On some level I have always known I was femme but didn't have the word for it.
Growing up, I was a girly-girl, played with Barbies, wore lots of pink, and it felt right to me. Meanwhile, I had massive emotional crushes on other women (not usually my peers, but teachers, adults I knew, etc.). I was a very lonely teenager; I was introverted and bookish and had no friends and didn't date anyone, even in college. (I had crushes on various guys, too, but they weren't nearly as intense as my feelings for women).
I considered the possibility of my attractions to women for the first time when I was a junior in college. I snuck to the sexuality section of the library and read books on lesbianism. I didn't dare check anything out. I felt guilty. What further frustrated me is that I didn't often feel like I related to many of the women's stories of feeling 'different': I wasn't a tomboy, I didn't want to be a boy, I didn't dream of marrying another girl. Instead, I was girly, I loved it, and figured I'd marry a man someday and forget all about these persistent and highly-charged crushes on women.
After graduation, I stayed in my hometown. I finally met a man who I thought was the one for me. We were both each other's first significant relationship (I was 27, he was 32). He proposed after only 2 months of dating. I accepted on the condition we wait a year to get married so we could get to know each other better, so that's what we did.
We had problems right from the start of our honeymoon. We couldn't achieve having sex (we both had waited; not for particularly religious reasons, though he was Catholic --just because that's how it had happened). My husband displayed a scary temper and yelled at me for not being able to relax enough. The resentment in our marriage started with that. It took us four years (yes, you read that correctly) for us to achieve that. Obviously, resentment had built throughout that time.
I suppose this all should have been a clue about my sexuality issues, but I was still deeply in denial. I took all of the blame for our problems; I was somehow 'faulty' as a woman. Further, while we were in marriage counseling, I came to the realization that I didn't want to have biological children (pregnancy/birth phobia). This reality hurt my husband a great deal, because he always had wanted to be a dad. He wasn't all that interested in adoption either (he actually thought to adopt would 'take away' children from people who couldn't have them biologically).
Finally, my best friend, after realizing I had an emotional crush on her in the midst of all of my marriage problems, called me out on my bisexuality and promised we would still be best friends (and she wasn't freaked out by my crush, either, though she didn't return my feelings). It was with her help that I not only admitted my attractions to women and called it what it was, but that I also began to embrace the inherent 'femmeness' I had always felt: Though I loved the 'trappings' of femininity, I wasn't passive or doing it to please men, not even my husband. That's why I felt so different from feminine-presenting straight women and why I could never fully relate to them: I had always felt like it was an authentic expression of my gender.
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