Below is an excerpt on old school style dating, or how we’ve dated up to this point as lesbians, from my book. I use it as a starting point in my book about a different way to date as women. Enjoy! KB
I began my career as a teacher, and during one conference workshop I attended on science education, I heard something profound that has stuck with me over the past 17 years. The facilitator was discussing the effects of increased technology in science and education. I don’t remember the session or the facilitator, but I do remember his (paraphrased) words:
As advances in technology increases, so does our need to create compassionate citizens. As technology allows us to do more damage than ever before, we need a society that is thoughtful and compassionate more than ever before. In other words, as technology increases the capacity in which we can hurt each other, so does the importance of teaching our children empathy, compassion, and responsibility in order to make the best decisions about how to use the technology.
Dating in the digital age is not all that different. As social media, and electronic devices increase as primary ways of connecting, it becomes even more important that we develop our ability to truly connect. For example, as we text message and use Facebook more when dating, it becomes increasingly important to be skilled in the art of connection – as we have to get beyond the technology. When it comes to dating and relationships, at the end of the day, all that matters is how tuned in we are – to our own needs, to what’s happening in the present moment, to who other people are, to their needs, and to the ways we interact.
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I am standing in a soppy puddle along the I-15 roadside, holding my bike, rain pouring all around me. I have a 7 hour road trip in front of me and already, before even exiting San Diego County, my bike rack, along with my attached bike, has slipped off the trunk of my car. Twice. And this is how I find myself one Saturday morning, having run a sloshy 14 miles before departing on said trip, – standing in the pouring rain, exhausted and feeling like a drowned rat. Zapped of any remaining upper body strength after a failed attempt to stuff my bike into my Civic backseat, I stand in the rain a moment, considering turning back and going straight home. I make one last heave of the back tire, shoving it fully into the back seat. I tilt the back wheel up and push the door shut. Seeing the light on, I realize that the door is still not fully closed. I stand, hands on my hips. It rains. I shift my weight back and forth between my feet, weighing the risk of driving 7 hours in the rain with the back door not fully shut. And so, lacking the appropriate butch road trip gear, I take off my scarf and weave it through the door handle, knotting it to the ceiling handle. The metaphor of a door neither open nor closed doesn’t escape my notice.
Hours later, as I calm down in a cozy, warm bed, it occurs to me that the past few months of dating have felt much like my soggy, messy, desperate attempt to close the door: with me wildly unprepared, tired beyond reason, and highly motivated to move forward and get on with it.
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One of the reasons the word dating can bring up feelings of dread, fear, annoyance, hopelessness, fear, and discouragement is because in what I somewhat jokingly refer to as old school style dating, generally the focus is on the other person. Focusing on someone else – finding someone, finding the right someone, places the control of our lives outside of ourselves. We ask ourselves questions like: is she out there? The one for me? The one without personality disorders or addictions? The focus is entirely on the girl we want to believe is out there somewhere. The most important shift in dating a different way is changing the focus away from outside ourselves and back to us. It’s the difference between thinking: I want my next girlfriend to be x, y, z, and thinking, I want to be my most authentic self in my next relationship and that means x, y, z. In future blogs, I’ll address more about figuring out the x,y, and z when it comes to our authentic selves. For now, I examine some reasons why we remain amateur daters in our community.
Practice
The old joke in the lesbian community is that when you ask a lesbian what she brings to a second date, her answer is bound to be, “A U-Haul”. Humor aside, while this stereotype may shine a light on the tendency we girls have on moving fast into playing house when in relationships, it also reveals one of the possible reasons we have challenges in dating – we simply don’t have much practice at it. Over and over I have heard similar complaints, “I’ve never been out on a date!” or “I have never asked a girl out on a date.” If this is true, how is it that we have had plenty of long-term relationships without dating? Women share their stories and they overlap in one common theme – I would meet a girl, go out with her, sleep with her, and just never stop hanging out. It has been described to me that this process is sort of like an unconscious, sliding from friends to sleeping together, or strangers to sleeping together, process whereby we remain largely amateur daters.
Gender socialization
Another possible reason for remaining amateur daters is that that we’re socialized to wait to be hit on. From the moment we are born, the gender messages we receive from the media, our families, social contacts, teachers, etc. tell us that we are valued as women for our youth, beauty, and submissiveness. Even as we come into our own as strong, smart, independent women, the messages have ingrained themselves in our being, making it even more challenging to make the first move to ask a woman out. In a way, as lesbians, hitting on another woman goes against everything we have been socialized to believe.
Adolescent, heterosexual model
We learn about dating long before middle school – through television shows, movies, educational institutions, church, etc. Yet it is in middle school that we often begin to institutionalize dating into our being. Herein lies the problem – we adhere to adolescent love principles well into adulthood. And because most of us didn’t grow up with same sex models of dating, we simply apply the middle school, or adolescent, rules of dating to adulthood. Then later we come out and apply the same adolescent, heterosexual dating principles to lesbian dating. Some common adolescent dating principles are:
- let the boy make the first move
- your boyfriend is more important than your friends
- be a good girl and don’t have sexual experiences
- feel shame if you do
- don’t let the boy know you like him – stand from a distance
If you think about it, you can change the pronoun here and many of these principles apply to much of our lesbian dating lives in the old school style of dating model.
Homophobia
If you’re over a certain age, chances are most of your dating life had to happen behind closed doors, in secrecy out of fear of getting fired, shunned from your family, or experiencing homophobic violence. One of my primary issues with inequity in general is that until you know what it feels like to be at risk of losing your job, getting kicked out of your house, being bullied, denied basic rights, or be the victim of hate violence, then you don’t really know what it’s like to be us. The secrecy, the fear of haters or repercussions, and the general shame of being “the other” can all contribute to a more passive stance when it comes to dating.
How did I end up here?
When we find ourselves in the dating pool, it’s usually either because of a breakup or a long period of time to ourselves following a breakup. Dating, then can come with this sense of failure at relationships, or dread about being single again at [insert any age over 30 here]. Either way, one trip with a friend out to the bar, which we rarely enjoy anyway, can leave us feeling…discouraged. Most of us describe ourselves as serial monogamists. We like being in relationships. We do better in relationships. We don’t know how to date. We’ve never dated. We’ve never hit on a woman. We’ve never been hit on. Some version of this-is-the-most-uncomfortable-position-I’ve-ever-been-in-in-my-life – appears and here we are. We have a choice. Either we can continue to feel sorry for ourselves, wondering how our relationship lives unwound themselves into facing the lesbian dating trenches once again. Or, we can regroup, recognize that we are survivors, we are healthy, we learned from our past relationships, we are capable of connection and love and intimacy and amazing sex, and ultimately, that it’s worth the risk.
I love that. I’m in love with an older woman she means the world to me how do I tell her