After hanging out with a woman from OkCupid last night, I thought to put together a blog about the evolution of my relationship with women. I grew up predominantly with my mother and my sister. I have always been close with my mom, but my sister and I are pretty different. We fought sometimes when I was younger, but as we grew into adults, we got along much better. I think that was partly because we no longer lived together and drove each other crazy. From Kindergarten to Grade 8, I attended a Jewish private school. I barely had any friends and I think a lot of the girls there didn’t know what to make of me. I have always been a bit unusual plus our school mainly had rich kids and I grew up middle class. A lot of my classmates wore expensive clothes that we never could afford. I did have a few friends who were girls and looking back, I feel like I might have been attracted to one of them, but I don’t think I realized it at the time. In high school, I started dating, but I never dated any girls. However, toward the end of high school, I did have some kind of inkling that I might be attracted to women. I was in my serious relationship, which would last 1.5 years, but one night I saw an attractive woman on TV and I remember feeling very turned on. I didn’t really know what to do about that, though. Shortly after that, my boyfriend and I broke up and I started university.
I didn’t start dating anyone seriously until my second year of university. For the purposes of this blog, I will call him David. David and I ended up being together for a very long time. In my 3rd year of university, I went to Vermont for a conference with a female friend of mine. I didn’t have a driver’s license so my friend did all the driving and it’s quite a long drive from Toronto. My grandparents, who live in Montreal, told us we could stay the night at their house if we wanted to. On our way home from the conference, we took them up on their offer. They were away at the time. On the drive to Montreal, my friend told me she had never kissed a girl. She was also involved seriously with a man at the time. When we arrived in Montreal, I called David and asked him if it would be okay if I kissed my friend. He later told me he thought I was joking, but I wasn’t. My friend and I made out and fell asleep with our clothes on. It was overall a very pleasant experience, though not extremely passionate. I didn’t really think anything of it, but I did enjoy it.
Fast forward to 2008 when David and I were living in Japan. We sometimes went to hot springs together and I sometimes went alone because I really liked them. The hot springs are normally separated by gender and everyone walks around naked. I remember seeing the women and thinking they were very attractive. Fast forward again to the summer of 2011. I was doing my Master’s and went to Germany, because I was studying the German anti-nuclear movement. My supervisor in Germany went to a conference in Istanbul and I went as well. I met a guy in an open relationship and fell head over heels for him. David visited me in Germany and I told him about the guy; he wasn’t happy about that. He did tell me he was fine with me dating women, which I felt was a double standard but for the moment, I accepted it. When we returned to Toronto, I did have a few dates with women, but nothing went anywhere. The following year, David and I broke up. 2 months after, I had my first relationship with a woman. Overall it was good, but I wasn’t ready to date, so I decided to end things. In the spring of last year, I dated a woman for a very short period of time; she and I are close friends and she introduced Ben and I, so I’m very grateful to her.
Going forward, I’d really like to date a woman. I don’t like putting labels on my sexuality, though. When people ask me if I’m bisexual, I usually say, I guess so. There’s a great book about the fluidity of sexual desire in women by Lisa Diamond. She interviewed 100 women over 10 years about their experiences and she has different categories for sexual orientation. One of those categories is, attracted to the person, not the gender. I very much resonate with that. At the end of the day, people are just people. There is a certain amount of conditioning based on gender that all genders have to deal with, however, we all have our own experiences and emotions. One of the great things about being polyamorous is we can experience it all and we can appreciate people for who they truly are.
If you have a question, send me an email to miriam@askmiriam.ca Have a great Tuesday!