Degrees of Friendship

For my lesbian timeline series I have been mapping out a rough timeline. As part of the process I have a list of all the girls along the way. I sort of have them categorized by degrees of friendship in my mind. Here is my personal friendship scale.

The scale starts at completely platonic friendship. This includes reasonable time spent together, normal friend activities, no sexual tension, and no sexual or romantic contact.

The next step is a middle ground that I call a 'homance'. You might have heard the term 'bromance' before. Well this is the female equalivent. The defining characteristic is the ammount of time spent together (every waking moment) and the type of activities enjoyed (dinner and a movie). This relationship is not romantic or sexual but takes as much time and energy as a relationship.

The third type of friendship, the passionate friendship, I had never really heard of until I read the book Same Sex in the City. According to the book, a passionate friendship is a "friendship that doesn't allow itself (due to inhibition/lack of recognition/lack of language/social sanction) to develop a 'proper' relationship." I was glad to have words to describe this mess of a friendship. Key indicators include sexual tension, a serious crush held by one or both parties, flirtation and inuendo without acknowledgement, and a near relationship type friendship (without the sex). These often happen when straight girls are involved and often end in heartache, yearning, and drama.

The end if this scale is of course an actual romantic relationship that includes sex.

I know that there are lots of other types of friendships and I am by no means trying to make any iron clad definitions, but I just thought I'd give you a little background of my classifications so that when I say "I had a total homance with D," it makes sense.

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Lesbifriends

I want more gay friends...more specifically more lesbian friends. No offense but I know pleanty of gay boys and while they can be fun that's not what I want right now.

I guess jumping right into my relationship with Kara sort of led me away from trying to male friends with other lesbians when I was first coming out. I was pretty consumed in her and wasn't really interested in anything else, especially tring to meet other lesbians.


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CLGB friend date

Saturday night I have a friend date with "cute little gay boy" (mentioned before in the post about St. Louis Pride). I will reffering to him as CLGB.

I'm about 98% convinced that this boy (age 18) is gay. I won't go into all the examples but no one is going to be very surprised when he finally comes out. The problem is that he's just not quite even there yet...I'm not even sure if he knows that he'd gay. The second problem is that he is still in high school and his family is very Catholic.

Anyways, he works with my girlfriend and he got into an argument with her. She suggested that some girl he knows might be gay. He said no. She suggested that maybe she was gay but didn't really know it yet, she's still in high school. He argued that Kara knew in high school. Kara just laughed and said not everyone knows in high school and asked if he ever met me, lol.

Anyways shortly after that he said we need to go out on Saturday night. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with this kid...

What if he comes out to me? That would make my life better...and make me feel very important...

That's all.
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Sometimes I just feel...

...really frustrated. Like everyone is complaining about all this stupid stuff that they aren't even trying to fix.

With one specific person, let's call her P, I feel like I've spent about a bazillion hours giving her advice about her problems and her life and she never does anything...she just complains and whines and let's her life happen.

Frustration!
/rant

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Changing friendships

My friend Jennifer posted a lengthy post on her blog about me and how our friendship has changed since I came out. Quote from her post...

I feel like.. I am sad that she is a lesbian, kind of. I love you Dazzle. I am sad because.. I feel like you are different now. You have a whole lot of different thoughts and you're part of a different community and you talk about it and I feel like I don't really have a lot of interest and you are gay.. So you are in on all the gay people things. Like you're a stereotypical gay person now or you're trying to be and it's weird because thats not you as I know you? Hmm. It is strange to me because.. I know you and you're pretty legit awesome and I don't feel like you should have to struggle to fit in with that community.. Or feel less about yourself because you're not just like them? (I don't know, that's just the sense I get.) You should be who you are. You were the cosmo reading, sex loving chick that's always rocking the amazing hair. You can still be that girl while also being the starbucks working, lesbian in a long-term relationship who is afraid of graduating from college.

It's really weird hearing all of those things from her. I think part of it is that we didn't talk very much between the May and December, and during that time I changed a lot and she sort of missed it.

A lot of our friendship involved talking about sex (with men). That's sort of how it started. When I was dating men, I talked a lot about sex with them. I am a very sexual person and I just couldn't understand why I didn't enjoy it more...so I overcompensated and talked about sex all the time. I could probably write a book about sex and relationships with men. Maybe that's really weird. I'm not sure.

So now I think she feels like we have less to talk about. To an extent that's true. She doesn't have much interest or need to know about lesbian sex. It's not really the kind of sex she has so she can't really file it away into her sex info/advice folder. But I still know everything I used to know about having sex with men. I can still give really solid advice about relationships. I'm still available for all of those conversations we had before.

Also I think there are a couple of things that she just doesn't really understand. Frankly, I think it's a big McWaste of time to read Cosmopolitan if you aren't having sex with men. The whole magazine is 50,000 different ways to please his penis. Which doesn't really apply so much to my life...

Idk. I am still me. I'm still the same. But also I'm different.

I feel like coming out is like High School...or at least a little like it. In high school, you sort of define who you are, who you want to be, what's important to you. You do a lot of dreaming and planning and hoping. You find role models and try to emulate them. And that's kind of how coming out feels to me. Like I'm trying to figure out all over again who I am and who I want to be. My whole self perception just keeps changing and well...it's a process.

I guess I just never really expected my friendships to change, but if the things I do and think about change so much, then that's bound to carry over into everything else, including friendships.

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