Tonight, a friend invited me to her house for dinner, and I went, since I often go to this friend's house for dinner. She wanted me to meet a visiting friend of hers, which is also fairly usual. But the conversation was academic -- my friend and her husband and the visitor are all in the same field, all PhDs -- and I couldn't figure out how to get into the conversation intelligently; they talked about people in their field and projects on which they are working, and I felt painfully young, under-educated, out of my league. And then the visitor turned to me and said, "So I do have some lesbians in Boulder you should meet," and I knew. I had been invited because I am lesbian and so is this visiting friend, and everyone hoped she would be able to introduce me to other lesbians.
Straight people don't experience this. Can you imagine? "Hey! You should come over for dinner tonight! You and Stanley are both straight, he's a man, you're a woman!" To be fair, people do set friends up like this, but they do not invite them over primarily because they are straight. Of course, the world contains a higher percentage of straight people and it's more difficult to find other lesbians, so it does make some sense to introduce them to each other. My friend Lynn: "I'll have to introduce you to _______; she's lesbian, too."
However, this isn't how people fall for each other. Romance doesn't stem from the fact that we're both wearing purple, or that we are the same age and have the same three hobbies on a dating website. The world is more complicated than that. It's nice to meet you, but just because we're both attracted to women does not mean we're compatible.
I'm not being fair. My friends are trying to help. But I cried the entire way home (silently, so my daughter in the backseat didn't feel alarmed). I'm not ready, and if I were, I wouldn't proceed in this way. My friend T___ worried aloud last weekend that I'm searching for "everything to happen like it does in the movies". So? My story with A______ is better than any book or movie I've read or seen; why shouldn't I hold everything else to that standard?
Until then, I just want to make friends who have real commonalities with me: hiking, literature, travel, cooking. Now I've just made my blog sound like a post on a dating website. Time to go to bed.
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