What Growing Up Queer and Falling in Love With My Best Friend Taught Me
By Grace Dunn
I’d never considered myself someone who experienced young love. I’m 24 years old and have never been in a proper, Facebook-official relationship. Reflecting on the modicum of car crash situationships I’ve had over the years, the ones where I was treated the worst are remembered most vividly.
When people asked who my first love was, I’d respond with the name of a man a decade older than me who pressured me into sex and swore at me when my alarm woke him up the morning.
This isn’t true. My first love was my best friend at school, whose eccentricities made me laugh endlessly, who stayed up all night with me and shared the darkest thoughts and deepest insecurities we had with each other. It was the person who, in her dad’s office (much to his irritation), played countless games of pool with me and held my hand when I drunkenly cried in the church yard, where our roads met.
My first romantic and sexual experiences were with men who treated me without care, empathy or respect. Only in hindsight do I realize how tragic it was that those relationships felt easier and more comfortable than the one I had with her. She was one of the first people to deeply care about me in a way that didn’t feel rooted in obligation, control or pity. She showed me how love could be acceptance, trust and — above all — laughter. She taught me what love could be even when we weren’t ready to do it, properly, with each other. When we finally drunkenly kissed in my parents' living room, five years too late, I told her, “I love you, but not like that anymore.” That was the most direct either of us had spoken about our relationship.
Nostalgia has tinted my memories of our ambiguous friendship rosy. I remember the electric feeling of her touch, the giddiness following our prolonged eye contact. The way I would stare at her face, just taking in how beautiful I found her. I also remember the lingering feeling of discomfort that would follow these moments. They felt like a prerequisite to pain and rejection, both by her and society.
I remember her visible unease when friends commented on our dynamic and how she would withdraw if it seemed like someone could sense it. I remember how she’d flirt with me at a house party, then disappear for hours with some boy. I remember feeling plagued with guilt about being attracted to her, like I was getting some sort of perverted enjoyment out of our friendship that she wasn’t consenting to. It did not help that she had told me, for the most part, she didn’t like girls when I had said I did. There was a power dynamic wherein it sometimes felt like the relationship was on her terms and I was just along for the ride.
While she has always been someone others confide in, getting her to share her own feelings is like pulling teeth. She’s hard to read, swinging between extroversion and introversion in a way that, as a teenager, often put me on edge. Her hot and cold behavior made me question our dynamic and out of fear of looking pathetic and deluded, I never brought it up.
For years, I barely reflected on our relationship as it largely fizzled out. We went to university and would only see each other a handful of times throughout the year. I still had a soft spot for her, but the intensity and infatuation had subsided. There would still be the odd moment when the warm feeling of her touch caught me off guard. Or when she’d tease me while looking deeply into my eyes and everything else around us would fade into the background.
While staying at our parents’ houses for Christmas, I (very) drunkenly asked her if she knew that I had feelings for her when we were still in school. She told me she had felt the same way, followed by a few drunken kisses. This moment had seemed so beyond the realm of possibility I felt guilty even imagining it. In actuality, the chemistry and metaphorical fireworks of my teenage fantasy were missing. Even the copious amount of alcohol we’d consumed couldn’t hide that while the love was still there, the spark had fizzled out. When we woke up the next morning in my parent’s spare room, we were still drunk, but sober enough that neither of us had the courage to bring up the events of the night before. Communication was never our strong point.
When we spoke on the phone eight months later, it took her 25 minutes to mention the girlfriend I already knew she had. Thinking of her with her new girlfriend — her first girlfriend — stings. But it’s a bittersweet kind of pain. It’s a reminder of what we weren’t ready for, what was taken from us by the fear and shame imposed by a homophobic society, one where my dad told me being gay was a form of narcissism and where the queer kids at school were spat on in the corridors.
In her new relationship, she’s found with someone else what we couldn’t experience together. The contrast between the shame we felt then and the joy and peace she feels now, both in herself and in her relationship, makes my chest hurt a little. However, it’s a pain I’m grateful for; it echoes the emotions I had forgotten. Those feelings, which had been dormant for the last few years, allow me to attribute what we lost to our internalized homophobia. Now, I can finally grieve the love we never properly shared.
It’s much too late to experience the potential of the love that we had for each other. But it’s not too late to look back, with both grief and gratitude, at the unspoken relationship that taught me what love could potentially be.