local alley is the Aloma Bowl, and it’s got just the right amount of bells and whistles, smells like shoe cleaner and dropped beers, and is home to what we jokingly (but also sometimes seriously) refer to as our favorite bar in Orlando. It’s called the Brooklyn Bar, and I suppose that means it’s New York-themed, though it’s difficult to discern that in the details. Really, it’s just a solid dive bar tucked into a corner of the bowling alley with a killer karaoke night twice a week. We’ve not had the courage to go up on stage yet (there are a lot of regulars, many of them 60+, all of them incredible singers), but maybe next Bowling Date Night.

The thing about bowling is the more you play, the more you want to play. We’ve been known to knock out a full five or six games together, which means we’re throwing those bowling balls a good 100-120 times each, more if we manage to get a tenth frame bonus. Are we sore the next day? Yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely. And hey, increased and intense upper arm strength concentrated to just one arm can be useful in a lesbian relationship I am just saying.

When I started dating Kristen, I said to her very matter of factly: “I’m very good at throwing things at other things.” I can’t remember where we were or even what city we were in. It was the early period of our relationship when I lived in Brooklyn and she lived in Orlando but we bounced around the country together at least every other week, as she was on book tour for Mostly Dead Things and I had a flexible job that allowed me to travel. She asked me to clarify what I meant by my declaration, and I listed some examples: bowling, yes, but also darts, horseshoes, arcade basketball, shuffleboard, corn hole, the more obscure yard game Kubb, I’ve even tried my hand at curling and wasn’t bad for a beginner. If a game requires throwing something at something else, I’m both down and good. Maybe we were in San Diego, because it was there that I decided to prove this point by throwing a skeeball ball into the 100 ring — yes, throwing, instead of rolling. Which is against the rules, but my point was proven. Where I lack in overall strength, I make up for in aim.

The first time we bowled together, we were in Austin, went with one of her best friends, split a pitcher, and played for over four hours. After that, it joined karaoke as one of the shared activities we love to do.

The spirit of bowling — with the right person or people — is congenial. Sure, there are leagues and people who take it very seriously, but it’s not a cutthroat sport. When I bowl, the only person I really feel like I’m bowling against is myself, trying to beat my own personal records every time. We cheer each other on, kiss when one of us gets a strike. Yes, we’re trying to win, but we’re not necessarily trying to beat each other. All couples are different in terms of how competitive they get, but I think it’s hard to be an asshole at bowling. The beer’s flowing, and the vibe is distinctly 1995-2002, no matter what alley you’re at. (We have occasionally tried out one of the fancy bowling alleys that do not have this vibe, and it’s never worth it!!!!!) It’s hard to be mad in a bowling alley.

And yet. One weird thing about me that was discovered by accident is this: When I’m angry, I’m really fucking good at bowling. We’re already established that I’m just generally good at bowling, but I’m talking breaking 200 good. I’m talking strike after strike after strike good. This became clear to us when, shortly before a bowling date with Kristen, I experienced a small but frustrating work-related challenge that pushed me over the edge of an already long day. I took my frustrations out on the lane, and it showed.

My weird emotion side effects aside, bowling should be an easy breezy time. It might not be obviously romantic, but it is. You get to talk a bunch, like a dinner date but with an added activity — one that not only enables you to but almost insists you stare at your partner’s ass. Even if you didn’t grow up going to bowling birthday parties in the suburbs like I did, there’s something in the air at a bowling alley that’s conducive to nostalgia, to telling winding stories, to not realizing how much time has passed. The focus on the game also means not focusing too much on your phone. It’s easy to connect while bowling.

We like to do date nights where we actually combine bowling with going to the movie theater after, a nice balance of activity and then chilling out. These are the best kind of dates, the kind that feel endless and like one adventure spilling into another.

Dykes on Dates is a new series by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya chronicling dates with her fiancé Kristen and offering ideas, tips, and tricks for stoking the flames of romance.

Heart Whisperer: How I Found My Way to a Love That’s Lasted 45 Years

Editor’s Note: This essay briefly mentions childhood sexual abuse.

When trees turn the burnished colors of autumn, I celebrate love. In the autumn of 1977, I met the partner of my dreams.

Autumn begins the holiday season, lifting me up instead of letting me down. We save our Halloween pumpkin to make pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving, we close our eyes, make a wish, and snap our turkey wishbone in two. We wish for more years together. No matter who gets the shorter section, we both win.

When Christmas spreads coverlets of snow, our warmth sustains us. Our toasts on New Year’s Eve sing with memories of 45 years together — overcoming challenges that tested our endurance, grit, and devotion.

I’m 83 now, but when I was 25, my story did not ring in happiness. The backpack on my shoulders weighed me down with fear. I escaped reality every weekend, wheeling my son’s stroller through a semi-dark tunnel beneath a footbridge, my heels echoing off the stone walls. As I approached the opening leading to my safe place, my heart leaped like an air-brushed flame. I blinked at grass as green as a sunlit shamrock shimmering on the ground. Swans glided on the blue-green surface of a pond and clouds drifted through the cobalt blue sky like dreams through my head.

My three-year-old son rocked in his stroller the way he galloped on his rocking horse at home, laughing as a pair of swans entwined their curved necks and created a heart-shaped space. Longing sucked the breath out of me. I wrote another love poem in my head.

Will I ever find someone to share this beauty?

I was a pretend wife, a stumbling, new mother – a woman who had never known passion or completion. I ached for tenderness.

My parents had not known how to place me in their hearts. As a child, I hated dolls and dresses; I loved fishing rods, baseball bats, and comics with super heroes. I also loved the quiet of my room to read and daydream. I read to fuel my imagination, yearning to sail on clipper ships, hike through jungles, and hit more home runs than the boys on my stick ball team. I spoke frog, bird, and puppy language.

As I grew up, my confusion grew. When I was seven, my neighbor married. His wife smelled like the honeysuckle bushes on my uncle’s farm. She wore a tiny pickle pin on the navy lapel of her stewardess uniform.

Why did my heart flutter when she knelt down to my level, tweaked one of my long braids, and made me promise to have fun every day?

I fantasized about being the pilot of the airplane that flew her to Africa. Always the hero, I rescued her from gorillas and lions.

One day, my fantasy world shattered. I overheard my mother confide to a neighbor: “My daughter’s queer.”

Crushed, abandoned, I felt separated from her. What do you mean?

My father was too hands-on. He tickled me to see if I was growing breasts. He’d touch me in places that made me squirm and stop when my mother entered the room. The only time I felt safe was after dinner when he drank three glasses of scotch and fell asleep with my mother on the couch.

The Good Humor ice cream man dealt me another shock: “You’re so pretty. Why don’t you ever smile?” Again, exposed.

And my high school English teacher, who stopped me in the hallway: “You’re a gifted writer. When you go to college you should major in creative writing.” Exposed again.

Who is he talking about? These were possibilities which had never entered my mind. But curiosity forced me to explore his words. I took buses to the library to take out books by famous writers. I loved colors and doodled a lot. I used my allowance to pay for an art lesson at the Brooklyn Museum. But the shard of light my English teacher presented dulled. I was not ready to be exposed in the larger world of college.

I yearned to express myself, to talk without stuttering, challenges that followed me into my thirties.

I married because that’s what most girls of the post-World War II generation did. My husband laughed at my dreams and drawings. He slept with other women, some my former classmates. On our wedding night, he told me he could never be my friend.

When he said he was taking my children away because I overprotected them, hives hounded me. Desperation squeezed my chest, warning me to save myself. I saw a therapist and met with a lawyer. It took me five years to find the courage I had found in my fantasies to end my marriage.

I testified in a courtroom. The witness stand faced my husband’s table. I looked him in the eyes. The judge pounded his gavel and granted me a divorce. But I still ached to share my heart. I turned to alcohol and it turned on me. Another roadblock, more work on myself.

With another therapist’s support, I signed up for a college art course, a stepping stone towards finding myself and the lost child inside me.

In the autumn of my 39th year, that lost child saved my life. I discovered that I was fluent in portraiture and watercolor painting. I opened up and bloomed in the nurturing environment of like-minded students.

One day a woman appeared in the classroom doorway. My heart fluttered. Gathering her lovely self, she strode across the front of the room, her boot steps eating up the floor, heading for a table at the far end. I watched her shake hands, introduce herself, and begin a conversation with the students at her table. I dove back into my painting and lost myself. My heart slowed down.

What felt like an hour later, a melodic voice turned my head. She leaned over my left shoulder and looked at my watercolor scene of clipper ships docked at a faraway shoreline.

“Nice,” she said. “Do you have a title?”

My mind jumped from her warm, brown eyes and smile to blankness. All of a sudden, the title of the painting I created over and over in my imagination surfaced: “The Harbor Where I Land.”

Her smile deepened. “Can I stowaway on one of your ships?”

A bubble of laughter rose to my throat. “You can sit at the captain’s table.”

She laughed. “And you’re the captain?”

I straightened in my chair. “You bet.”

She laughed. “I accept your invitation, Captain….when do we sail?”

We have been sailing through life together for 45 years. She’s my Heart Whisperer. I’m grateful that the sons who witnessed my fantasy years bonded with her and benefited from her devotion, wisdom, and love. It’s taken me 83 years to realize the depth of my good fortune, my patience, and my strength to change.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

You Need Help: My Partner Keeps Saying We’re Going to Break Up!

Q:

I love my partner very much, and things are good a lot of the time, but they have a bunch of Stuff (trauma etc) that means when they identify something they perceive as a relationship problem (sometimes it’s just been a miscommunication!), they escalate immediately to talking about breaking up. It’s something they’re working on, though they’re unable to access therapy right now, but it makes me feel really insecure — like the other shoe is always about to drop. Is there anything I can do to help mitigate some of my anxiety about this? I’m worried about my anxiety making me act in unhelpful ways, or ending up resenting my partner for something that isn’t their fault.

A:

Hi, friend! I’ve got some tough news for you right off the bat, and that news is: Feeling insecure and anxious is a normal and reasonable response to the situation that you’re in. I don’t think I can talk you out of feeling anxious with strategies, but I do have some thoughts for you to mull.

I wish that your letter had been a little bit longer, because I have so many unanswered questions! I’m curious how long you’ve been dating, and how the communication is between you when there isn’t any conflict in the room. I’d like to know the specific ways that your partner talks about splitting up — “it feels like a break-up is inevitable (since love always ends)” for instance, is very different from “it feels like you’re going to dump me,” which also differs hugely from “I think we should break up.”

Even without knowing the answer to what things sound like during a conflict, an important factor here is how you and your partner communicate after the escalation is over. Are you able to get to a point where you’re each able to express what feels true about the state of your relationship? You note that your partner is “working on” this tendency, and I wonder what that looks like — do they apologize for saying something that hurt you without speaking further about their state of mind, or are you able to have real conversations about how you each feel and what you want: out of your relationship, through inevitable conflicts, and in your broader lives?

Trauma responses to conflict are very real, and something I personally deal with (although, like fingerprints, I’m sure that no one is just like any other). That said, I want to note that just because something isn’t someone’s “fault,” or isn’t something they do intentionally to hurt you, that behavior (as you’re seeing) will still affect you. The fact that you feel affected by what your partner tells you, even when they are not their best self, is not inappropriate or bad. It’s human.

I can’t mitigate your anxiety about a potential future break-up between you and your partner. What I can suggest is that you turn your mind to what you can control: your communication, your boundaries, and your behavior.

During times of conflict, your partner is moving directly to talk about breaking up. That escalation may be influenced by a trauma response, but you still have the right to set boundaries. You still get to decide whether this situation is one that you can live comfortably within, and if not, to clearly communicate what would need to change for things to work for you.

I hope you’re able to have some honest, open, and conflict-free conversations with your partner about ways that you each would like to move forward. What are ways your partner wishes they were able to respond to conflict? What are the things they truly want you to know? What are their boundaries? And on your side, if you were to stop playing defense for a moment, stop being the person in the relationship who is reacting, and try to put your own needs, desires, and boundaries on the table where they belong, equally important next to your partner’s: what would that look like? What would you say to them? What would you want?

If you can have these real conversations, if you can work together to build something that’s more balanced, I think that some of your anxiety will start to fall away. But if that’s work that you’re not able to do together, it may be time to start reevaluating whether a break-up just might be the right choice after all.

I wish you all the best! 💙

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

Homo Reno: 13 Tips for Keeping Your 5 Year Queer Relationship Intact While Renovating the House You Live In

1. Begin, as all couples do, with optimism.

Actual footage of us freaking out when the deed was done and we arrived to find that wow we got free window treatments thrown in with the deal. Also that chandelier no longer works and I cannot wait for the day I finally pull it out.

How long do you think it will take? It will take years longer.

You have not even begun to plunge the depths of simultaneous strength and despair that lie ahead. I’m not sure if it would have been better to start with more pessimism, but the thing is — it’s actually, factually impossible to start with the correct amount of negativity because the house is going to challenge everything you ever believed about just how wrong something can go.

But sure, buy a house! The mortgage might be cheaper than rent would have been, but you will pay the difference in BLOOD.

Have some vegan pizza!

2. Accept that Home Depot* is now your PRIMARY RESIDENCE and get really friendly with any local re-use locations.

Sadie always looks at tile. We have never bought tile.

You could go to Lowe’s. They do have that paint color you want, and it’s not available at Home Depot, but the thing is that when you get there, the cashier with the Hell’s Angels tattoos is going to stare you both down as you wander the aisles, and then leave the only open register when you try to checkout, forcing a very annoyed colleague to come check you out instead. (This is because you are queer, FYI.)

For whatever reason, the local Home Depot employs a lot of older women who are puzzled by you two undertaking projects, but they’re not overtly threatening, similar to the neighbor who stops by once in a while when you’re working outside to exclaim, hands on his hips while his kids run around him, “No man!”

You will not be able to avoid spending money with a company that donated to the Trump campaign. There is no winning when you need drywall. They have a chokehold on building supplies. We should probably think about that.

It helps if you put on your dirty work clothes before going to Home Depot, also — a hot tip from me to you. Also, unofficially, you can bring your dog with you into Home Depot and this will make everyone be nice to you because who doesn’t love dogs? (And they also often have a secret stash of dog treats and will ask if they can give your dog a treat.)*

*This may just be about the dynamic between our local Pittsburgh Lowe’s and local Home Depot…YMMV.

3. Try to scream or yell in surprise at only appropriate times. If you are working on something and you drop something off a ladder and no one is hurt…should you yell in frustration? ONLY IF YOU WANT YOUR PARTNER TO THINK YOU HAVE FALLEN OFF THE LADDER AND IMPALED YOUR LEG ON A PIECE OF LATH.

Discuss this many times. Never manage to get ahold of it. Hurt yourself for real at some point, curl up into a ball on the floor and say nothing about it, even, just for good, contradictory measure.

Looking this hot and butch can be a hazard.

Then, stub your toe, graze yourself with a nail, or just drop something while on a ladder in an annoying but not life-threatening way. Of course NOW you are going to scream your lungs out.

Everything is always fine.

4. Okay, there is at least one ghost, now. You are going to need to reconcile with being haunted. Depending on your existing beliefs, this may range from run-of-the-mill to existential crisis. The creepy shapes painted on the walls won’t help your unease.

Why.

Is.

It.

Like.

This.

5. But what you will be most haunted by is the fact that they decided to wallpaper the bathroom.

Reckon with the fact that you are going to have to take down the wallpaper that is actually apparently more like vinyl contact paper on the bathroom ceiling and that you are going to have to go full Spielburg and dress like you’re one of those guys in Hazmat suits handling ET while you annihilate the mold.

The Last of Us really hits home when you’ve had to kill bathroom mushrooms.

6. Have an ice cold beverage waiting for you upon completion of a She-Hulk-Level task.

There will be so many devastatingly onerous items on your to-do list ahead.

It helps to pretend like you will be able to partake of a reward…two hours from now…okay…six hours from now. Okay, listen, if you don’t finish it’s not like this is a job you can leave at the end of the day you will have to stare at the unfinished project for weeks because you only have THIS SUNDAY and then you are booked for like fourteen days so just GET IT DONE.

Rebuilding this wall in 2019 took a whole day — and a full hour was spent DISLODGING the one very stuck stone block. It was also 40 degrees F and rainy.

7. Sometimes you are going to have to undertake a project during which it will be inevitable that you will scream at each other. My advice is to just kind of pretend it didn’t happen.

The only thing you can do is prepare for this and engage in after-care. You both might have to hold a heavy object above your heads while standing on ladders for an extended period of time. This could be a ceiling fan. You might have to haul a 200lb insulation machine from the sidewalk up 27 concrete stairs to your back patio, certain that if you let go of it, you will die. You will scream, you will cry, you will fight about how to survive whatever you’ve gotten yourself into today. This is your fate.

The men at the Home Depot rentals department will be mean to you two when you pick up the insulation machine but will be able to SAY NOTHING when you return it, obviously used.

8. Never give up hope…that you’ll find secret money!

Fireplace is a big fan of amontillado.

Things we’ve found include: a fireplace hidden behind wood panelling that gave me major House of Leaves vibes at first. We couldn’t see the fireplace. It looked like there was a closet. I kept walking from the hallway into the bedroom and back, measuring with my arms. The measurements didn’t make sense. We started tearing.

Other things we’ve found in no particular order include bonus closets, the tops of windows, a popcorn maker, a box of matchbooks collected over decades, an entire drawer of odds and ends and tools, a knife engraved with “Old Timer,” a bowling ball, a cigarette beneath a floorboard (as well as a removable floor board), a 1965 poster of the Pittsburgh Steelers, a refrigeration well in the basement, and a card table I currently use to pack A+ perks on.

We prize each of our finds, and though the attic was ALSO seriously lacking in cash, we’re still holding a candle for a coin collection or something.

No money up here.

None up here either. (Upside: there were no bodies in the completely sealed-off attic. A real concern we had.)

9. Take pictures and videos of each other during silly moments because, eventually, this is what you will remember most.

Look at those cute butch lesbian legs!

I have no excuse except delirium.

Are you ever just…tired?

Go ahead. Guess.

Choices have been made in this house.

The theme is “tired.”

10. Get away.

Camp, visit friends, get the fuck away from the devil on your back that is your home reno project. Your relationship will thank you. I swear the only time I am ever actually relaxed is in the woods. (Except for that one time I left the tent at night to pee and a bear growled at me. That was stressful.)

Ah yes one of my favorite hobbies: stick collection.

11. Have at least one room that is a sanctuary as soon as you can.

Mmmmm sanctuary.

We did not do this and wound up living in “The Creepy Room” for two years, including the start of the pandemic.

12. Remember that you’re a team but also that your girlfriend is very special because she is doing most of the work while you work tons and tons of hours for Autostraddle. Hug her even when she’s covered in dust. DO IT.

We’re at the dump! I take her to all the best places, I swear.

Especially if your butch girlfriend has experience working in home reno and the repair of Victorian homes and horeshair plaster…she will be taking the lead here.

13. If you can’t fix it right now, make it fun.

I just gave up on our bathroom so hard I bought a clown print, framed it and hung it up because we lean into vibes around here okay? We do not look away. That’s just where we’re at, energy-wise, time-wise, money-wise, penny-wise.

Also when my Sadie told me she always wanted to collect clown art, I knew I’d made the irrefutably best choice in life partner.

You Need Help: I Think My Partner Is Emotionally Cheating On Me

Q:

My partner and I are in a monogamous relationship, but for some time now I’ve noticed they have escalated what started as a work friendship into emotional cheating. They deny to be cheating at all, and consider their friend to be “just a friend,” but I can tell by the intensity, frequency, and intimacy of their bond, that it’s more than friendship.

We can’t agree or find a common ground on this issue, because they are sure that they’re not doing anything wrong since there’s no hidden agenda or intentions with said friend. I, however, feel like they’re playing with fire and subtly “leaving the door open” for something else to develop between them.

My partner says they’re not flirting, and I think they are. What do I do?

A:

OK. I’m gonna be honest with you. Really honest. I think you’re stoking the fires of what might escalate into real cheating more so than your partner.

It’s this simple. I don’t believe emotional cheating is a real form of cheating. Or, rather, I don’t believe that having deep platonic relationships outside of a monogamous romantic relationship is cheating. I don’t even consider having harmless crushes on your cute friends cheating, if no one is being secretive about it or acting on it. I think both of those things are frankly normal, healthy, and fine for most people in relationships.

The whole panic about emotional cheating is deeply heteronormative. And one of the best things about being queer and having queer relationships is that we don’t need to abide by heteronormative ideas. In a hetero relationship, you have a man and a woman, your Adam, your Eve. Adam has platonic man friends. Eve has platonic woman friends. The number one relationship is supposed to be, in super hetero land, the sacred marriage.

The marriage is monogamous and both Adam and Eve are, obviously, very straight, exclusively straight, a Kinsey zero. Both Adam and Eve can have friends and even very close friends so long as they 1) don’t get in the way of the marriage, and more importantly, 2) are of the same gender. They can even go on overnight trips with these friends, share a hotel room, get trashed alone at the bar together, have secret inside jokes, have special places and songs, and reserve time outside of the marriage just for these same-gender (read: non-threatening to heteronormativity) friends. You know, “girls’ trip!” or, “boys’ night!”

And in this heterosexual garden of monogamy, it’s understood that the heteronormativity implicit in the marriage is very important to maintain, and any threat to it breeds insecurity. So talking to a different-sex person becomes a gateway to flirting, and flirting is a gateway to cheating. Therefore same-gender friendships can be intense and deep so long as they stay in their proper platonic intimacy boxes, and different-gender friendships are actively avoided (Can men and women even be friends?! har har har), leaving the only sexual attraction left to exist between the husband and wife. Of course, we know this isn’t how most people relate to attraction. You’ve heard the adage: “I’m married, not dead,” inferring that even married people can see that other people outside their marriage are hot. Duh.

From that you may deduce that, yes, emotional cheating is real. Because, frankly, the world is very not exclusively heterosexual, and isn’t that how so many classic lesbian rom coms start, a girls’ trip that turns into a gal pal tumble into that shared hotel room bed, a straight girl realizing her boring husband actually isn’t meeting her emotional needs and falling into the arms of the mysterious lesbian next door while the husband doesn’t even realize he’s losing her?

In the queer world, the reality is that our friends don’t live in such a separate world from our partners. Quite the opposite! We often find it safest and most convenient to be close with those like ourselves. Unlike the heterosexual world, there isn’t this gender division between romance and friendship and I think that’s a much better model. And it also adds a different layer of nuance to the question of so-called emotional cheating or flirting with friends.

For example, when a straight girl comments a heart emoji on a thirst trap of their same-gender best friend, there’s implied platonic intent. No one has to wonder. (Maybe they should — see lesbian rom com trope — but I digress.) When a queer girl does the same, there’s a hint of cutesy flirting because regardless of intent, there’s a different implication when a queer girl tells another queer girl they look hot. And I think that’s amazing. We get told we’re not desirable by the world all the time, so to see the hotness in each other and comment on it? It’s fun! It’s necessary, even!

If my partner was worried every time I had a close friend who is also queer, or every time I said something flirty to a queer friend, or even every time I had a legit low-key crush on a friend, we’d not be together and monogamous for almost two decades. Our queer relationship subverts the norm in so many ways and one is the way in which we can invest in queer platonic intimacy. I can’t be everything to my partner and I don’t want them to be everything to me.

One of the most fulfilling aspects of queer platonic friendship is how we see the hotness in each other, hotness that lives outside of ableist, heterosexist, cisnormative, racist, sizeist beauty standards.

Look, I say this as someone who has cheated, a lot, in past relationships, when things got tough and I wasn’t mature enough to work it out or say what I needed. But never in the past two decades have I cheated on my long-term spouse partner queer married boi person. Why? Because we trust each other, and because we communicate with each other, and we aren’t threatened by other people because of the trust we’ve built. Do we sometimes have harmless crushes? Or think our friends are cute? Or have intense platonic attractions and relationships? Yes, of course. And it’s not a big deal. And we don’t hide it or pretend it’s anything it isn’t.

I don’t know your situation exactly and maybe there are things you aren’t saying, but from what you describe, it sounds like your partner is telling you that you can trust them, and you feel you aren’t able to do that. Maybe there’s a legitimate reason you haven’t disclosed that your partner has broken your trust, but if the reason is just that your partner is having a close relationship with a friend outside of your relationship and they have a little bit of chemistry, I’m sorry. That’s not enough to constitute cheating or even a slippery slope to cheating.

Continuing to show that you don’t trust them and that you believe they are cheating or will cheat will, however, almost definitely manifest in cheating or the end of your relationship. If not with this friend from work, with someone else down the road, or just by bringing distrust and jealousy into your relationship to the point that your relationship can’t bear it.

There are things that are warning signs and, as someone who, like I said, used to be a panic cheater, the warning signs are pretty clear:

Is your partner hiding things about the friendship from you?

Are they often complaining about your relationship to the work friend?

Are they being secretive about what they talk about or do with the friend?

Are they blowing you off to spend time with the work friend?

Are they lying to you about the friendship?

Does your partner compare your relationship to their relationship with the friend?

Are they keeping important life events from you, but sharing them with the friend?

These are all signs that yes, you should be concerned that your partner is starting to walk away from your relationship or is unsatisfied with your relationship. If you had described any of the above behavior, I’d be truly concerned that your relationship is in danger. I would suggest that you need to find a better way to communicate stat. I might suggest that you seek out couple’s counseling. And yeah, I’d be worried that your partner is already one foot out the door.

I don’t think the friendship itself is cheating. Not yet. But this dynamic can lead to that if it isn’t resolved. The issue isn’t the friend, though — it’s your relationship. And you need to work on it to save it.

If the red flag behaviors I mentioned above aren’t currently present, I am a little worried that you could create friction and distance in your relationship — that doesn’t need to be there based on your partner’s behavior! — with your own current behavior. If you continue to express that you don’t trust your partner to maintain appropriate boundaries, over time, they will learn to avoid this conflict with you by hiding the details of the friendship from you, and as that boundary and mutual respect of your relationship weaken, so will the health of your relationship. That breakdown of communication and trust is what could lead to cheating, not just having an attractive close friend from work.

It’s not your job to police who your partner’s friends are or how “intense” your partner’s friendships are. It is your job to work on your own insecurities and to communicate and work on the relationship with your partner itself.

Long story short, I don’t believe in emotional cheating. Or, rather, I think the idea that we must save our intimate, intense feelings only for our partners is a deeply heteronormative one, and I don’t want us to adhere to it. Queer relationships make space for us to experience connections to people in many ways, even and especially within monogamous relationships, and setting up an expectation that monogamy means you can’t ever be close to someone else or even have an innocent attraction to someone else is unreasonable.

What should you do? You should talk to your partner. You should really listen. Ideally, you should trust them, though it sounds like, from the tenor of your question, you’ve already expressed pretty clearly that you don’t trust them. Frankly, if you want to keep this relationship, you should work on yourself and the idea that you are required to or should provide the only intimate emotional connection to your partner or any future partner. When you feel secure in yourself, you will be better able to gauge whether a partner is being secretive and unfair, or whether you are the one being unfair.

I wish a whole lot of happiness, for you and for your partner, and I hope you are able to work this out!

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

When One of Us Transitioned, Our Relationship Changed for the Better

We were two years into a committed relationship. We had moved in together and settled into a life of postgraduate studies and domestic logistics, plus the day-to-day mundanity of supermarkets, mealtimes, and Netflix. It was 2020, so we had also been trapped in our apartment for a record stretch, and half the country was canned. The perfect storm of stress and isolation forced introspection onto us as we tried to lead precedented lives during unprecedented times.

By the time the lockdown lifted, she (Lucy) had kicked a life-long nail biting habit, and I (Summer) had come out as transgender.

You Need Help: How Do I Know if I’m Really Attracted to My Partner?

Q:

In the past, I have started relationships by reaching out to someone I was really attracted to. We would start from our strong mutual attraction to each other and go from there. My current relationship started sort of by chance. I met them at a queer meet-up event and wasn’t wildly attracted to them, but I wanted to be physical with someone and ended up sleeping with them after the event. We started seeing each other from there, but with sex as the main focus, and eventually I caught feelings for them. We are now dating, and it is one of the healthiest relationships I have ever been in. However, I feel like my attraction is based on the fact that I have known them for so long. I didn’t see them as especially beautiful until a few weeks ago, when they became so familiar to me that I started to see them that way. How do I tell if I am actually attracted to them, or if this is only a feeling I get from being close to them for so long? Does it matter? How would I bring this up to them? And my biggest question, don’t they deserve someone who would find them beautiful from the first time they meet?

A:

This is my favorite kind of advice question to answer, because in my opinion (and maybe some people will disagree!) you’re seeing a problem where there might not really be one — or at least, the problem might not be as big as it seems.

In the same way “love at first sight” can sometimes be a damaging thing to internalize, I actually believe that “attraction at first sight” can sometimes oversimplify and mislead when it comes to our understanding of desire and attraction. Yes, attraction can be explained by science. It’s a chemical reaction centralized to the brain. But the science of attraction also supports exactly what you say you’re experiencing: The longer we know someone, the more attracted to them we can become. Our attractions can change over time, affected by things like hormones. The specific ways we interact with others can also impact attractiveness; for example, lots of studies have indicated that when someone makes direct eye contact, it increases their attractiveness to others.

Now, I’m not particularly a science-y person, especially when it comes to matters of love and attraction. But I do think it can help to understand the psychology of what you’re experiencing! But let’s shift into a more personal and subjective discussion about your situation. I think it’s extremely possible that there were several factors at play that didn’t lead to an instant spark between you and this person. Was the queer meet-up loud and dark? Did you get very much time to talk to them at all? Were you distracted by anything? Because you went with the explicit intention of hooking up with someone, is it possible you were flattening your preferences into very distilled and rigid categories in an attempt to reach that goal efficiently? What I mean by that is say you know you have a tendency to be attracted to people taller than you, so when you entered the room it’s almost like you mentally eliminated people shorter than you, cutting off that part of your brain that might trigger attraction.

The potentially concerning part to me is this: “I didn’t see them as especially beautiful until a few weeks ago.” But because the idea of INSTANT ATTRACTION is so normalized, I again wonder if you’re overanalyzing. Did you really not find them beautiful? I’m not hearing anywhere in your letter that you found this person unattractive but rather that you just didn’t get that chemical experience of attraction at first, and I think there can be a difference there! I am not attracted to my friends, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think they’re smoking hot! If you do believe not finding this person beautiful is rooted in something deeper (like perhaps beauty standards, socialized biases, etc.) then it might be good to do some self-work on that, identifying why you did not find them beautiful. But if you sit with yourself and think about it and realize that actually this person was just different from other people you’ve been attracted to in the past — a deviation from your perceived “type” — then there’s no real need to get too far into the weeds of self-analysis. Humans can sometimes be unreliable narrators of our own damn lives, our own damn desires. We tell ourselves we like or want something specific, and it causes us not to see something that might be right there in front of us all along. If becoming more intimate with this person has increased your overall attraction to them, I believe that attraction was there initially and just needed to be nurtured and/or was inhibited by other factors, which could include assumptions about yourself!

I believe you can grow into loving someone, and I also believe attraction can shift, increase, and not always feel like an immediate punch to the gut the first time you set eyes on someone. Maybe that’s a tough pill for some people to swallow, but I think continuing to prioritize the weight of instant attraction can hold us back in relationships and even lead us to get into relationships that aren’t solid — and yours sounds very solid! Think about this: The opposite of what you’re saying also happens! Sometimes, we might look at someone and find them instantly attractive but then once we get to know them become less attracted. Does that make that initial attraction any less “real” of a feeling? No! It’s just temporary. So just because you didn’t experience attraction before doesn’t make your attraction now any less real.

To end, I’ll directly address each of the questions you have at the end of your letter:

How do I tell if I am actually attracted to them, or if this is only a feeling I get from being close to them for so long? Attraction is not an easily decipherable thing. For myself, I actually barely believe in having “types” because I feel like it can be super limiting and also is often entrenched with beauty standards. Becoming closer to someone is a perfectly valid reason for attraction to increase. I’ve seen the friends-to-lovers trope play out in real life with a lot of friends, and I think that’s just one example of how you see someone can shift. You said you weren’t wildly attracted to them at the initial meet up, but attraction doesn’t have to feel like a real, wild thing to be real.

Does it matter? I think the point when it would start to matter is if it’s starts affecting the way you’re intimate with this person. If it starts affecting your sex life or other parts of your relationship, that’s when it’s time to step back and figure out what’s going on.

How would I bring this up to them? You should not bring this up to them at all. Honesty and vulnerability are important in any relationship, but this is an instance where I think it would do more harm than good. As close as we may feel to the people we date, they cannot read our minds. I think explaining your brain’s attraction chemistry would be confusing and ultimately not very fruitful. I think you yourself are struggling to understand some of your brain’s attraction chemistry, and that’s alright! Again, there’s this belief that we should know what we’re attracted to, what our “type” is, but in reality, attraction is more complicated than that — even the parts that can be explained by science.

And my biggest question, don’t they deserve someone who would find them beautiful from the first time they meet? This person deserves to be in a happy and healthy relationship with someone who is attracted to them, and from what you’ve written, it sounds like they are!

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

You Need Help: You Fat-Shamed Your Beautiful Girlfriend

Q:

My girlfriend and I have been together for a few years. Recently, she has gained a lot of weight and it has been causing her significant distress. She doesn’t like how she looks, her clothes don’t fit anymore, and she hates getting dressed in the morning when she used to love fashion.

Throughout all of this, I have tried to be as supportive and loving as humanly possible. I tell her how beautiful she is, how much I love her, and I’ve encouraged her to buy new clothes that she feels good in. She admits to being a chronic overeater and not exercising enough, and so I’ve tried to support her adjusting her lifestyle to be healthier by eating healthier at home together and getting a gym membership. However, old habits die hard and those changes haven’t really stuck.

This has been going on for nine months, and she has continued to gain weight. And even though I am a self-proclaimed body positive person, I follow fat activists on social media, and I have worked hard to fight the fatphobia I’ve learned throughout my life, the truth is I sometimes miss the way she looked when we first met. And I feel completely ashamed of that fact. I feel like a horrible person, and a horrible activist.

I obviously have not told her this because I feel so ashamed and don’t want her to feel bad about herself. But we’ve been less intimate lately, and she’s so insecure about her weight gain and is constantly asking me for reassurance about it, which I’ve given. Recently, she asked me straight up if I am less attracted to her now than I was when we first met. I couldn’t lie to her face, and so I said yes.

Obviously, she was devastated. And now I feel even worse and even more ashamed. I feel like a hypocrite and a horrible person.

I guess my question is, how can I revive some of that physical attraction? How can I be less of a fatphobic asshole? And was it wrong for me to be honest about my feelings?

A:

I think it’s really admirable that you wrote into this particular publication to ask for help navigating your situation. And I’m going to take you at your word that you want some real advice here, not a fluffy feel-good pep talk. In fact, what I’m going to write isn’t going to make you feel very good at all. The reason I know that is because your letter is mostly about how you feel. How your girlfriend’s weight makes you feel about yourself as an activist, how your girlfriend’s weight makes you feel about your struggles as an aspiring fat-positive ally, how you said this really terrible thing to your girlfriend and now you feel “ashamed,” “horrible,” and like an “asshole.” The only thing I really know about your girlfriend is that she’s gained “a lot of weight” (whatever that means to you) and has gone from distressed to devastated because of your response to it.

While I’m hearing that you’ve encouraged your girlfriend to eat healthier and go to the gym, I’m not hearing anything about the zillion other factors that go into determining a person’s weight. Like genetics, age, hormones, family history, metabolism, mental health, stress, social pressure, medications, her relationship to her past traumas or abuses or neglects, her history with food and exercise, the messages she internalized about those things growing up, whether or not she’s a perfectionist, what demands are on her life and time and body outside of “diet and exercise,” what her financial situation is, whether or not she has any food aversions or sensitivities, how the pandemic has affected her. I could go on and on. I could ask a billion more questions about your girlfriend. Because a person’s weight is almost never about their willpower to eat vegetables and sweat it out on a stationary bike; it’s a tangled, mangled knot of physical, mental, financial, emotional, and social factors that is almost impossible to unravel. Really trying to learn about how those things intersect, and figuring out how any of them might have affected your girlfriend, would be a much better use of your time than following fat activists on social media.

I’m going to be completely honest: If your girlfriend wrote into this column with this story, I would tell her she should break up with you. Not because you were “honest about your feelings,” but because gaining and losing weight, over and over and over, is part of nearly everyone’s life. It is so inconsequential in the vast tapestry of existence, and if getting fatter over the course of nine short months throws you into this kind of tailspin where you find yourself not only unattracted to her, but you feel honor-bound to tell her so, how are you going to handle it when the really hard stuff happens? When one of you gets sick or disabled? When one of you becomes consumed by seemingly endless grief after the death of a loved one? When one of you loses your job? When money trouble strikes? When you lose your home? When one of you unearths a trauma you hid away even from yourself? When you become responsible for a dying family member? When one of you is unable to free yourself from the dense fog of depression or anxiety? When one of you is in an accident? When your bodies simply get old, the way all bodies do?

Why would your girlfriend trust you with her future happiness, with the burdens and joys of buying a home or having children, with the gift of loving her so long you get to see her face age into her grandmother, if simply gaining weight is going to cause you to say something you know will devastate her? Something you know is going to affect her perception of herself for the rest of her life? Every time you initiate sex, every time you walk into the bathroom while she’s taking a shower, every time she changes clothes in front of you, every time you now try to tell her something nice about herself, or her makeup, or her outfit, she’s going to have to wrestle with the fact you told her she wasn’t attractive anymore.

It seems like the way you perceive yourself is at the center of your decision-making process right now, so may I ask: Why aren’t you as attracted to your girlfriend as you were when you met? Is it really because her body is shaped differently? Or is it because you’re worried about what a fatphobic society will project onto you for being with her? Have you compounded your girlfriend’s insecurities by projecting your own onto her?

And here’s something you need to be extra honest about, because it’s going to reveal something deeply important to you about yourself: You knew it would devastate her, you knew it was cruel, you knew what those fat activists would say about it. You’ve done enough work to know exactly what you were doing. Yet you went ahead and told your girlfriend she isn’t attractive to you anymore. Why? Really, why? Did you do the mental calculations in that moment and decide that the shame and hurt you knew you were inflicting on her were worth it, if it got your girlfriend back to the size you want her to be?

You’ve asked for some practical advice, and so here it is: Start with yourself. Work on yourself. I’m not talking about liking photos of fat yogis and body positive quotes on Twitter. I’m talking about trying to really understand what goes into determining a person’s weight, and really seeking knowledge about what it’s like to move through the world as a person who isn’t thin, and most of all unpacking why you’ve responded to your girlfriend the way you have. If your intimacy is going to be repaired, it’s going to have to start with you doing some really hard work on yourself, and learning to center your girlfriend’s feelings about her own body. It’s going to start with you worrying less about how people perceive your activism and more about what’s going on in your girlfriend’s mind and heart.

I have it on good authority that these are some great books to kick off your journey to being a better you, both learning texts and memoirs: Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da’Shaun Harrison, Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across: Poems by Mary Lambert, Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon, anything/everything by Samantha Irby, Fat and Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives. And, for podcasts, a good beginner one is Maintenance Phase and a more radical one is Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back.

I’ll close with a story about my own personal diet and exercise journey. I’ve actually gained a good bit of weight since the pandemic started, in large part because of Long Covid, and the medications I need to take to manage it, and the way I was mostly housebound for over two years. I’ve struggled with how it makes me feel about myself, but through the process of that struggle, my wife and I have grown even closer and our intimacy has deepened beyond my wildest imagination. Not because I gained weight, but because my weight gain did nothing to diminish my wife’s affection for me or attraction to me. When I asked, and asked, and asked, she reaffirmed over and over and over that she loved me, that I was a prince among women no matter what size clothes I wear, that she wanted to love on me and smooch on me regardless of what the scale says, that she understood my insecurities and they were valid, but that my body is simply the bone-shell that keeps me alive inside it and all she cares about is that I’m still me in here. The process of making myself so vulnerable about my insecurities, and being met with nothing but affirmation, it healed something inside me I didn’t even know was hurting.

This morning I came in from riding my bike, covered in sweat and road grit and rain. My wife grabbed me and kissed me silly. I said, “You like me in this bike jersey.” She said, “Nothing makes me happier than your happiness, and nothing makes you as happy as being on your bike.” I almost didn’t get back on my bike after I started healing from Long Covid, because I felt like a sausage stuffed into my spandex bike clothes, but my wife encouraged me to just buy better fitting bike clothes. So I did, and my reward has been regaining my favorite hobby and getting smooched all over about it.

Everyone deserves that. Me, your girlfriend, and all the zillion other people in the world whose weight is just one of the myriad things that will always be in flux in our one wild and precious lives.

You can submit your own questions any time.

You Need Help: I Feel Like I’m My Girlfriend’s Second Choice

Q:

My girlfriend and I have been dating for six months. My girlfriend came out this past year (we are both in our 30s). We have a good relationship — great sex, solid communication, compatibility, etc.

However, whenever my girlfriend talks about her first crush, I feel uneasy. She speaks reverently about cuddling in the dark with her close female friend while they watched SNL every week — neither one of them out of the closet or out to themselves at the time. This person is significant to her.

Her friend came out several years ago and is married to another woman. When I asked my girlfriend if she wished they had ended up together, she responded, “what does it matter? She’s married; she’s not an option.” Admittedly this isn’t the answer I want. My girlfriend doesn’t keep regular contact with this old friend and hasn’t come out to her yet. My instincts are telling me this is unrequited love. When I ask her why she hasn’t come out to her yet, she gets quiet and doesn’t respond.

To add insult to injury, I once asked my girlfriend what her type was, and she described “tall, masc of center, sporty, long curly hair.” I looked this girl up on social media, and that describes her exactly. As an uncoordinated artsy femme of average height, I’m measuring myself against this girl and coming up short (literally and figuratively).

The question I want to ask my girlfriend is, “If your friend and I were both single, which one would you choose?” I’m scared of her answer, but I don’t want to be my girlfriend or anyone’s second choice. My girlfriend is, hands down, my first choice. On the one hand, maybe I’m overacting, but on the other, don’t I deserve to be her number-one pick?

A:

Oh, babe. This situation sucks, and I’m sorry you’re going through it. I’ll say upfront: I think you and your girlfriend should break up. But that’s rough news to just hear first thing on the third day of the new year, so I’d like to invite you to make a cup of tea, grab a warm blanket, cozy up on the couch, and take some deep breaths before we get into the nitty gritty of what’s going on here. I’ll make some tea too. See you in a moment.

Whew, okay. Hi. So like I said, I’m sorry you’re dealing with this. Ouch! It would hurt my feelings so much if I asked my girlfriend her type and she didn’t describe me, and worse, she described her friend who I suspect she has unrequited feelings for. It’s such a bad feeling to feel as though you are anyone’s second choice, especially when it’s the person you picked first. I spent some time reading over this question and trying to pick apart what everyone (you and your partner) could be doing differently, but ultimately I came down to this very simple sentiment: you and your girlfriend should definitely be picking each other first. You say “don’t I deserve to be her number-one pick” and the answer is wholeheartedly, absolutely, resoundingly, yes.

When I first read your question I found myself asking some of my own. How long has your girlfriend been out? How frequently does she speak with this old friend? Do you both post about your relationship on social media, and if so, shouldn’t we assume that this person knows your girlfriend is gay, even if she hasn’t formally come out to her? Why are you asking leading questions to your girlfriend instead of just asking what you want to know? Do you have experiences in the past that have led you to feeling anxious in a relationship? Have you considered attachment theory and has anyone ever recommended DBT to you to help with intrusive anxious thoughts? (Admittedly, I am projecting with that last line of questioning — I am not a therapist and I am not offering a diagnosis, I’m simply an anxious woman who has been working with a DBT group for just over a year and has become evangelical about it because the tools have helped me manage my own intrusive anxious thoughts so much!) But the more time I spent with these questions, the more I concluded they don’t really matter.

What matters is that you don’t feel secure in your partnership with your girlfriend. So you either need to get to a place where you feel secure, or you need to break up. And I, personally, would not be inclined to put the hard work that is required to overcome feeling like my girlfriend’s second choice into a relationship that is only six months long. Maybe you will be! But you wrote in for advice, and I am imagining myself sitting on my blue velvet sofa drinking tea with a dear friend and offering them advice, and this is the advice I would give: Break Up.

Not because your girlfriend is bad! Not because you are anxious or overreacting or not overreacting or any other such weeds we could get into it. But because part of the magical sparkly unbeatable joy of being in love and in relationship with someone is feeling like you are choosing them and they are choosing you over and over and over with glee, with zest, with happiness, with excitement, and most importantly: without reservation. And for whatever reason, that isn’t the feeling you’re experiencing here. And it seems, from taking your letter at face value, that you have some evidence to support your concern. Sometimes our brain makes up stories to wreak havoc on our emotions, but sometimes our intuition is sounding an alarm. It seems to me that in your case, the latter is happening.

I want to tell you about a time I ignored my own intuition. I used to date someone I loved very much who was simply not the right match for me. And I struggled so hard to make our relationship work; I believe she struggled to make it work too. We both wanted to be right for each other. And yet — we simply were not. But because I am A Good Queer Who Goes To Therapy And Reads Books About Attachment Theory I had bought into the idea that Relationships Are Work. And they are! That’s true. But my therapist used to challenge me every week, when I showed up for our sessions to cry some more about how much my partner’s behavior was making me feel terrible and how I was working so hard but nothing was changing, and she’d say, “Vanessa, relationships are work, but they shouldn’t be this hard.” I didn’t really get what she meant until my ex and I finally broke up, goddess bless us both, and I met my current partner who is going to be my wife. And yes, my relationship with my fiancee is work — I wasn’t entirely wrong about that, all relationships of course are work — but I understand my therapist now. The work I do with my current partner is not hard. And even when we are struggling with a challenging moment, we are not struggling about whether or not we should be together — because that is easy. It is Known. We have chosen each other, without reservation, and we are In It Together. That is obvious and true. So all the work we do surrounding us is manageable because we’re doing it together. That feeling of panic or anxiety or mistrust in my last relationship wasn’t me overreacting — it was the terrible way we feel in our bodies when we ignore our intuition.

It sounds to me as though you do not necessarily feel as though you’re In It Together with your girlfriend, and whether that’s your perception or her truth or somewhere in the middle doesn’t really matter. You deserve to be in a relationship with someone who chooses you enthusiastically and proudly and obviously every single day, and your girlfriend deserves to figure out exactly what she wants and needs from a relationship (and perhaps from the personal closure she still needs to find from her past significant relationship with someone who, as she astutely and wisely can point out, is no longer available as an option for her to date or be with romantically). Perhaps this sounds callous, but six months is really not very long in a relationship. I think it makes sense to take this moment and call it off, so you and your girlfriend can both get back out there and find people who can do the work of a relationship with each of you in a way that feels manageable, enjoyable, and mostly just not this hard.

I don’t want you to go through another moment of feeling like a runner up. You don’t need to ask your girlfriend any questions to figure out what to do here. You just need to ask yourself what you deserve, and then you need to choose yourself. I want you to start 2023 feeling like your own number-one pick. That way, when the right person comes along, you’ll be ready and confident to be her number-one pick, too.

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

How I’m Rewriting the “Trophy Wife” Script As a Queer Trans Woman

The concept of being a “trophy wife” is rightfully fraught. At best, it prioritizes the subject’s appearance and social status. At worst, it’s just plain dehumanizing. It reinforces the social value of unearned privilege either way. When I entered womanhood, I started rewriting the script, reconceptualizing the objectifying, default understanding of a trophy wife to a variant that values my efforts, achievements, and agency.

For trans women, learning womanhood in our adult years can be highly distressing. We often transition without the same resistance to media persuasion as our cisgender peers. And the support structures for cis women that foster body positivity, neutrality, and self-love often ignore trans people and the complications imposed by gender dysphoria.

We’re also dumped into the aesthetic expectations of womanhood with bonus horrors, like how aspiring to feminine ideals of appearance can be a tool for safety. “Passing,” or being read as cisgender, can shield us from violence and discrimination. This risk is etched onto the transgender body — we’re often centimeters away from violence, should anyone “find out.”

But embracing my trans identity was also the first time I became a person after more than two decades of un-life. For me, the cost-benefit analysis of womanhood checked out, despite the repression and risk that accompanied it.

It’s taking time to reconcile parts of me that seemed opposed to each other. On the one hand, there’s a part of me who wants to have a bimbofication arc. But I’m also an intersectional healthcare researcher. I faced the usual internalized shame for having “frivolous” and “feminine” desires. There was also the insidious, transphobic layer, a squirming rhetoric that cored itself into my brain: Do you want to be pretty just because it’s a fetish? You’re obviously an irredeemable outsider to womanhood if you think florals and long hair are so important.

It was the intersectional researcher in me who reassured the flighty young woman that it’s all fine. It’s fine to critique cisnormative femininity while wanting to embody parts of it. It’s fine to want an aesthetic that I find pleasing. It’s all fine, because the heart of my feminism is agency.

I’m building a bespoke form of womanhood that fits my vision and makes me happy.

I love my wonderful girlfriend. We’ve been at this nonsense for four years, and our relationship has only gotten better and better. She met me when I was an oddly charming, but agitated man, and we held each other through difficult and joyful years. She watched me overcome my driving anxiety during a medical emergency. We grappled with personal traumas across numerous late night conversations. We bought too many plush cats together.

Now, as I look forward to my future as a cheerful and bright young woman, I can only picture it in a relationship with someone else. Not because I am entirely dependent on others for my happiness, but because it’s hard to envision greater happiness than the one I built for myself. This applies to transition and relationships alike — I’m building my tomorrow, and I have to make it a happy one.

One fortunate thing about being transgender is that it exposed me to the joy of choosing my own name. I picked one out and I endeavor to live up to its warmth every day. I want to be the best version of myself, then I will pass the magnificence I’ve created to someone who deserves it.

That’s the heart of my re-written trophy wife script. Instead of wanting to be possessed by anyone with means, I’ve placed agency back into my hands. I want to be an extraordinary prize for someone who has earned the privilege. The “trophy” and “prize” components are still there, perhaps even problematically so, but I chose this for myself. I want to be treasured for my many wonderful qualities beneath the surface and held proudly by the person who chooses to date me.

I’ve also detached the primacy of a trophy partner’s appearance and social status from my script. That outmoded line of thinking privileges that which is unearned, and that’s the train of thought that led to the derisive term “trophy wife” in the first place. Ornamental, pretty, valued solely for being possessed. In my own version of being a trophy wife, I want to be prized for my skills, knowledge, and achievements first and foremost. Respecting my desire to iterate on my abilities is both profoundly respectful of my agency and a non-negotiable prerequisite to dating me. And:

I want to dazzle her with my intellect and hold her hand through all of life’s trials.

I want to fill her current perch with plush cats so that she never feels alone.

I want to build her the powerful gaming PC she so richly deserves.

I want to inundate her with hugs, no matter the occasion.

I want to fill her with such happiness that her joy turns heads wherever we walk so that people can see how lucky I am to belong to someone so precious.

All of this, I do for myself.

And then, I give to you.

You Need Help: I Want to Work on Myself, How Do I Do That?

Q:

I am looking for advice on books/apps/websites/activities/tangible things that actually helped you change for the better. I am in a long term relationship and both of our mental health has been very bad recently, there have been lots of conversations on the lack of feeling “in love,” we both love each other but neither of us are getting that honeymoon feeling anymore, which makes sense. And I recently began therapy again so long story short I am looking at how to actually work on myself, there is so much talk about it but like HOW do I actually do it because I have behaviors I notice that spill into my relationship that stem from personal issues. I want to be a better person to myself, and my partner. I want to feel like my cup is full as I am, and then be able to use that to help fill our cup. I hope this makes sense. I am feeling really lost looking at how I want to be and what I am currently doing, and it’s a bit crushing honestly. I know I can’t just change who I am and that’s not what I want I just have noticed ways I want to improve myself so my quality of life is better but how the hell do I do that?

— Needing To Grow

A:

Hi Needing To Grow,

Despite my skepticism of “self-care” as an “answer,” I am a big fan of self-help. I don’t like super didactic books or strategies or anything that claims it can “fix” something that’s “broken,” or that relies on gender or other stereotypes, but I am a believer in the power of introspection generally. And of books. So, I have a bunch of book recommendations for you!

Unfortunately, I don’t have experience with any apps or websites, though I did get a free subscription to Balance — but haven’t tried it yet — and have been talking to my therapist about doing something like Habitica. On that note, one tangible practice is I create a weekly habit tracker. I have a list of about 12 habits, and I track every day whether I did them. My goal is to average at least six per day. This is motivating because I have to share my results with my therapist (accountability!) and because it’s data and I am a nerd. Other than the standard activities like therapy, journaling, physical activity, and being in nature, though, I don’t have too much else to offer. Hopefully commenters can chime in! I’m mostly going to recommend books.

Before that, though, I want to quickly address the beginning of your letter. I’m sorry that you and your partner are struggling with mental health right now, and I’m happy you’ve restarted therapy. I hope you both have access to any other resources you need, whether a wider circle of intimate friendships to rely on, good food, rest and relaxation, or whatever else. I also am happy that you understand the diminishing of the “honeymoon” phase makes sense, and I have a metaphor I’ve been thinking about that I want to share.

A frequent negative feeling we often have in relationships is that the relationship has lost its “spark.” But if we want to think more deeply about that common metaphor, what is a spark actually for? If our relationship is a fire, then a spark is for lighting a fire, and is not particularly useful beyond that. The “spark” brings people together and ignites passion — but a spark, no matter how intense, will not keep a fire going.

Other things are necessary to keep a fire going — primarily fuel, oxygen, and shelter. To extend the metaphor: Fuel is the daily actions that we take to keep a fire going, like the daily act of loving each other (a fire must be continually fed logs in order to stay burning). Oxygen is space and time apart to breathe and take care of ourselves (a smothered fire will quickly go out). And shelter is how we protect and care for each other when things are difficult (fire needs some kind of rain/wind protection to literally weather a storm).

I hope it’s not out of place to offer this metaphor to you. I think even when it’s not about relationships, doing work on yourself is necessary for a healthy relationship “fire.” Please note that I don’t believe that any of the modalities in any of these books is “the truth.” I don’t think there are four types of attachment, or five ways to give or receive love or five love languages, or whatever. I do believe that these different ways of thinking about ourselves and how we love are useful frameworks to ponder, not “the truth.” Also, many of these are written from a straight perspective, but the ideas are universal enough that I think everyone can get something out of them. On to my recommendations!

Books Specifically About Relationships:

1. Essential reading: How to Be an Adult in Relationships by David Richo

I recommend this to everyone, and I think all adult human beings should read it, especially anyone trying to love better. It hits on similar notes to the books on love languages below, but frames them differently, and is really about working on and changing yourself as the key to loving others better and thus improving your relationships. I believe that one of our most important goals as humans is to learn how to love, rather than finding someone to love us.

2. Getting philosophical: The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm

Check out this podcast episode for a primer on Fromm and on this book. Existential loneliness is an inevitable aspect of the human condition, and we’re typically taught a “commodity” framework about making ourselves more loveable and seeking out a partner we “deserve” in order to attempt to escape that loneliness. It’s transactional: we think of relationships as something that’s mutually beneficial, whether by soothing each others’ loneliness or bolstering each others’ ego, and a “healthy” relationship is when the transaction is about equal. Fromm says: what if instead of trying to escape that loneliness you learned to accept it? What if you grew your capacity to love others because of the inherent merits of doing so, not because of what you might get out of it? What if love isn’t a feeling but an art we must practice in order to excel at?

Note: writing this had me going back and looking at this book, and I realized that Fromm does, in fact, rely heavily on gender stereotypes/tropes and also has some pretty blatant homophobia in here. It’s too bad — the ideas are really powerful otherwise. If you can’t deal, then listen to the podcast episode and skip this one. If you’re able to shake your head and keep reading (he’s remarkably feminist for 1957, actually, and I had to keep that publication year in mind) then it’s still a recommended read.

3. On love languages: The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts

There are tons of books and websites about love languages, and this probably isn’t one of the best ones, but thinking about love in this way was very helpful for my partner and I. Reading it really helped us to talk about how we give and receive love, and helped us make little shifts in our day-to-day that really supported our feelings of security. It also gets us to think deeply about how we learned what love looks like as young people, and how we’ve created assumptions about it, and how this affects our adult relationships. It also helped us to better understand that there are lots of ways to “put logs onto the fire,” as it were — including having sex, giving gifts, going on dates, writing love notes to each other, spending quality time together, etc. — and they’re all necessary in varying degrees to “keep the fire going.”

4. On attachment theory: The Attachment Theory Workbook: Powerful Tools to Promote Understanding, Increase Stability, and Build Lasting Relationships

I don’t “believe” in attachment theory, but I and my relationship still benefited a lot from reading and working through this. I clearly have avoidant attachment tendencies, and my partner clearly has anxious attachment tendencies — so learning about this and our triggers and fears and childhood messages has also helped us to better love each other.

Books That Are Not About Relationships but Are Important for Self-Work and Introspection

1. Learning to be a trustworthy, secure person: The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz

I think this book can be over-hyped, but like everything else on this list it can be powerful for anyone to take from it what they will. I especially think that making every effort to learn how to take care with your words, mean what you say, and follow through on your commitments is huge. It is one of the only ways to become a trustworthy person, and how can someone love you if they can’t trust you? How can you love someone else if you can’t trust yourself? I also believe that working on taking fewer things personally is an incredible challenge that pays off in big ways the more you work at it. I think some things are personal, though, and finding that boundary is crucial to living a contented life.

2. Overcoming self-sabotage: The Mountain Is You by Brianna Wiest

I am currently reading this book, and it’s really been blowing my mind. A few years ago, I exited a period of extreme mental health crisis, changed career paths, and now I’m doing better mentally and financially than I ever have in the past — and I feel guilty. It’s helping me realize that I created narratives for myself when I was younger about certain types of people. And it’s been transformative as I’ve experienced a crisis of conscience upon becoming one of those people! I think this book can be powerful for a lot of people in our communities who romanticize poverty or struggle or overwork or moral/ethical purity out of necessity as a survival strategy, and who then get older and realize that those narratives might not necessarily be accurate.

3. On doing what feels good: Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown

While this isn’t a “self-help” book, it really helped me to understand that one of the most powerful and transformative things I can do in the world is seek pleasure and contentment. “Movement” work doesn’t have to be a slog or a constant struggle. We should pursue justice because it’s pleasurable to, because it brings us joy, because it’s an outpouring of the love we have for humanity. My best work in the world is doing what brings me joy and pleasure, whatever that is. This of course requires us to expand our thinking about pleasure; helping a friend through an intense crisis, or working through a difficult struggle with our lover, isn’t a pleasurable experience in a typical sense, but it does bring us joy and is an aspect of our love for them and that intimacy and shared work is pleasurable in an expanded sense.

I think it’s our work as human beings to constantly be getting to know ourselves better and to grow our ability to love and care for ourselves and others. As some of these books address, there are major structural barriers in our way to building intimate, loving relationships with ourselves and others. True love is essentially anti-capitalist and anti-oppressive, which is why it’s so hard to do. That being said, no matter our circumstances we can always do our best. I hope that these resources give you some places to start, and that your love continues to grow, internally and externally.

PS: Commenters, please make more recommendations in the comments! I’m sure there are so many great books, along with apps, websites, and activities, that I missed.

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

You Need Help: What To Do With This Meaningless, Single Life?

Q:

Dear lovely insightful people,

I am struggling with time passing and me continuing to be far away from the life I would like to live: I miss tangible sustainable community, and I long for being “equal partners in a very fun and exciting and safe relationship” (from a NYT article) with someone, and a family.

While my job is ok-ish, as is my health (i.e. some permanent conditions that I do address, nothing acute) — the big life sections are gaping holes: No significant other. No offspring.

And it doesn’t look like this will change anytime soon or at all.

Of course I might find a healthy relationship eventually; it is not impossibly impossible even when you’re 80. But the thing with continuing my family, breaking the cycle, and being able to pass on love and connection and values and valuables and so on, will not happen anymore (and I do not have siblings, it was all on me and I’m 41 now).

It looks like I am deemed to live a single life, where I do stuff and am socially active, but ultimately alone. Lonely. Meaningless.

It cannot be life to just keep going.

Like it’s nice to enjoy a coffee and watch the birds on the platform while you are waiting at the station, but when you are there to catch a train, and learn the train is delayed and then delayed some more and so on, the coffee and the birds are nice but not what you came for. And they do not get you to the place you were to go.

And no, I do not want to get comfortable on the windy platform of a train station.

If this is the life the universe or whoever decided for me — I do not consent!

Maybe you have clues how to deal with this?

Thank you!

A:

I want to start by saying that there have been so many times in my life — most of it, in fact — that I have felt a lot of what you’re feeling. Your metaphor of waiting on the train platform and being able to see the bits of beauty and comfort that exist there but still wanting, so badly, for the train to arrive so you can get to where you want to go resonated really strongly with me. So first of all, I want you to know you’re absolutely not alone.

And yet, in this particular moment, as I write a reply to your letter, I find myself in a different emotional place. A novel one for me, in fact. It’s not that my life has changed dramatically in that time: I’m not in a relationship; most of my closest friends continue to live far away from me, and I haven’t been able to see many of them for years now because of the pandemic; and I continue to question why I expend so much time and energy on my day job when there are many other things I’d rather be doing. Yet, something has shifted, which I’ll get to presently, but I want to acknowledge that some of what I say below may not feel applicable or relevant to you. Regardless, I want to try to hold space here for both: for your (and my, really) pain and for the possibility that you may not feel this way forever.

So, let’s start with your letter. I really am sorry. It is so incredibly disappointing and heartbreaking to have something you want so badly, something that, in your value system, feels like the ultimate “point of it all” and for that to be just out of your grasp. There is a lot of very real grief in that.

One of my favorite advice pieces is an article on ambiguous grief by Lori Gottlieb from The Atlantic. As Gottlieb writes, “Ambiguous grief isn’t more or less painful than other types of grief — it’s just different. But one thing that does make it additionally challenging is that it tends to go unacknowledged.” In my own experience, acknowledging that grief both privately to myself and, eventually, more publicly has been incredibly valuable and important.

Recognizing, naming, and speaking the feelings won’t change the reality of your circumstances, of course. But what I read in your letter (and forgive me if I’m just projecting myself here) is a lot of frustration. Perhaps taking the time and space to acknowledge your pain, both with yourself, and with close friends and family, may help you let go of some of the frustration.

In my own experience, as I started talking to my friends and sisters about my feelings of sorrow and loneliness as a result of being chronically single, a few things happened.

First, I realized that while many of my friends are in partnered, long-term relationships, there are also several who aren’t. Hearing their experiences helped me feel less alone, knowing that they not only shared in my struggle but also felt the same types of loneliness and hopelessness that I did.

Second, I also found that many of my friends in committed relationships, and even those with families, struggled with that same loneliness and hopelessness. And, as I’ve been able to internalize that second one, I think that has — albeit slowly — allowed me to shift my perspective a bit. A loving, long-term relationship won’t save me from loneliness or my ever-present existential crisis about the point of my life. I have known this for a long, long time, but there is something about seeing friends in the kinds of healthy, long-term relationships that I have always dreamed of expressing the same things I have felt for so, so long. Really being there for, and also deeply empathizing with some of my closest friends has been incredibly powerful in terms of driving that message home.

At the same time, I do understand why you say that a single life feels meaningless. There was a time in my life where my professional pursuits consumed me, and I very quickly realized how empty those pursuits were. Racism and sexism were always going to hold me back, and increasingly I questioned (and continue to question, in the present) the ultimate purpose of any of the work that I do. And so, sometime around seven or so years ago, I started believing that the only thing that matters in life is the relationships we have.

For so long, I had wanted a romantic, partnered relationship, and the shift in my values made that desire even more intense. Alongside that, I watched so many of my closest friends and sisters make difficult decisions and, because of the way society is structured, ultimately prioritize romantic relationships and family over friendship. From all this, it followed, that the only real meaning in my life would be achieved by having a romantic relationship of my own. That might not be exactly how you landed at this conclusion yourself, but I share all of that to say: Please believe me when I say that for most of my adult life, I have also felt that a single life is lonely and meaningless.

But as one year after another goes by, and I remain single, and the prospects of that changing don’t look so great, my perspective on this has started to shift. If I had told myself that a year ago, I would’ve rolled my eyes and said that that’s just a trick of the mind. Yet here I am, and maybe it is a lie I’m telling myself, but the truth is, I am so much more at peace and, frankly, happier when I can really hold things from this place.

It’s true that the structure of society makes it hard to hold friendships as close as partnered relationships. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible to build deep, long-lasting connections with friends, even if you can’t speak with or see each other regularly. It might not be what you or I really want, but it’s also not nothing. A life full of rich and varied relationships also isn’t empty, even if it’s not the richness that you’re seeking. To quote from one of my favorite books, Ancillary Sword: “It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t what I wanted, not really, wasn’t what I knew I would always reach for. But it would have to be enough.”

And maybe that’s not really encouraging. Maybe that is just resignation, which is where I lived for years. But as I continue to ask myself the question, “Can this be enough?” that resignation has started to shift into an acceptance, which on occasion is even joyful. As many have written before me, there are some serious perks of being single. I live my life on my terms, filling up my days however I want and doing the mundane things in life according to my own particular habits.

Finally, I want to address this part of your letter, which I think is the hardest: “continuing my family, breaking the cycle, and being able to pass on love and connection and values and valuables and so on, will not happen.” Again, I really am sorry. We have gotten a letter previously in the A+ Advice Box from someone who wanted children but cannot have them, and again, that grief and pain is just so, so real. I can only imagine how that’s magnified by not having siblings and feeling like “it was all on me.”

I have never wanted to have children, especially biological children, so I can’t speak from a place of empathy, but when you mention “breaking the cycle” that implies to me a complicated family history. I, too, come from a complicated family, with an enduring history of abuse, and so I think a lot about “breaking the cycle.” I wonder if it would be useful to you to consider that in terms of the love you give yourself, rather than just what you impart on the next generation.

As for passing on “love and connection and values and valuables,” as I have gotten older I’ve started to think about this, even though I have no desire for children. But several of my close friends do have kids, and it’s important to me to spend time with them, building loving connections and sharing my values and, someday, valuables as well. In the same way that I suggested earlier to think more expansively about which relationships bring meaning to life, it might be helpful to think about generational connections and legacy more expansively as well.

Ultimately, I hope something in what I’ve written resonates for you, even though we seem to be in different parts of our journeys of making peace with this struggle. I really do feel your pain, and, honestly, I really am sorry for both of us. I don’t know why life is so fickle in this way. I want to leave you with something I have written previously for the A+ Advice Box in response to a related question:

“It is so, so incredibly painful to have something you want with all your heart and, as you said, you know that you don’t control whether or not you will ever achieve it. But somehow, we manage to build ourselves up from those places, even if we’re always living with a little bit of sadness. (Re-appropriating Eleanor Shellstrop there.) Trust that this is true for you, as well.”

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

You Need Help: My Trauma is Activated When My Partner Masturbates to Porn

Content warning 11/18/22: This question mentions childhood sexual abuse.

Q:

Dear Autostraddle,

A while back, my partner of many years and I (both they/them) spoke about Crash Pad Series, and they said that it meant empowerment for them to see very different bodies (trans and non-binary people, mascunline-presenting persons, various sizes) and how it normalized kink for them; and I was absolutely fine with it. Recently however, I learned that my partner masturbates when watching Crash Pad Series. This made me feel hurt and betrayed. Maybe this is naivete on my part, as I know most people masturbate when watching porn, but I did not receive any prior indication that masturbation was a part of what they were looking for in Crash Pad Series in the way they described it to me. It feels as if a crucial information was omitted on their part.

Moreover, I feel like a bad queer for not being into queer porn or having a problem when my partner masturbates to it. It seems to me that the only people who are critical of porn are religious fundamentalists and those feminists who want to outlaw pornography, which is no company I want to be in. To make matters more complicated, I was brought up in a fundamentalist Christian environment in which pornography was absolutely condemned, and I was sexually abused by my father in my childhood; he also showed me porn. As a teen, I discovered feminism which was very much second-wave, and my socialization in this regard is Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Steinem, who were critical of pornography. And as a young adult, when I believed to be straight and had a boyfriend, he watched porn that I considered sexist and that was made by cis-men and for cis-men. I wanted to be the “cool” girlfriend who didn’t have a problem with his porn consumption; but deep down, I did. I crossed my own boundaries when watching porn with him.

Back to the present – I feel really down by the recent information. To be clear: It is not that I expect my partner to only be attracted to me; also, I believe they should be free in their fantasies when masturbating. Yet, it feels (to a limited extent) like cheating or a breaking of trust that they didn’t tell me before. Somehow, it feels very different if they masturbate to videos and images of other people on a website they pay for, as opposed to fantasies in their head.

My partner cares about how I feel and said we could negotiate if I didn’t want them to use porn. To the same time, I don’t want to reduce or “prohibit” something that is empowering to them.

I have been doing research. The only thing I seem to find on this topic are narratives by straight couples, in which a) the guy consumes porn that the woman considers misogynistic, and/or that b) he is addicted to porn. Neither is true in regard to my partner and me, or Crash Pad Series. I would love to hear some how queer/lesbian couples handle it – besides joyfully watching porn and happily going to queer porn film festivals together. It feels like I am the only queer person who has this problem, which is probably not true, but it surely appears to me right now.

I’d really appreciate your thoughts and considerations.

A:

Wow. Hey reader. Thank you for this question. I’m gonna try to be as gentle as I can with this but I think you need to hear it.

It may not feel like you’re coming from a bad place when you feel, to use your own words, “betrayed” by your partner’s porn consumption. Honestly, that’s a strong word and a strong reaction and makes me think you are laying claim to a part of your partner’s sexuality that you don’t necessarily have the right to. They aren’t cheating on you, though it may feel like it. They are just practicing a very healthy sexual relationship with themselves while supporting a queer indie porn site. The fact that you feel betrayed or like you’ve been cheated on says more about you than it does about your partner.

I know I may sound harsh, but you really have to ask yourself why this bothers you so much. You say that you know they have a right to their fantasies, that a lot of critique of porn is usually through a fundamentalists lens and you don’t want to be in that company, but do you really grasp that you’re basically asking your partner to stop doing something that brings them a feeling of joy and acceptance because you personally have a problem with it?

I’m operating from a place where I assume people watch porn to masturbate to it. Especially porn that is made by sex workers who are queer and have a range of body sizes and abilities. Your partner says they find something really special in watching Crash Pad, and I don’t know but I think masturbation is a key part of that. To see bodies like theirs being desired and catered to is probably really hot for them!

I fear you aren’t gonna like my solution which is essentially that you have to accept your partner’s porn and masturbation habit. I know you probably want a happy medium, but if that medium consists of your partner having to reduce or limit their fantasies because of you, that doesn’t seem very fair. To be clear, they are just watching queer porn. By your admission, they aren’t doing it obsessively, and they aren’t watching something that depicts another person being harmed, so I don’t see a solution in which you get what you want, which is for them to not masturbate to Crash Pad or do it less.

You aren’t a bad queer. You’re someone with a history of trauma that has probably affected the way you view those who watch and masturbate to porn. You may say all the right things in this post, but you also admit that you feel betrayed and cheated on. That tells me that you are still viewing porn consumption as something that is bad or is somehow taking away from your partner’s desire for you, which it isn’t. They can be 100% into you and still want to see another person engaging in sexual activity.

I don’t know if you’ve tried it yet, but you say you think Crash Pad is cool and everything. Maybe try watching a few together without masturbating. Talk about what you see and how it makes you feel. You can work up to doing a mutual masturbation session while watching porn when you feel comfortable if that’s something that interests you. You haven’t spoken about your own masturbation rituals so I don’t know how you do that or if you do at all. But mutual masturbation can be a hot, fun way to connect with your partner and share something that is important to them.

I want to leave this by just reiterating that your partner isn’t doing anything wrong. They are just masturbating which is normal and a part of a healthy sexual relationship with the self. It’s on you to work through your feelings around this, not on them to change their behavior.

Best of Luck!

x
DJ

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

My Chronic Yeast Infections Wouldn’t Go Away — Until I Left My Toxic Relationship

I knew that Amazon sold actual sitz baths, but I chose a simpler option — and by simpler, I mean cheaper and more convenient. I filled my largest stainless steel pot with herbs and several kettles-worth of hot water. I felt like a witch over her cauldron. In actuality, I was desperate. This was yet another attempt to rid myself of a yeast infection.

For several weeks, I’d been taking anti-fungal pills, soaking tampons in yogurt, eating copious amounts of raw garlic, and dropping oregano oil underneath my tongue, to no avail. As I placed my pot on the kitchen floor of my Berlin apartment, I was staving off hopelessness. I hiked up my robe and squatted over the steam.

Over the years, I’d become familiar with what caused — or at least exacerbated — my chronic yeast infections: a lover’s careless hands, hormonal changes from taking Plan B pills, a terrible diet, antibiotics, scented detergent and soaps. Monistat and its equivalents pretty much zapped them all in the past. But as of late, my infections were a mystery, pests that were starting to feel like punishments. What had I done wrong? I’d changed my diet, used condoms regularly, and switched to hypoallergenic products. Why were they coming back and staying for so long?

I feared I had a resistant strain. The gynecologists I saw abandoned their scripts about wet bathing suits and tight underwear. They suggested I was genetically predisposed; pills and garlic would be my future.

I wonder what would’ve happened if those same gynecologists hadn’t relied on their usual spiel. What if they’d genuinely inquired about the life that these yeast infections disrupted? What would I have dared to tell them? Not much, probably. More likely than not, I would’ve ignored any inner discernment about the true cause of my distress, which went deeper than the surface of my vagina’s membrane. It would be a few more years before I could fathom that the true source of my pain was my ex-partner: the stubbornness of my infection likely due to the depth of my emotional ruin.

Maybe I would have reached that conclusion sooner if a professional had mentioned the relationship between stress and chronic yeast infections. Unfortunately, I had to figure that out on my own.

While researching wildly for permanent solutions to my vaginal torment, I stumbled upon the correlation. A 2015 study published in the Annual Review of Microbiology determined that changes in stress can result in yeast overgrowth, causing infections. A 2020 study in the Journal of the Turkish-German Gynecological Association had complementary findings: there’s evidence that depression, anxiety, and stress can increase one’s susceptibility to vaginal yeast infections.

Interestingly, many of the articles I read failed to mention a toxic relationship as an environmental and embodied stressor that factors into chronic illness. The search words “chronic yeast infections and toxic relationships” yielded very few results, but articles about toxic relationships and poor mental health were plentiful.

The National Library of Medicine published a research article in 2015 stating that, “negative partner interactions were significantly associated with increased likelihood of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation.” But I don’t need PubMed to tell me that a toxic relationship wreaks havoc on one’s mental health: I am a statistic.

According to a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 1 in 2 women have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner. Approximately 1 in 3 women have experienced coercive control by an intimate partner. I am that 1. My ex-partner humiliated and gaslit me for most of our relationship, and for most of our relationship, I nursed yeast infections. I had several infections for the 1.5 years we were together, each one lasting weeks at a time.

And yet, breaking up with him was so difficult.

Days prior to my DIY vaginal steam, I took three buses on a biting cold evening to join a friend at a cultural heritage event. When I got there, I was met by warm lighting, buffet style food, and live music. I watched as adults danced in place and children darted about. I wanted to be present; I couldn’t. My partner had just left Berlin after a three month visit. During that time, he’d shamed my body and my sexuality, coerced me into choosing him over my livelihood, attempted to isolate me from my family, and caused me to question my reality. A voice outside of my own had to cut through the chaos; I needed my friend’s opinion. I gave no context, only a question: Do you think I should break up with him?

I don’t remember what she said, but on one of those three buses back home, I called him. “What is it that you want, Khi?” he asked. I had an excruciating headache, but I wasn’t crying. I told him it was over. That was my second time ending things. Immediately I wondered: Would it last? I was mentally lost and inundated by emotion, but my body — she knew. The itch between my thighs was an instruction, a command, a plea to let him go and heal. Apparently, without realizing, I listened.

And I haven’t had a yeast infection since.

The 68 Absolutely Gayest Ways You Met Your Gay Partner(s), According to the 2022 Reader Survey

Roller derby. Your college’s LGBTQ+ group. Roller derby! Forums for niche fandoms. Lex. Roller Derby. Climate justice protests. Academic conferences. Autostraddle Meet-Ups. Roller derby? OK Cupid. A-Camp. ROLLER DERBY. These are the places where you queer weirdos have met others like you, experienced the power of attraction and pursued relationships in which you remain to this very day! On the 2022 Autostraddle Reader Survey, we asked where you’d met your very special someone(s), offering a multiple choice array as well as a comment box.

From the multiple choice, the top answers were as follows: 29% met through a dating app, 21.5% through school, 21% through friends, 13% through work, 11% online (not through a dating app) and 7% at a bar or party. Over 700 of you also hit up the comment box to tell us exactly how you met — because you picked “other” or just wanted to get a little more specific. A solid third of these answers were people wanting to specify the dating app or website they used but the rest contained far more detail, which I am sharing with you now here, today, some ripped out of context, because sharing is caring. Specifically: I will be sharing some of the very gay ways your soul found another and united.

1. Pottery sale

2. Farming conference

3. “online through witchcraft”

4. Ladies Rock Camp

5. Talking about gay mad scientists from a children’s cartoon on twitter

6. We fell in love while sitting a housemate’s toads

7. Studying Wildlife Ecology in college

8. In the comment section of a fanfic they wrote about trauma and community and healing :-)

9. Bering and Wells fandom

10. We met in 1995. I was in grad school and had a job at the campus women’s center. I helped her hang an art show. We later hung out at a feminist science fiction convention. We’ve been together ever since.

11. We’re both librarians who met through a mutual friend (also a librarian)

12. We met on an AOL Teen message board when we were lonely teenagers 20+ years ago

13. I was sitting on an LGB panel in my now-wife’s class on the psychology of oppression (it was the 90s)

14. Sweat lodge – we had both worked with this particular medicine man in different states and she just happened to be in town and come to ceremony that weekend

15. I play DnD and she’s my dungeon master’s wife!

16. Working at the same summer camp. We were randomly paired to be counselors together and we immediately both wanted to find out if the other was gay. Here we are, several years and two cats later.

17. The Rose, a women’s-only transitional housing apartment building

18. A dyke meet up / conversation salon in the 1990’s!!

19. Band camp in high school

20. She saw my bio on the website for the volunteer board at the local LGBTQ Center and stopped by my public job but I wasn’t there. Then we emailed and arranged to meet ‘for a tour of the LGBTQ Center’ which went well and was followed immediately by a coffee date. And The Rest Is History.

21. Feminist young adult fiction forum in the mid-2000s

22. Buffy The Vampire Slayer Faith/Buffy shipping site in the early noughties

23. Search & Rescue Volunteer Organization

24. Infectious diseases summer school

25. Archaeological excavation

26. We both followed Heather Hogan and the #gaysharks crew on twitter

27. We both play roller derby and were introduced by my ex at a party at her house 😂

28. Lesbian book club that was organized locally and advertised on the Unofficial Autostraddle facebook group

29. Board game night at a comic shop

30. At a queue to Pink concert 9 years ago. She was watching hockey on a tablet, her country’s team was playing against mine. Didn’t think I’ll see her again after the concert, but she had other plans.

31. We were both at 2 protests in a row in a small town where I knew most other people there and got to talking and decided to get coffee!

32. Two Rabbis made the connection (a double-Rabbi shidduch, if anyone reading this understands the phrase ☺️)

33. Our union — we were both on the bargaining team

34. Smut Slam event at the Edinburgh Fringe organised by Cameryn Moore. They told a story about knife play, I asked them out afterwards.

35. An online text based X-Men RPG

36. Xena Fan Fiction Writer’s Fan Group. Merwolf, specifically.

37. Sailor Moon chat on AIM in 1999

38. Discussing gay fanfiction about the members of Fall Out Boy

39. Queer contra dancing in Chicago

40. Unofficial Hannah Hart fan meet-up

41. We both worked at the same very small vet clinic

42. We met at a party in my first year of grad school, and she offered me chickpeas she roasted herself

43. L Word quiz night: she hosted it, I won it.

44. Feminist Choir

45. I was the back of a pantomime horse and she was the front!

46. They directed the queer sapphic ballet in which I was one of the dancers

47. On a Scottish island at an outdoor education centre

48. Working at the farmers market & a coworker introduced us because we had “similar style” but the similarity was just that we both dress gay

49. Health food store take-out counter

50. I was a rope bunny at a Sexpo and I was cold so I asked them for a hug

51. Trans hormone clinic lol

52. My wife is a personal trainer. She was training the president of the college where I taught. The president, a closeted woman, thought all lesbians should know each other. So she walked her into my office. And, va-va-va-voom.

53. In the Peace Corps (but also, decolonize aid)

54. Organizing for Climate justice!

55. Working on abortion decriminalisation

56. A Zoom workshop for the group Showing Up for Racial Justice

57. She was a regular customer at the bookshop I managed. After many months of flirting she (finally!) leaned across the counter and asked if I ever got a coffee break.

58. We actually both went solo to the Gentleman Jack party autostraddle threw three years ago which would have been such a good meet cute, we even ordered the same drink! Sadly, we did notice each other there and matched on Hinge like three weeks later instead.

59. A class about sociology and cats

60. We went to Mormon church together when we were kids

61. Nolose conference in the early 2000s! Fat dyke 4 fat dyke!

62. 2019 Women’s World Cup Semi-Final in Lyon

63. Quaker meeting

64. We met at a mutual friend’s wedding and she lured me into a conversation by loudly talking about the Kristen Stewart Lizzie Borden movie during the cocktail hour.

65. Queer Soul Night, in line for the bathroom!

66. Community softball team

67. Volunteering at a folk festival

68. We were bunk mates at the OG A-camp. I looked up when I entered the cabin and locked eyes with her in her denim overalls and cute-as-heck smile. At the end of the weekend, I slipped her my number on the back of a library index card that was used for Slam Poetry inspiration. We kept in touch and eventually got married- she carries that index card in her wallet to this day.

69. She wrote fan fiction and I corrected her grammar. Where’s THAT movie? Grammar weirdos are sexy, damn it!

How Chloe Caldwell’s “Women” Shaped My Queer Heartbreak

Karina took me by surprise. When we met one humid August, both working as counselors for the same summer camp in Boston, I was still wounded from an earlier heartbreak. I wasn’t looking for anyone or anything new. Then enter Karina, soft-voiced and sure. Karina, monochrome in her black button-up and Dr. Martens. At the Central Square CVS, where we’d been sent on a supply run for the campers, I was enchanted by the way she danced down the toothpaste aisle. Her boots tapped against the carpet as she shimmied in time to the dreamy indie pop song playing over the tinny speakers. She looked up and we locked eyes. That was it — I was in deep. I vowed that no matter what she did to me, I would never save myself from her.

We lived in different cities, several hours apart. As I hurtled across the northeast towards her, I curled up on the seats of Greyhounds and Amtraks and calmed my restless mind with books. I read the works of Melissa Febos, Carmen Maria Machado, Eileen Myles, Adrienne Rich. Usually, though, I was reading Women.

Chloe Caldwell’s autobiographical novella is a tight and biting account of the unnamed narrator’s affair with a woman named Finn, who is twenty years older than her and in a decade-long relationship with someone else. Finn is the first woman the narrator has ever fallen in love with, and she shatters everything the narrator believed to be true about her life.

I was a freshman in college when I discovered the book in the stacks of my school’s main library. A few months had passed since my first heartbreak at the hands of a woman, but the wound was just as raw. My parents were still struggling to wrap their heads around my sexuality, and my friends had long grown tired of my hysterics. I felt deeply and profoundly alone in my pain. But then I found Women. I took it home and read it in two hours. I found solace in the narrator’s unsparing, piercing descriptions of her own heartbreak. By the time I finished, I was excavated.

Since that spring four years ago, I have read Women in full more times than any other book. I worshiped the affair that played out across its pages in all its passion and futility, all its grotesque emotions and adult (read: unnecessary) complications. Caldwell was telling the story of my life: obsession to ruin and back again. She knew the pain of being too much for the world. Women held me steady when I was shaking with the force of my own desire and the fear it inspired within me. On a base level, though, I was just drawn to the love story.

At its core, the novella is about two damaged women — one opaque and withholding, the other a tornado of feeling — who, despite all their differences and all the circumstantial impossibilities, still want and take each other desperately. They don’t have a happy ending, but their love is seismic. I wanted a love like that more than I wanted anything else in the world.

It was only when reading Women that I started to understand how it really felt to live a queer life in adulthood. In its sparse pages and wrenching vignettes, I could glimpse a slice of the characteristic ecstasy and messiness such a future held. Autostraddle Co-Founder Riese Bernard wrote that part of Women’s power comes from the narrator’s immediate acceptance of her feelings towards Finn: “This new categorization of affair is approached not with hand-wringing” on the narrator’s part, “but with nervous, tentative, flushed excitement and curiosity.” This thrilling joy was everything my younger self desperately needed to believe was waiting for me and everything my older self would eventually require help navigating.

There exists a storied lineage of queer novels depicting a central, sexual, (semi-)loving lesbian relationship (The Color Purple, Rubyfruit Jungle, The Price of Salt), but Women was the very first of these I’d ever read. It was no wonder, then, that three years after I found Women in the stacks, I would pursue a relationship so inevitably and equally doomed; the chance to live out the plot of a book that fundamentally shifted my understanding of my own sexuality and maturity proved impossible to reject.

Like Finn, Karina wore her red flags like badges of honor. She smoked American Spirits and couldn’t sleep without the windows open in the dead of winter. She lied to me about her height and only dressed in black. She was allergic to commitment and emotional vulnerability, so we were “together” but not “monogamous.” If she could sense herself starting to open up to someone, she immediately and abruptly pushed them away. She even eerily fit Finn’s description, “an olive-skinned woman that touches you just so,” who “read books avidly,” “walked with a certain swagger,” and occupied “the sweet spot” between butch and femme.

When I showed my friends photos of her, their comments were eerily similar to what the narrator’s friend Nathan had to say about Finn: “I can’t tell if she’s incredibly cocky or incredibly tortured.” As it turned out, the answer was both.

After a fair amount of buildup, Finn and the narrator finally make the breach, that first unretractable kiss that quickly leads to more, in the narrator’s basement apartment. They take to calling the apartment “The Aquarium” after the teal color of the walls. When I entered Karina’s room for the first time, the first thing I noticed was the pale turquoise paint. I distinctly remember thinking, the universe has gotten pretty heavy-handed lately. On her couch, she leaned in to kiss me, and I could only hear Caldwell’s voice in my head. “There is no teeth clanking, no awkwardness,” she says, describing the narrator’s first time kissing Finn. “Just fucking, and no fumbling.”

As we fell into bed, I noticed she didn’t dissolve into me the way I did into her. I knew something so imbalanced couldn’t last long. “She reads me a poem she wrote about us,” Caldwell’s narrator reflects. “The poem says she knew the we or us of this would never make it out of that ocean-colored room but that she loved me anyway.” On the bus ride back home, I held the book open in my lap and traced my fingers over these exact sentences again and again. I wanted to suspend myself in our own Aquarium. If I could find a way to freeze us in the blue, maybe I could subvert the inevitable.

“She is going to ruin you,” my friend Isabel implored. It was October, and we were standing on the balcony of a house party in Brighton, Massachusetts. I had come directly from the holistic health store Karina had taken me to, where she’d made me an herbal blend to roll my joints with. The jar filled with small plastic baggies labeled in her cramped scrawl was a pulsing heart in the bottom of my tote bag, a sign of something sure. Isabel grabbed my hands, stared directly into my eyes. “She is going to tear you apart.”

There was no talking me out of it. If Finn and Karina were the immovable object, then Women’s narrator and I were the unstoppable force. It was always me on the bus or the train, putting my life on hold just to have her in my arms for one night. On my end, the time Karina and I spent together was always characterized by sharp spikes in adrenaline, cortisol, and all the shitty chemicals that delude you into thinking that what’s happening between you and the reticent person you’re obsessed with actually means something. I swung wildly between euphoria and despair. She told me about the other girls she was also dating and how much she liked them. She took hours to respond to my texts and never messaged first. She mocked me for my favorite movie and recommended ones she thought were “better.” There was never a moment where I felt secure. But then, this was how Finn had made the narrator feel. This was going to be that wild, big love I’d been waiting for since I read Women’s first line. The lows may have been low, but the highs were so high. How could I give it up?

And so I followed Karina all around her city. We picked out books for each other in the dusty basements of used bookstores. We browsed the rock and new wave sections of record shops, dancing to the Florence + The Machine album blaring from the loudspeakers. We spent hours in sticky bars talking about our shared passion for writing. She’d pull out her phone where she had recorded her thoughts on the last book I’d given her, and we’d go through them all, point by point. The days and nights would predictably end with me following her up the winding stairs to her apartment, where she laid me out on her forest-green comforter and made me feel again and again and again. She slowly wove the tapestry of her past for me, and I was gentle with the fabric.

In retrospect, I should have known it was too good, too fast. I should have known she would be scared by so much truth coming from both of us. But I think part of me subconsciously wanted to see us crash and burn. Like in Women, our collapse would be proof of our romance’s firepower.

Caldwell’s narrator tells us, “I can’t be in a relationship with anyone, [Finn] says, so if you have to grieve something, grieve that. When we get off the phone, I am in a fetal position on the bathroom floor, holding my heart while it literally aches.”

Karina ended things on Christmas Eve. I was back in my hometown in upstate New York and had driven my dad’s Subaru down to the waterfront so that I could be totally alone. It had snowed three inches the night before. I crunched over the white and dialed her number, staring into the gray water.

I had been with her just days earlier. Over breakfast the morning I left, she told me that one of the other girls she’d been seeing wanted to be monogamous. She told me they were going to talk about it. She told me it wasn’t what she wanted, but that she was probably going to do it anyway. Because I was too complicated.

“You have deeply affected me,” she had whispered, her voice thick with tears.

Now, over the phone, she was devoid of emotion. “We’ve decided to try the monogamy thing,” Karina said. “I’m happy.”

Dry. Casual. Cold. Nothing like the voice of the woman I had spent the past few months starting to love. I closed my eyes. I inhaled the icy air and let it burn.

It took pursuing a relationship almost identical to the one in Women to realize that it wasn’t what I actually needed. I knew that Finn and the narrator’s relationship wasn’t healthy, but I didn’t want to acknowledge that their wild passion and desire that I longed for, and that I chased in Karina, was inextricable from their toxicity. When things ended, I had to confront the fact that I fell in love with someone else’s story just as hard as I’d fallen for Karina, and I was trying to make it mine instead of listening to my brain and body’s warning signs.

The nausea that gripped me when I saw her coming down the sidewalk, dark and distant. The heart palpitations. The tongue tie. I felt smaller in her presence, less myself, more performance than woman. I desperately wanted to be cool for her. Sexy, smart, down for whatever. I didn’t want her to know how badly I thought I needed her. I couldn’t acknowledge that this was unsustainable, that my life wasn’t the novella I had convinced myself it was.

After their affair has ended, the narrator of Women meets Finn for the infamously unproductive “closure talk.” She is spinning out of control in her grief, grasping at straws, trying to create some sense out of this nonsensical heartbreak.

“But we were so close,” the narrator pleads.

Finn will not bend. Dry, casual, cold, she replies, “That’s what women do.”

It’s a convenient deflection of responsibility, made possible by the historical and societal denial of the very possibility of lesbian intimacy. Wave your hand and all the love vanishes. Of course this was nothing. It’s just what women do. How could you ever believe otherwise?

Standing in the snow, listening to Karina slam a wall down between us, I understood the narrator’s desperation. But we were so close, I wanted to scream, wail, sob. I was unmoored. I wanted Karina to anchor me in the reality I had spent months believing, the reality where she wasn’t afraid of her feelings for me. But she just couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give in to them; to her, I suppose the vulnerability was unfathomable.

In a way, I’m grateful that she broke my heart. I can only imagine how my distrust of her would have ballooned into paranoia, how my insecurities would have multiplied as I grasped for a love that she wasn’t equipped to give. In a note to me a few weeks before the end, she’d written, “My cowardice still wins over my sincerity.” And I knew it would have killed me if it happened again, if her cowardice triumphed once more, if she erased everything between us with her own version of That’s what women do.

So instead I said, “Congratulations.” And then I said goodbye.

I’m Not a Cat Lesbian but I Fell in Love With One

I have never been a cat person. I vaguely remember my grandmother having one when I was younger, but all I can remember of it was that it was a white cat named Snowball, it scratched me at least once, and I was allergic to them. So I kept my distance. My mother despises cats, so I think some of her cat hate rubbed off on me, firmly cementing me on Team Dog for life.

For a brief period in my twenties, I lived with a family friend who had a cat, and while I didn’t love it, it wasn’t the worst thing. The cat had no respect for boundaries, leaping up on my dresser or coming into the bathroom while I was on the toilet or in the shower. But it didn’t scratch me, so I didn’t totally hate it. But those few months confirmed that I never wanted to live full time with a cat ever again. Of course, the universe had other plans.

In February 2020, I met a great woman online named Beth. We started talking, and she told me about her cats. They were her babies, and she was extremely attached to them, especially because she was recently divorced. My mind reeled at the thought of falling in love with a cat lesbian. I knew they existed, but until that point, I had only dated women with dogs. I understood dog ownership; dogs are great companions who give you unconditional love even when you don’t ask for it. I loved walking in the door and having something there to greet me with a wagging tail. Cats are too aloof for my taste. I’ve always said, “If I have to pick up an animal’s shit, I want it to come when I call it.”

Anyway, this woman swore that her cats, Gilda and Madeline (named after comedians Gilda Rader and Madeline Kahn) were the sweetest, most loving cats. I really liked her, so I sucked up my indifference to felines. I admit, they were very cute. Not as cute as their momma, but their existence wasn’t a deal breaker.

The next test was introducing them to my human son. He was six and a half at the time and had never really been around cats before. The cats weren’t so keen on kids either — Beth has a niece who was obsessed with cats and had traumatized them, so we had no idea how the introduction would go. Gilda kept a curious distance between herself and my boy, but Madeline hid in the closet and hissed like a viper whenever he opened the door to see her. All in all, it could have been worse, and over time, the girls grew to accept the small boy as part of their lives.

At the beginning of our relationship, because of the pandemic, Beth would divide her week between her apartment and mine. She’d spend three or four days with us and then return home to the cats to give them some love and attention. I knew it was wearing on her; she needed time by herself as she was still really adjusting to being on her own for the first time ever. I knew she felt guilty for leaving the cats alone for such long periods of time, and deep down I feared they resented us for taking her away. The kiddo and I were so happy to have someone else in our life after it being just the two of us for so long. And while we welcomed the change, we had no idea how much of our life would soon be changing.

Because of the pandemic, Beth’s work became unsustainable and she needed to move in with us. We all knew it would be an adjustment because I lived in a significantly smaller apartment that was barely big enough to accommodate who already lived there. But she and the cats moved in anyway, and we all knew we’d make it work no matter what.

We decided that the closet was going to be the cats’ safe space. Of course it also happened to be the only major storage spot in the apartment. Soon, my already crammed closet became the home to their food and water, a litter box and a scratching post. Every time I had to get fresh towels or clean pajamas, everything had to be moved. I constantly knocked the water over, sloshing it on top of everything. The food bits had to be swept up all the time, and ugh, the cat litter was so gross.

Those first few months were a learning curve for all of us. With significantly less space and the inability to go anywhere, my son turned feral. His face and arms were covered in scratches, because he would often forget he couldn’t get up in the cats’ faces like he could with the dog. I had to get used to living with animals who’d jump up on everything: the kitchen counter, the towel rack in the bathroom, our laptops to crash virtual first grade and any Zoom meeting they could. And the shedding, oh my god, the shedding. For animals who spent so much time grooming themselves, I was amazed how much hair they shed. There was always a layer of cat hair on everything. The dog kept his distance as best he could because the cats made it clear that they were in charge. It was like the scene in Lady and the Tramp when Lady gets chased out of her own house by those rude ass cats.

That scene actually hit a little too close to home. Unlike in the movie, our dog was kind of chased out of his home by the cats. I had gotten him only a couple weeks before I met Beth and while things worked out for a month or two after she and the cats moved in, we knew it wasn’t going to work forever. The cats would hiss at him or he would bark at them and the fighting was giving my son anxiety because he doesn’t love loud and excessive barking, which was happening a lot. Add to that being in a small space and him being a big dog who was used to a house, and we thought the best idea for everyone was to rehome him.

“You haven’t had to compromise much since I moved in,” Beth said during a particularly tense argument.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I hissed through my teeth so I didn’t wake up the sleeping boy. “I had to rehome the dog. I gave up my closet. I live with cats.”

It’s hard having new people in your space. I hadn’t lived with a partner in years. When I lived with my ex we were more like roommates who had sex. After we broke up, my son and I lived with my parents for three and a half years. I never had privacy or my own space, so when my son and I moved, I really made the space mine as much as I could. Some would say I had a hard time adapting because I grew up an only child, but it’s really because I spent my entire adult life living with someone else and never really getting my space. I was happy to finally be in a romantic relationship again, but it was a major change that I didn’t think about at first.

I had hoped that one day I’d be in a relationship again and that it would be serious enough to live together. And I understood that it meant giving up my autonomy and space. But what I wasn’t expecting was how quickly it all happened, even though it’s exactly what I wanted. I feared we had rushed things too quickly and that it was going to be a disaster and end horribly. The cats weren’t the sole problem, they were just the easiest thing to place all of my fears on. If I couldn’t live with them, maybe it meant that I couldn’t live with her. The thought of things not working out sat in the back of my mind for months, even after we were engaged. I’ll admit, sometimes they still creep up just to fuck with me even though we’re much more solid than we were then.

A little more than a year after Beth and the cats moved in, we were finally able to move into a bigger apartment. By then, we had learned how to cohabitate pretty peacefully, but I was very excited to be less cramped. The girls love having more space — it means more shit for them to get into apparently. Do I love that they jump up on the counters and chew Dorito bags? Absolutely not. But I have created a more comfy space for them on top of the refrigerator. Do I enjoy when Madeline lays all over my black sweatshirts? Definitely not, but I’ll eventually learn to put them away. Has the small boy learned not to get in the cats’ faces? Haha, of course not, but now he’s afraid enough to do it less often. Did we get another dog? We did, and the cats treat him like an annoyance that won’t leave.

It’s the middle of the night and I’m trying to roll over. I can’t because I’m pinned between Madeline and the dog on either side of the blanket. I groan as I shoo her off the bed so I get up and start the day, and when I walk over to my clothes and yet another sweatshirt is covered in cat hair. I go out to the living room where a tubby cat meows at me to feed her while I’m still wiping crust from my eyes.

They’re lucky they’re cute.

You Need Help: Can I Go Through this Heartbreak Again?

Q:

My partner of 5 years ended our relationship while we were discussing our future path and a job offer I’d received. She had been ruminating on not being able to see a future together for years and had fallen into a bad cycle of holding in doubts, letting them build into silent resentment, suddenly breaking up with me and then taking it back the next day.

I really loved our relationship. To me, there were no major value conflicts. We consistently had fun together and I felt a deep attraction and respect for her. I had a lot of faith that the issues she saw were things we would grow and work on together as long as we maintained a secure love and respect for each other. On the flip side, my partner had attachment fears and would often run away from conflict resolution by shutting down and claiming “maybe we are just too different to be together.” This brought a huge amount of pressure on me to be the one to insist we work through conflicts and to maintain the security in our relationship.

After this last breakup (the fourth) I told her that for me it would be final, but predictably she has expressed a lot of regret. She has been going to therapy and reading some relationship books to try to break some of these psychological stresses she has with attachment and communicating emotions. She has asked us to take some months apart and then to reconsider if I might give it another go. Despite my pride, I find I am unable to move on from the relationship and clinging to the idea we will get back together after a few months of personal growth. Does this make me a sitting duck to go through this heartbreak once again? Is this the inevitable point of being truly vulnerable in a relationship and loving someone unconditionally? Or am I really being treated unfairly, and I need to move on and find a love that is equally supportive and secure?

A:

Oh, friend. I’m going to say something very harsh right away, to get it over with: Your partner does not see a future with you. She has not seen a future with you for years. She has told you with words, and she has told you with actions. It is absolutely time to let her go.

Yes, I realize she’s said other things, too. I realize she’s expressed ambivalence, sadness, and regret. I realize you’ve gotten back together three times. I understand why you’re unsure. When someone expresses a lot of contradictory feelings, it can be really natural to gravitate most strongly towards the ones that you want to be true. You love her. Of course you want the truest parts to be when she regrets the break-ups, when she wants to be with you again. And if this had just happened once, I might think that instinct was right. But it hasn’t just been the once. It’s happened time and time again.

You’ve mentioned being the one who has to “insist that you work through conflicts.” I want to be very clear about something here: regardless of what your partner’s fears might be, regardless of her attachment style, regardless of what she is working on in therapy, one person absolutely cannot insist that their partner stay and work on the relationship with them. You cannot insist that you work through your problems any more than you can insist that your partner eat an ice cream-cone, or walk the dog, or take a fellowship. Her choices are her own. In order to work through problems in a relationship, both parties must be present, willing, and able to do the work required. It’s a little like you’re sitting side by side in a rowboat, each holding one oar. When one person does all the rowing, you’re only going to go in circles.

You ask if this is what it is “to love someone unconditionally.” People sometimes take the concept of unconditional love to mean “I will love you whatever you do, however you treat me,” but I think that would better be described as un-boundaried love. We can think of conditions as rules we set on someone else’s behavior, and boundaries as what we ourselves will accept. You may love this person unconditionally, but that does not mean that you should not set boundaries. What’s your line in the sand? How many times are you willing to play your part in this cycle?

Five years is a long time. When you’ve been living in a certain pattern for that long, even if it brings you distress, it can feel far more safe to stay in it than to break free. But you’ve tried to end the pattern before, and you’ve written this letter now. You have an opportunity to say no when and if she asks you to consider getting back together, to help end this cycle. You can set a boundary that sets you both free to grow separately. If you are able to let go, that will clear the space to learn new ways that you can thrive, and someday, I’m confident that you’ll meet the person (or people!) who can see a future with you. It’s time.

I wish you all the best. 💙

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

You Need Help: Is ‘Lesbian Bed Death’ Really So Bad?

feature image by Zackary Drucker for The Gender Spectrum Collection

Q:

Hey hey my dudes/dudettes/and dude-theys.

So, ever since I came out like, seven years ago, the term ‘lesbian bed death’ has been on my periphery through both interactions with my local queers and sifting through the online community.

There’s this common knowledge that if you stop having sex YOUR RELATIONSHIP IS DOOMED, and also random “facts” like people defining a successful relationship by having 2-3 partnered orgasms/sexual experiences a week.

As someone with mental illness and chronic pain who has been off and off all sorts of medication, things like this just make me feel… broken? I’m often jumping into bed for the first few weeks or months of a relationship, and then I lose interest and my desire plummets. It’s not that I’m not attracted to my partners, I just don’t feel like having sex. I’d rather cuddle or watch a movie or get a pizza.

I’m defos not ace, but I do have ADHD, so also part of me wonders if I just need a break in the repetition? I am into kink sometimes, but often I’m more bored of kink than vanilla sex. Which I do enjoy! I’m all about getting fucking railed on a nice bed/sofa/kitchen floor etc.

But there’s that thing that if you’re not having regular/frequent sex there must be something wrong with your relationship, and I just feel weird about that. My current partner and I are both on anti-depressants, and although we find other ways to be intimate and are open to sex, we’re just not bothered mostly. Does this mean something’s wrong?

Plz halp.

–Very confused skaterboi xoxo

A:

Hi Skaterboi! I have great news for you: nothing is wrong with you, and nothing is wrong with what you’re describing! I hear you on the confusion and the feeling broken, though. A lot of misconceptions and assumptions get passed around our community, and one of them is the impression that everybody either is or wants to be having lots and lots of sex, all the time, forever and ever, amen.

The fact is, sex is different for every couple (and throuple, and polycule), and it also evolves over time within those relationships. I think that arc you describe, a ‘honeymoon phase’ followed by a period of increased interest in less sexual types of intimacy and a decreased interest in sex, isn’t unusual at all. It’s one I hear sometimes from friends who are very happy in their relationships, and one I’ve experienced myself.

It’s really good news that you and your partner are feeling well-matched at the moment, desire-wise. Where couples can sometimes run into trouble, or need to assess, are when their respective levels of sexual desire don’t match up.

If you were uncomfortable with your lack of desire because of reasons within your relationship, I’d want to unpack some things around that. If you missed feeling more sexual desire, you could ask your doctor about alternate anti-depressants. If feeling bored with sex was frustrating, you could seek out some ways to make it feel new and interesting. But it sounds to me like the only things truly worrying you are the external messages you’ve gotten around what a sex life is supposed to look like. Our wider culture demonizes sex, and there is natural pushback to that in the queer community. Because of its name, the existence of the sex positivity movement can sometimes make us feel like we should be having more sex. But the core of that movement is really about removing shame from sex and from sexual desires. It follows that you should also feel free to remove shame from those times when you lack desire. I want to give you permission to dismiss your worries about what it seems like your sex life “should” be.

Sex is a lot of things. It’s intimacy, it’s touch, it’s physical exertion. It can be a powerful way to show love and affection; it can also simply be a fun way to pass a long Tuesday in May, like rollerblading or taking up watercolors. And there are many things that sex is NOT: it’s never mandatory, it’s not ethically or romantically superior to not having sex, and it is absolutely not the only way to share intimacy with a partner.

Within your relationship, you and your partner are the only ones who get to decide what activities and intimacies are meaningful to you both. You and your partner are the only ones who can know when “not being bothered” to have sex is an indication that something might be wrong, or a nice token of your comfort with one another. It sounds to me like right now, it’s the latter!

I’m glad that you know yourself well enough to know what you want, and what you don’t. That’s very healthy — it’s basically the opposite of being “broken!” I hope that the future holds just as much getting railed on the kitchen floor as you and your partner desire, and also just as many cuddles in front of the tv at the end of a long day. 💙

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.