Sasha Speaks: Answering Your Most Private Dating Questions –- I Think My Girlfriend is Gay?
11-29-10
Dear Sasha,
I think that my girlfriend is cheating on me, not with another guy but with a good mutual female friend of ours. I’ve asked her a number of times but she always says “no!” We live in a very conservative small town in the Midwest where it’s not at all accepted — especially since we are both 19, and also in the wake of all the bullying we have been seeing in the media. What should I do?
Sincerely,
I think my girlfriend is gay?
Ahhh, 19. I remember it well.
It was a magical year of underage drinking and alcohol-fueled make-out sessions with numerous theater majors who eventually came out of the closet as being gay men. Good times, good times.
Listen, buddy, your late teens and early twenties are a time of self-discovery and experimentation. Your girlfriend might not be gay, she might just be exploring her options. Kurt Cobain once wrote, “Everyone is gay” and the Alfred Kinsey created a scale, aptly named “The Kinsey Scale,” that describes the fluidity of a person’s sexual history and proclivities. The scale moves from 0, meaning exclusively heterosexual, to 6, meaning exclusively homosexual. In use since 1948, research studies have discovered that 11.6% of white males earned a rating of 3, meaning “equally heterosexual and homosexual,” from ages 20–35. Meanwhile 11% of women that same age could be classified as a 3 and 2-6% were 5′s, qualified as “predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual.”
This might be your girlfriend’s time to be a 3, or maybe she’s a 6 and fears rejection in your community, which is so sad to me. Let people live and be happy, who cares if it’s with some of the same sex?
If she does decide she’s gay, don’t think you’ve “converted” or “turned” her. I once went out with a gay who came out as being gay not long after we broke up. At first I was humiliated, wondering what was so wrong with me that he decided to give up women entirely after we dated. But we spoke a few years later and he told me quite candidly, I was his last ditch at heterosexuality because, as he said, if I couldn’t make him straight, no one could. I still cherish those words.
The best thing you can do is be supportive of your girlfriend and her choices, especially in what seems could be a hostile environment.
*Feel free to email us with any dating, relationship, love and sex questions you may have for Sasha.
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- What do you think?
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I did not wake up one morning and say “hey I think I’d like a man use my sweater like a towel, write a candid dating book, become a dating expert, the CEO and founder of a social dating site and have three blogs.”
