When’s too soon to say “I love you” if you’re also a lesbian?

In her column DYKE DRAMA, GT’s own “sapphic Carrie Bradshaw” unpacks the validity of fleeting relationships.

words by ANYA SCHULMAN
art by Margaritis Georgios (before 1842)

I just watched 15 minutes of The Bachelor’s recent season to see if Maria really is that hot (she is) and then listened to “Kissing In Swimming Pools” by Holly Humberstone, which of course made me think about the aforementioned London Girl. The song came on when I was helping her pack up her life to move 3,459 miles away, two weeks into us knowing each other, and I did cry when she left. (She said, “It’s the song.”) 

bell hooks taught us that love is a verb, but when is it too soon to call something “love” if lesbian relationships are notorious for growing faster than Renesmee? 

The jury is out on London Girl (the jury being: people I’ve kissed who are now my friends). But from my experience, here is an incomplete list of things that are easy to mistake for “love” as a lesbian: 

• Helping assemble furniture
• Helping move apartments
• Buying you a Meredith Marks branded caviar spoon
• That floating feeling where everything is brighter and somehow minor inconveniences don’t matter because you feel a sense of hope about the world in spite of It All
• The way they smell 
• Crying so much in public you get a free smoothie from the Juice Press by your DBT group
• A single, sustained look exchanged where you know exactly what the other is thinking 
• Grabbing your wrist with a sense of purpose

Even though most of these things are verbs, I’m pretty sure now that they are not love. I always joke that lesbian time is like dog years. One moment can stretch to eternal when you’re savoring every second of them. Or, at least, the thought of them.

Last June, I was seeing another girl, a Summer Girl, whose bed I was laying in at 3 am, very drunk, holding her hand, again crying (I’m a Pisces rising, okay?), because I’d just seen my ex with a new girlfriend who kind of looked like me at the Dyke March, an ex who told me a few months prior she “needed to be alone for a while.” Summer Girl was trying to make me feel better by saying I’d loved Winter Girl. I said No, it was impossible to love someone I’d only dated for a short amount of time. But Summer Girl insisted. If you’re still following this, you’re gay. 

Where it felt melodramatic to assign the word “love” to this person, it also felt fair to attribute plain heartache to love lost. I didn’t love Winter Girl. But after Summer Girl left, I looked at a picture of us on my phone and realized it might be the happiest I’ve ever looked. Being that happy makes you look substantially hotter in an untraceable way. Next time I’m taking a solo shot.

I always joke that lesbian time is like dog years. One moment can stretch to eternal when you’re savoring every second of them. Or, at least, the thought of them.

To start at the end, lesbian relationships tend to break up by one of the three classic curses: avoidance, distance, and someone changes their mind at the two month mark but has a whole girlfriend the next time you run into them. 

A misplaced and generally premature mention of “love” is arguably the fourth lesbian curse. But straight people say it after roughly two months on The Bachelor all the time, with the whole roster staying under one roof. Sure, the contestants face their fair share of skepticism, but everyone generally believes them. So why not extend the same empathy to ourselves that society does to ABC’s glossiest funemployed singles? 

Summer Girl ended things with me via text a few days after a trip upstate that was her idea. In the weeks leading up to the end, I wondered if she made a fair point: “Does love have to be sustained in order to be real?” 

It’s in queer people’s nature to experience brief and intense relationships with what some might call “alarming frequency.” To me, the feelings we experience within these entanglements aren’t any less valid than what your married or deeply committed friends have shared, especially if those feelings are what currently qualify the entirety of your lived, romantic experience. Forget the therapists on TikTok telling you it’s harder to get over something that lasted a short amount of time because you’re “grieving the possibility” and left with unanswered questions. This is true. But as we indulge ourselves in a little ABC emotion today, I’ll venture to say that just because something burns fast doesn’t mean it can’t be meaningful or formative. 

Now feels like a good time to tell you I’ve never told anyone “I love you.” The thing is, feeling a jolt of love is entirely different than saying “love” to someone. The second you say it, you apparently have to keep love alive until it dies, or you do. Maybe that’s why saying it is so terrifying. Feeling it comes with fresh material for maladaptive daydreams. But saying it comes with responsibility. 

Telling someone you love them after less than a week is either going to result in complete disaster or one of the best days of your life. I have some couple friends who said it the sixth day they were dating and they’re still together. I’ve also heard you should give people three months to uncover your potential partner’s lasting behavior. But if we’re applying gay math within the physics of queer velocity, then maybe six weeks isn’t too soon to say you’re in love. Fast-burn queer love, even if doomed, is more authentic to me than most attachments you can find in a Love is Blind pod or in a Bachelor mansion, at the very least. 

Context matters, too. Someone said “I love you” to me once in a crowded bathroom at a club that used to host a party called “Clam Jam.” I knew better than to take it to heart. We were… otherwise occupied so everything said then and there had to be taken with a generous crystal of Maldon Salt. But I laughed and said, “you said it first.” 

Which means, if you were using your deductive reasoning skills, we were both thinking it. And we kind of knew we both were thinking it. The beginning feeling is so intoxicating (as is the sex vortex that follows), which makes it hard to imagine how time-tested love could feel much better, closing us off to the danger of passing time.

I’ll stipulate that we, dykes, cannot fear time. When things work out, whatever “working out” means, time is an essential ingredient to the most profound relationships of our lifetime, romantic or otherwise. Time brings us beyond the agonizing superstition of “maybe.”

Now feels like a good time to tell you I’ve never told anyone “I love you.” The thing is, feeling a jolt of love is entirely different than saying “love” to someone. The second you say it, you apparently have to keep love alive until it dies, or you do.

But maybe we, the dykes who survive ex after ex, are entitled to the privilege of calling it whatever we want, what it felt like, no matter how long it lasted. And for those few golden weeks or months we were the center of someone’s life, their conversations with their friends, their phone, their thoughts.  

If you find yourself returning to those moments where anything felt possible, where you remembered what a January without seasonal depression felt like, even though the finer points of those memories fade quick and fast, I don’t know what to call that other than some kind of love. Even if it was just a possibility, that in and of itself is so rare it should count. 

And if you’re brave enough to say it, well, maybe wait until week seven, which is basically a year in Gay Time.

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