Yes, of course I can see that there are red flags popping up everywhere, but if I ignore them they will go away. Won't they?
Sex, love and relationships are natural human behaviours and lesbians want someone to love and we want to be loved back. Statistically (unofficially) the life span of a lesbian relationship is between 2 to 5 years; so many of us will either be single for a lot of our adult life or we end up having several relationships that don’t last.
Unless, of course we get lucky enough to find 'the one' and we become that couple, the one that’s together for 40 years, the couple that are the gage that all lesbian relationships aspire to be.
Every event, every meet-up, every karaoke night we go to is fuelled by the hope that she will show up. When it happens and we meet someone we are attracted to and connect with, we skip the next 20 steps (the ones that involve truly getting to know someone, the good, the bad and the ugly and not just the sexual intimacy bit).
By the end of the 2nd week, the relationship is Facebook official and at the end of the first month we are talking of moving in together.
Throughout it all, we deliberately ignore the red flags slapping us in the face.
Here’s some of the more drastic (and not so drastic) red flags that we have all ignored at some point (we’ve all been there).
· When you first meet, she has no place to live and she’s sofa surfing
· She’s between jobs and has been for the last five years
· Her last girlfriend has a restraining order against her
· She always is the one to do the dumping or is the one that keeps getting dumped
· On nights out she acts like a Rottweiler if anyone approaches you
· She doesn’t disclose any STDs yet you find yourself at the local sex clinic
· She tells you that her last girlfriend accused her of stalking, totally unjustified, of course
· Not responding to her text within 2 minutes of receiving it will send her into a total meltdown
· She says she’s always busy with something else
· She keeps the relationship separate from her 'real' life
And as we have all found out, those sweet little lies we tell ourselves don’t make the red flags go away. All we are doing is rearranging them like the deck chairs on the Titanic before the disaster hits.
And we learn and we learn...
We learn that we need to put boundaries in place to protect our hearts from being broken.
We learn that kisses are not a binding emotional contract.
We learn that sometimes all the pain she has caused us was worth it - because for a short while the world made sense.