Love Lessons
The One Lesson About Love that I Learned Embarrassingly Late
If you want to keep a secret, rearrange your face
When I was sixteen, I fell in love with another girl. We were both super deep into Conservative Christian culture. We never told anybody but everybody in our lives knew.
We never kissed one another on the lips, we didn’t hold hands. But people knew from our glances, our voices when we spoke to one another, our constant need to be in the other’s space.
We went to church together several days a week. One day at a church potluck, I came to sit down next to her and ask her if she was ready to leave. It must have been my voice, my tone. I only have one real memory of the event which is that when I looked up, an older couple was staring across the table directly at us with looks of mildly disguised contempt.
“Getting a little intimate, aren’t we?” the wife said to us both.
When the relationship crumbled because she started dating a guy that I had been seeing first, I felt a mixture of deep pain and relief that my secret would no longer be a problem. Until I realized that everybody knew. Her family had been talking about us as being gay, my family admitted to it as well.
I read one of those listicles online recently about how you can tell that two people are having an affair and I realized that even though I should have internalized this lesson at 17 when I had my first break-up, I didn’t.
“Their orbits are smaller around each other. Without meaning to, they will change their personal space requirements with the other. They’ll think they’re a normal distance away, but won’t be. Also, they’ll move around each other too easily, particularly in small spaces, without the awkward missteps the rest of us would usually make.” from Buzzfeed
Twice more in my twenties, I fell for women while I was still desperately trying to stay in the closet. Both times I was caught out, people knew and we hadn’t told them.
When you’re in love with somebody, it changes the chemicals in your brain and the rushing hormones going through your body. Even if you think you’re acting normal, it’s impossible not to act differently. And people notice this.
But I didn’t know.
If you’re oblivious like me take a look at this article by Buzzfeed and educate yourself on all the signs that show people you’re in love.
