bell hooks taught us that love is a verb, but when is it too soon to call something “love” if lesbian relationships are notorious for growing faster than Renesmee?
The jury is out on London Girl (the jury being: people I’ve kissed who are now my friends). But from my experience, here is an incomplete list of things that are easy to mistake for “love” as a lesbian:
- Helping assemble furniture
- Helping move apartments
- Buying you a Meredith Marks branded caviar spoon
- That floating feeling where everything is brighter and somehow minor inconveniences don’t matter because you feel a sense of hope about the world in spite of It All
- The way they smell
- Crying so much in public you get a free smoothie from the Juice Press by your DBT group
- A single, sustained look exchanged where you know exactly what the other is thinking
- Grabbing your wrist with a sense of purpose
Even though most of these things are verbs, I’m pretty sure now that they are not love. I always joke that lesbian time is like dog years. One moment can stretch to eternal when you’re savoring every second of them. Or, at least, the thought of them.
Last June, I was seeing another girl, a Summer Girl, whose bed I was laying in at 3 am, very drunk, holding her hand, again crying (I’m a Pisces rising, okay?), because I’d just seen my ex with a new girlfriend who kind of looked like me at the Dyke March, an ex who told me a few months prior she “needed to be alone for a while.” Summer Girl was trying to make me feel better by saying I’d loved Winter Girl. I said No, it was impossible to love someone I’d only dated for a short amount of time. But Summer Girl insisted. If you’re still following this, you’re gay.
Where it felt melodramatic to assign the word “love” to this person, it also felt fair to attribute plain heartache to love lost. I didn’t love Winter Girl. But after Summer Girl left, I looked at a picture of us on my phone and realized it might be the happiest I’ve ever looked. Being that happy makes you look substantially hotter in an untraceable way. Next time I’m taking a solo shot.