you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]HighPlainsDrifter 12 insightful - 1 fun12 insightful - 0 fun13 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Wow, that list is wild. Like some of it was valid to my experience but mostly that list is nutso.

I came out when I was 28 but I had known I was a lesbian since I was young, I did a lot to try and force myself to be bisexual. I dated men who were objectively great men and good people and I thought if I just found one that was good enough I would suddenly be able to enjoy sex with men, rather than having to be incredibly fucked up to do it. So for me it's not a matter of "figuring out" but "accepting" and those two things are very different.

When I looked up "signs of being a lesbian" it wasn't because I actually wondered, it was to see if maybe I could find a list that didn't have anything I felt on it, if one thing didn't match how I felt I thought "see, gotta be bisexual". I've been gay for as long as I have been alive I just felt like if I tried hard enough I could ignore it and not have to deal with the implications of what that meant for my life. Honestly my parents and my family didn't even care, besides one cousin who is racist and homophobic and who still supports me and has never said a bad word about me or my partner, no one in my family was even slightly fazed when I came out. "Oh, you're gay, ok, pass the peas." so I don't even know what pushed me so hard to deny who I was and what I wanted, probably a lot of internalized worth issues wrapped around the idea that women's value is correlated to male interest/opinion. I also had a lot of internalized "all women are bisexual" and thought that since that was "obviously" true and had research behind it, I would have to find my perfect male fit eventually.

So yeah some of that list is valid in action but the motivation is all wrong. The motivation for nearly every late bloomer I have ever talked to has either been safety or denial of a truth that is bone deep.