Ruth & Kim, 1999Ā
I was teaching at a writer's conference when I spotted a woman who took my breath away. It was the fantasy kind of chemistry so many of us dream about. Her name was Kim, and she told me later she'd had that same feeling when she saw my face on the poster advertising the conference.
Kim and I had lunch together every day that week. On Wednesday, we hiked in the woods and found a little hut someone had made out of sticks. We crouched down to enter the hut, and shared our first kiss. She had a way of biting my lower lip that spread like fire through my body.
On Thursday she took me on my dream date. I didn't know where we were going, but we ended up at a center that rehabilitated injured raptors, where we gazed together at one of the biggest, most beautiful hawks I had ever seen. She picked up a fallen feather on the ground, and handed it to me. Everything felt so magical, so meant-to-be.
On Friday, we ended up in her bed. Hey, you could consider that our 5th or 6th date, right? (Since we'd met on a Sunday.) No matter that it was 6 days in a row... I had never been so captivated, never felt so sure before about wanting forever with someone. Kim was THE ONE.
She was just as crazy about me as I was about her. Yet, things were... complicated.
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A few months in, she told me she'd call me at 10 p.m., and then never called. I was frantic with worry for hours, fearing something terrible had happened to her. The next day, I found out she'd been out til 5 a.m. drinking with her ex.
I knew I should break up with her then, but I was in too deep. I sobbed for hours in my bathtub, then chose to try to forgive (translate: ignore the red flags waving in my face) and go in even deeper.
You can probably guess where this is going. Maybe you know from your own painful personal experience how I hung on for months, lost in the trance of what I was calling "love," but what I now understand was doomed and toxic.
Seven months later, in the beautiful month of May, Kim broke up with me long distance, without explanation. I spent weeks sobbing in my old green chair, unable to sleep or eat. At one point I even called a suicide hotline, not because I actively wanted to die, but just because I couldn't imagine what would make me want to go on living.
No surprise, then, that when she reconnected with me in June, I eagerly took her back. The condition was that we couldn't say we were together. As long as I accepted that we weren't girlfriends, we could spend every weekend together doing all the things girlfriends do (yes, lots of time in bed.) But, because we "weren't together," I wasn't supposed to have any feelings about it when she left at the end of the summer to go back to her ex (not the one she'd been out with that night - a different one.)
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In December she called, invited me to meet her at a hot springs resort in New Mexico, asked if I thought I'd still be attracted to her. Dear reader, what would you have done?
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I went. And predictably, it was a disaster.
For years, when I told this story, I focused on Kim: her unavailability, her mixed messages, the time she told me, "You know you can always count on me, right?" "Yeah," I sneered back at her in my head. "I can always count on you to hurt me!"
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It took me a long time to reckon with how eagerly I had signed up for this mistreatment, and the potent mix of brain chemicals, fantasy, denial and early attachment trauma that made me fall so desperately in love, so fast, with someone who simply couldn't be a good partner.
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And how deep in denial I had been to ignore our first breakup and then our second breakup (the one when we supposedly "weren't together") and still get on that plane to New Mexico to continue that passionate and toxic lesbian relationship.
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At a certain point, you've just gotta take responsibility for your own actions, and it took me a long time to get to that point. But eventually, I made it. The third time was the charm, though it took me many more years to really understand what had happened, and the part I had played.
This powerful and destructive love was one big part of what set me on the quest to really understand and decode lesbian love: how and why we are so often drawn to the wrong person (and make ourselves believe she's the right person), why lesbians often skip the dating phase and bond so fast, why our relationships can go from blissful to heartbreaking in just a few months (just as Kim's and mine did), and most importantly, what to do about all of this.
In 2015, I wrote a book about what I had learned, Conscious Lesbian Dating & Love, which has been an Amazon bestseller pretty much ever since. In 2020, I founded the Conscious Girlfriend Academy, where lesbians and queer women come together to learn and practice the skills involved in conscious, healthy dating and love, which bring us the nourishing, beautiful, passionate and stable relationships we truly want. Our 12-week Lesbian Dating Essentials class, starting September 20, will show you the way.
Kim died before I founded the Academy. That strong, gorgeous Amazon I fell for ended up with a life tragically shortened by Parkinson's. I wish I could tell her now what I did with our story -- and how grateful I am to her for breaking my heart in ways that sent me on a healing quest.
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Thank you and rest in peace, Kim. You loved me as well as you could, I loved you as well as I could, and our community deserves better, easier, more fulfilling love, and I'm committed to helping us get there, one queer heart at a time.
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Check out Conscious Girlfriend Academy's on-demand classes or our upcoming schedule of live events and groups here, to get the help you need to END drama, without having to end the love. And make sure you've downloaded the first four chapters of our Amazon-bestselling Conscious Lesbian Dating & Love book, too.Ā
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