Relationships

In the spring of 2013, I met a woman on OKCupid. She was petite, with a kind smile and a voice so soft that it could melt all your troubles away. Her shock of red curls went down to her shoulders — and because of this, and the fact that we no longer speak, let's call her Ann.

Ann was a few years older than I, wise and mature. She also, it turned out, spent her professional life beating up strangers for their sexual satisfaction.

In general, I don't believe in compromising for love. I'm not interested in a relationship where I become less of myself to make someone else happy. It's not that I want it all — it's that I know that both my partner and I deserve the most intense and unfaltering happiness and satisfaction we can bring each other.

I didn't use the word "asexual" until I was a senior in college. I didn't so much use the word as slur it, in between a long drunken ramble, to my girlfriend and our best friend in our apartment's small kitchen.

After 55 years of being by his side every day, being apart was more than she could handle when he became ill.

Dear Erin, I am a lesbian and am currently talking again to this girl who I’ve dated in the past. She and I dated for seven months, until I cheated on her (which was obviously messed up on my part). After we broke up, she started dating my best friend who is literally the same person as me.

It was in my second year of college that a girl expressed sexual interest in me. It took me a month to realize that what I thought were hangouts were actually dates. It took me another month to realize I wanted them to be dates. As I realized I wanted her to like me, I slipped back into my old routine — my makeup got more advanced and my hair was always straightened. I still thought that to be attractive, I had to be as feminine as possible. I’d been a hardcore ally for a decade at that point, but had no idea about the politics of beauty within the queer community; I thought I was stepping back into my old role.

I'd like your opinion on why a smart, formerly-independent woman can't break ties with someone who I know is emotionally manipulating me, making me question myself, uses me as an option at his convenience, is a womanizer, and admits to being a narcissist?

I don’t identify with the heterosexual norms that have been shoved down my throat and the pathologizing rhetoric that, for most of my life, shrieked "you’re broken," and then I was publicly ostracized by a person who identifies as part of "the community" — the same community I feel connected to.