Every time a straight girl tells me “I wish I was a lesbian,” I want to light myself on fire.

(Source: Giphy.)

Picture it. Walk with me for a second.

You enter into your favorite local bar looking good as hell, but you know the only heads you want to turn — spicy & stylish alpha bitches — are heavily fixated on the D. The hot girl talks to you, but she only wants to be your best friend. Her nonthreatening and attentive best friend. Receiver of sexy selfies, listener of stories. Meanwhile, you attract unwanted attention from straight men, pudgy and greasy moths to your emotionally distant flame.

The only place you can go out and feel desired is a lesbian party. There is a reason lesbian bars no longer exist. Women aren’t taught to approach each other. We’re taught to cross our arms and judge. You worry about the shape of your eyebrows now? The stage of your roots? You haven’t felt fully judged until you’ve been in a room full of scowling women who want to fuck each other.

For years, your friends, family members, and medical professionals will doubt your continued homosexual confessions. They will tell you that you “haven’t met the right man.” Sex with women is fine. That’s allowed. You can be “experimental,” a titillating object of the male gaze. You can be fluid. But you want to partner with a woman? No no. You must be mistaken. You tend to believe them, because you’ve been conditioned to disbelieve yourself, to instead defer to the voices of others.

You will experience years of confusion about your sexuality, because you haven’t been taught to prioritize your own sexual desire. None of your female friends orgasm anyway. And if they do, it’s definitely not from penetration. Everyone’s a little in love with their best friend, right? Maybe you just haven’t met the right man.

The word “crazy” continues to come up whenever you discuss your love life, because mainstream society still associates lesbian love with mental instability. If you’re femme-presenting, you will hear wildly homophobic statements in your presence. You will hear people opine about single brothers, cousins, uncles who are “obviously gay,” which doesn’t bother you. But then you’ll hear them mention their unhinged friend, about whom they express a performative concern, tinged with excitement: “She went to rehab and then she dated a woman…. That’s just Crazy Carrie for you!”

A family member will tell you that your your “alarming lifestyle” has required them to seek therapy. Your mom will tell you that she “supports you no matter what” but that it would be “much easier for everyone if you dated a man.” Your love life will become a burden, something that frightens people. You will go to the Deep South for the holidays and your Grandmother will quite literally scream when you confirm her suspicions that you do, in fact, have a girlfriend.

You will feel like gay men are the only people you can really get close to, because you feel confident they won’t want to fuck you and you won’t want to fuck them. But this is not a hard and fast rule, because you aren’t strictly a lesbian. You’re a woman, you’re flexible, but mostly — you’re indecisive. You don’t know what you want, exactly, but you’re always open to new avenues for finding love. The more unrequited, the better.

You will seriously date both men and women. And you will realize that men are much simpler to please. Women, yourself included, are impossible. Men are easy. Put out. Don’t latch. Present them with food on occasion. Pretend to be impressed with their dicks. Lie there and make porny sounds in the boudoir. Boom: they’re in love.

Women will tell you you aren’t good in bed. You aren’t doing it right. The vagina is a complex mystery, an enigmatic flower that requires a unique and precise series of convoluted maneuvers to access. You need to do more, women will say. No man ever told me I needed to do more in the bedroom. I laid there, looked cute. My body was the prize. And I always made them come. Have you tried to make a woman come? Women: have you tried to make yourself come? I can say it’s not rocket science because it’s definitely harder than that.

Emotional processing is the great lesbian elixir. Many straight women like this idea. Men are bad texters, straight women complain. They don’t understand emotions. Have you texted with a lesbian who wants to have sex with you? Listen, I love to text. But lesbians don’t banter. They emotionally vomit onto you. They paragraph you. These textual novellas are mostly well-written, but they low-key rip into your personality, while also making it all about them. When you don’t respond appropriately — and trust me, you won’t — they will make you feel like the horrible person that deep down you’ve always suspected you are.

Women fuck with your head. I mean, I do it too. We lure you in and push you away. Men are from Mars and women are from Withholding. “Straight women” will tell you in no uncertain terms that they are straight, then they will put on Carol and insist on giving you a massage. Lesbians with girlfriends will tease you. Men allegedly invented negging, but women perfected it. They will demean you in a way that doesn’t hit you for days. Men are straightforward; you know when you’re being patronized. With women, it sometimes takes hours, days, months. Suddenly you’re at a red light and you hate yourself and you can’t quite figure out why. Women will eat your heart and spit it out on the floor.

Look, men are not perfect. See: literally any headline from the past year. All love is complex. Relationships are always tricky, attraction always mysterious. But straight women, I promise you: being a lesbian will not solve your romantic issues. Not even a little bit.