Secret love

[liv]

atreic made a great comment on my post about Valentine's Day angst: it's not ... a day about traditional relationships celebrating themselves openly ... it's a day about secret love making secret hints.

My first instinct is to be scared of secret hints. I like direct communication, I'm afraid of horrible misunderstandings and even though it's really a very unlikely sort of danger to worry about, Far from the madding crowd still haunts me. There's also the issue of lots of teenage experiences where people sent tokens of affection (which were really badges of coolness) and I was among the despised group who didn't receive anything because I wasn't popular. I didn't want the valentines for their own sake, I wanted not to be laughed at for not getting any.

That said, I totally love atreic's definition of Valentine's Day:

It celebrates the fact that sometimes love isn't easy and people pine and don't know how to say things and that sometimes people are much fonder of you than you know they are.

So, I invite you to talk about crushes and pining and secret love and people you shouldn't have feelings for. Comment anonymously or identify yourself, talk about current situations or past experiences, anything goes.

When I was, oh, 15 or 16 or so, I experienced a funny feeling when I was around a good friend of mine. At the time I thought of it as like being calm and excited at the same time. Sometimes I had dreams in which we were both naked and we grappled or rolled down grassy hills together or tasted eachother's skin. I had no idea what to make of this, just absolutely no concept that it could be called attraction, because it didn't match what I'd read about what attraction feels like, and the idea of being attracted to another girl didn't have a clear referent for me. At some point she tried to come out to me, and I blurted out something of my confusion about sexuality and all that stuff in a way that made it seem like I was going to react by being homophobic, so we never really completed that conversation. In some ways it's probably a good thing I didn't articulate anything specific, even to myself, because the context I was in, I would have had a really hard time dealing with the idea that I might not be straight.

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By the time I was in Sixth Form I was aware of the Kinsey report, and no, it's not great by modern standards, but at least I had a concept in my mind that lots of people experience same-sex attraction even if they don't fit a narrow, naive definition of "gay". Another friend tried to come out to me, and I shared my new-found knowledge about sexual orientation being a spectrum and again was fairly unhelpful. I'd also been reading a lot of Simone de Beauvoir who was overtly bisexual and talked about her attraction to and relationships with women. I was hopelessly in love with her, much as one might have a crush on a fictional character (she'd died when I was 7, and anyway I was in love with the persona she presented of herself when she had been my age in the 1920s.) I didn't really add any of these things up to thinking of myself as having a sexual orientation towards women.

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The first time I saw two women kissing I was, oh, nearly 20? I thought very hard about my reaction to seeing that, and identified that one component of it was perhaps a hint of jealousy. This thing I felt for the first non-straight person I knowingly met, it perhaps wasn't just a schoolgirl crush on an older, much more worldly and brilliant woman (though I've always been somewhat prone to those in a fairly innocent way), there was something of actual attraction in there too. But also, it was almost the first time I consciously understood that gay was something that it was possible to be, it meant being attracted and falling in love and having a partner and all that stuff, not only being a pariah and a weirdo who hoped people wouldn't hate you too much.

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Early in 1999 I met the love of my life at a J-soc event. I fell in love at first sight, coup de foudre, just at the instant she smiled vaguely in my direction from across the room. It was so intense that I couldn't possibly have denied my feelings. In fact I spent a lot of time angsting not about the fact that I was possibly bi (I was in a relationship with a man at the time so I knew I wasn't purely lesbian), but about doing something so irrational as falling deeply in love with a total stranger. I knew nothing about her, I saw no possible chance of a relationship ever developing, I assumed she was probably straight just because most people are, and yet there I was, utterly consumed with the intensity of feeling I had for this essentially random person. But it probably took my falling in love that hard to give me enough of a metaphorical kick to add together all the clues and work out I was in fact bi.

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It's hard to think I was that ignorant, back in the 90s. Recently I was chatting to a friend who is dealing with her 14-year-old step-daughter coming out as bi. And partly it was a jolt to think that my peers have teenaged step-daughters, but more than that I just couldn't quite get my head round being 14 and not only knowing for yourself that you're definitely bi, but being able to tell your parents about it. At 14, I don't think I knew the word bisexual and lesbian was pretty much a synonym for weird and uncool and maybe a little bit (whisper it) perverted. Nowadays 14-year-olds have the internet, including decidedly-not-straight teen subcultures such as Tumblr and media fandom. And more than that, they have professionally published media, books and films and TV shows with canonically, overtly gay characters which are not Problem Stories about how terrible it is to be gay. And they can watch or read the ordinary mainstream news and follow discussions about the exact legal status of same-sex marriage. I don't imagine that being 14 and not-straight in 2013 is a bed of roses, not at all, but it seems to me like there are a lot fewer 14-year-olds nowadays who are in the position of not even knowing that not straight is possible.

Happy day of not knowing how to talk about your feelings, or having unruly ones.

Comments

[liv]

I was really, really lucky in my early encounters with religion. I had a couple of out rabbis who had a big influence on both my own education and the community where I grew up (one of them founded Beit Klal Yisrael which was a gay synagogue in the 90s and is now a kind of radical post-modernist genderfuck synagogue). And the very clear message of my religious context was that you treat people with respect no matter what you might feel about scriptural prohibitions on sexual activity.

I'm not very good at recreational flirting, I must admit. The things that make me bad at sincere flirting mean I don't even know where to start with low-stakes flirting with friends. And I have a terrible lesbian sheep problem when I am actually trying to initiate something; I tend to fall for shy and socially awkward and unconfident people, and both of us assume the other couldn't possibly be interested and argh.

I can definitely relate to the whole tangle of stuff that means things are not likely to Happen. I've always been complicated to date, I'm not great at romantic relationships, I have a life-consuming job / career. And now I'm, y'know, married, so.

Thanks for commenting, I really like your thoughts.