Popagandhi

Sometimes I wonder if everything I say eventually works out the opposite, in a more dramatic fashion than for most people anyway:

When I was 12, they had to force me into a girls’ school ââ�¬â�� I said then, “I don’t want to be lesbian!”

When I was 14, I heard my classmate was snogging a girl in the toilet, and seriously thought, “How does that work?” (While mucking around with enough boys to form a UN General Assembly)

When I was 16, younger girls wrote letters to me like, “Dear House Captain, you run so fast/ you’re so pretty/ I love your voice when you debate/ I think I love you”. I’d say to my friends, “My goodness, thankfully I’m straight, so I’ll never have to be so madly in love with an older girl.. or any girl”..

When I was 17, the resident lesbian couple in the level kept fighting, and patching up, every half an hour. “I hate her! I love her so much!” Since what I had said to that was, “Why must lesbians be so drama? Can’t they make up their minds if they want each other or not?” Obviously, I should have learned to shut up by then.

I’m a peace-loving person, and I always have been ââ�¬â�� that could be because Librans supposedly hate violence, love peace, and should consider careers in mediation or diplomacy. Few of my friends have ever seen me get angry; I don’t. I’ve never fallen out with a friend, because everything is “okie dokie” to me (I was always described as an ‘indifferent’ child), agitated only by abstract things like injustice and oppression. When I used to have boyfriends, the only times we quarreled was whenever I did something irredeemably wrong (which was, all the time). They could have said, “honey I just kissed another girl”, and I would have said, “Oh.” Or “honey, I don’t think this is going to work anymore”, and I would have said, “Oh.”

Now, it doesn’t take anything at all, to trigger an overblown response of the “I could kill now” variety.

I never knew what it was like to “fight”, or make up, until I started seeing women, and have never stopped since. Most of my still-straight friends like to say “You know, I really really like women, maybe even in that way, but I think girls will drive me insane.. does it all have to be so complex?” And it’s true ââ�¬â�� it is complex. You could get rocket science and never figure out a woman. Nothing is easy: to even hold her hands, there are a million different factors to think of: if people are looking, if she’s going to freak out, if she’s gay enough for that, if she’s over her ex, if her ex is going to kill you in the next five minutes… what more when negotiating the complexities of a relationship?

I watch my straight male friends struggle with their girlfriends, trying to make sense of it, and feel almost sorry for myself, because: think of everything you hate about women in the collective (fickle, indecisive, hyper sensitive, emotional), multiply that by 10 to be applicable to the woman you’re seeing, then multiply that by two, to factor in yourself as well ââ�¬â�� two periods, two different times for PMS, two sets of everything.. and that is, in effect, what we go through day after day, girlfriend after girlfriend, lover after lover. Where every monosyllabic answer is loaded, there are two built-in state of the art lie-detecting machines, when everything means something else, every “you’re in trouble look” translates to 45 minutes fighting in a toilet, almost always crying.

It’s maniacal, but why does it have to be so amazing as well?

When I was 18, I once commented to a friend, “I hope I never have to date an artist or musician. Writer + artist = too much artistic competition, too much pride, too much of emo“. No prizes for guessing what I’m kicking myself for now.