The hard truth about lesbian relationships

Being a lesbian is more than having a built-in best friend to share clothes and makeup with. 

Whenever I tell straight women I’m a lesbian, they usually say I’m lucky. They tell me they wish they could date women, too. This has always felt weird to me.

I spent years hating that part of myself, thinking I would never be truly happy without a man. Now, straight girls are telling me they wish they were in my place? 

The truth is, I don’t really think they want to be lesbians. They like the idea of being a lesbian. Women long for relationships in which they feel equal to their partners. 

“People have this assumption that same sex relationships don’t have power differentials and things like domestic violence, that’s not true,” says Bipasha Baruah, the Western University research chair in the department of gender, sexuality and women’s studies. 

“There’s this perception that a relationship between two men or two women might be on a more even playing field in terms of power,” she says. 

What bothers me is that these same women who claim they want to be lesbians still imagine our relationships as pseudo-platonic partnerships, stripped of lust and romance. Newsflash: lesbians have sex. 

Meanwhile, heterosexual men can’t seem to stop thinking about lesbian sex. They only see lesbians as the hard-to-get slut in their Pornhub fantasy. 

Lesbian women are women they can’t have, and they feel the need to dominate those women. 

I once rejected a guy at a party by telling him I had a girlfriend. He immediately started going on about how hot that was and asked if he could watch us make-out. 

I felt absolutely disgusted. 

That isn’t a unique experience. I know so many other lesbians who’ve had similar interactions or been subjected to invasive questions about their sex lives. 

Some guy asked my girlfriend if she preferred having sex with a strap-on or scissoring. She was at a library, and they had just met. 

If lesbians won’t include men, they’re expected to perform for them.

This objectification may shape how lesbians approach sex within their relationships, says Mathew Gagné, the acting program coordinator for the gender and women’s studies department at Dalhousie University.

“It’s entirely possible that queer women … focus their relationships on romance and intimacy as opposed to sex and lust,” he says. “It’s not because they don’t experience those aspects, but because when those aspects of female sexuality enter the public sphere, they become objectified.”

Other queer women share similar experiences, but lesbians are at a distinct disadvantage: men aren’t in the equation. Without male involvement, lesbians don’t have the option to fit into the mould of heteronormative society.

If being a lesbian isn’t just about sharing makeup or scissoring, then what does it truly mean to be a lesbian? It’s more than just being attracted to women. It’s about defying patriarchal expectations of what women should do. In a world where men are constantly in the spotlight, being a lesbian is an act of resistance.