Falling For My Best Friend: One Woman’s Introduction to Queer Love
By Freya Paulucci
When I arrived at sixth form at 16, there was almost no doubt in my mind that I was straight. Growing up, I thought I was attracted to boys (well, a boy – a sole unrequited crush in my teen years). Although I spent most of my time around women, and I perhaps entertained the notion of fancying a girl, I never really gave it much thought until I met Eliza.
Our friendship blossomed. We bonded over a shared love of binge drinking, Natalie Cassidy, and rap music. By her 18th birthday party, we were extremely close. The day after the celebrations, recovering from the night before, I watched her cuddle up on the sofa with her boyfriend, surprised when I felt pangs of envy. Was I jealous? I was almost 17 and had never had a boyfriend of my own. This fact was how I initially explained my emotional reaction to seeing Eliza with hers. In reality, like many young queer women before me, I was falling in love with my best friend.
Growing up and navigating your sexuality as a young queer woman can be complicated. Learning to accept yourself and to understand your desires in an environment that is unsupportive and often unsafe is just one of the challenges faced by young LGBT+ women. In the UK alone, 45% of LGBT+ pupils are bullied for being LGBT+ in school. It is common for young queer women to explain away their romantic desire towards other women as ‘girl crushes’ to avoid dealing with difficult situations and emotions: this is the route that I took.
Yet, looking back on my experience, I was ridiculously attracted to Eliza. I wanted to spend all of my time with her. When we weren’t together, I was thinking about her. There were times when it was agony – we would kiss when drunk, and then the next day I would be aching to do it again now that we were sober. I craved Eliza’s attention and affection like a drug; she had me hooked. But despite all these signs, all these thoughts, feelings, and desires, I barely even admitted to myself that I was queer.
To an outsider it might have been painfully obvious, but I was wrestling with a lot of internal and external homophobia. Facing that first crush on Eliza taught me a great deal about what to expect from future queer relationships. The trials and tribulations of sex and dating in your late teens are not exclusive to queer people, but there is no denying that there are a unique set of barriers and issues that come with dating members of the same sex.
One of the trickiest things can be figuring out whether a woman is actually queer. Even well into my 20s, this remains a problem. At school, I took it for granted that everyone was straight because no one had come out. In hindsight, I understand why people didn’t. According to a National LGBT+ survey carried out in 2018, 21% of respondents had their identity disclosed by a teacher or student without their permission, and 19% experienced verbal harassment. Furthermore, lesbian, gay, and bisexual pupils were twice as likely to be bullied as heterosexual pupils. The figures for trans students are even higher.
In school, an unwelcoming environment for LGBT+ students, it is no surprise that queer relationships do not flourish. In my personal circumstances, there was no question that I would stay in the closet. As strong as my feelings were for another woman, I lacked the confidence to have an open conversation about my feelings for fear of being outed or rejected by Eliza. Coming out at school felt like it would mean saying goodbye to any social life.
In a similar vein, to enter into a relationship with someone of the same sex usually entails a choice between coming out to everyone in your life – not just your school peers – or moving forward with your feelings in secret. For me, the period in which I fell for Eliza was one marked by shame and the fear that no one in my life would accept me. It kept me awake at night, thinking that once I came out people would always treat me differently. When I did finally come out to my family at 22, I was emotionally ready to do so. At 17, I was not. If I had grown up in an environment that was tolerant of and sensitive to LGBT+ issues, perhaps I would have felt empowered to tell my truth to people earlier.
An awareness of LGBT+ issues is an area where schools are failing. In the UK, 54% of 16 to 17-year-olds reported that neither sexual orientation nor gender identities were mentioned in any lessons, assemblies, or workshops, and only 1 in 5 LGBT+ pupils have been taught about safe sex in relation to LGBT+ relationships. During my secondary school years in the late noughties, we received very few sex and relationships education classes and references to LGBT+ identities were made only in relation to the prevalence of HIV within the gay community. Whilst education around sexual health and STIs is incredibly important, the stigmatisation of the LGBT+ community in these classes only contributes to students further internalising or externalising their homophobia. Schools have a responsibility to teach their students about queer relationships in order to combat homophobia and to empower young queer people to be themselves openly and authentically without fear of bullying and harassment.
While there are many issues shared by members of the LGBT+ community, a problem that queer women in particular are vulnerable to is harassment from heterosexual men who sexualise queer women’s displays of affection toward one another. I grew up in a small town in the south of England that had no queer community or queer-specific venues, spaces that are crucial for young queer people to feel safe when socialising. On nights out, Eliza and I were subjected to endless harassment from men asking to ‘join in’. This is a problem that has continued through my adult life when dating women and men are rarely satisfied with rejection.
In light of this, it’s sadly no surprise that bisexual women are twice as likely to be victims of abuse as straight women. This type of harassment is particularly nefarious because not only does it serve to make queer women feel unsafe in public spaces, it also attempts to devalue and reduce our love to something sexual for men to enjoy. In truth, the incessant comments from men left me questioning the authenticity of my feelings towards Eliza, and I never told her how I felt. Years later, when she and I finally discussed this period of our lives openly, we discovered that we’d both been feeling the same way. But we were both too afraid of rejection from the other and everyone around us at the time to admit this.
Your first love teaches you about life, lust, desire, and heartache. For queer people, falling in love for the first time can also be a rude awakening to how differently queer people experience the world. The barriers you face as a young queer woman become less obstructive as you grow, learn, and build the confidence to fight against them. But many young queer women must learn to do this alone, having been failed by the institutions that should be educating them about issues that impact their lives. Real, societal change will never come until all young people are taught about all kinds of healthy relationships – until young people are shown that heterosexual and queer relationships are equally valid and deserve equal respect.