wandering said 10 years, 6 months ago:

I don’t really know where to begin, so I guess I’ll just jump right into it..

Just about a year ago I fell in love with my best friend. We had the kind of first kiss that you read about in stories..you know where you stomach flip flops and you get butterflies (even just thinking back to it) and it was the greatest, and scariest thing that has ever happened. Why? Because she’s a girl. I was never able to understand people who could date someone of the same sex but still claim that they “weren’t gay” until of course it happened to me. We secretly “dated” for a couple of months and it was weird and great and scary and amazing all at the same time. I say “dated” like that because we didn’t actually date we just made out in secret. The two of us went to the same college. The school is so small (smaller than my high school was) so everyone knows everything about everyone. This was a problem for us. We knew that if we came right out and said that we were dating, there would be no going back. People would look at us for the rest of our time there as gay. And that was scary for the two of us. Neither of us have any kind of bias towards gay people, we’re not homophobes (that would make us huge hypocrites) but both of us know that if we ever were to break up, we would both go back to dating boys.

So now this goes on for months. We saw each other every single day and slept together every single night. Being that she was my best friend, even before we were dating we spent this much time together. And because of that, people began spreading rumors that we were together. We laughed it off at first because to us it was ridiculous. “She’s my best friend” thats what we kept saying to people by they were persistent. Long story short we made a big deal about it being untrue, and then of course it happened, and we felt silly. How could we now tell people about this after we just made a big deal about it being untrue? So we didn’t. We didn’t tell anyone. I don’t know if anyone reading this (hopefully someone is) has tried to keep some kind of secret about themselves for almost a year without telling anyone, but if you haven’t I can tell you how it feels: horrible. It is the most unbelievably miserable thing you could ever do. I wanted SO badly to tell everyone I knew that I WAS IN LOVE. I fell in love with my best friend. I wanted to walk with her in public and hold her hand. Kiss her whenever I pleased. Even just to hug her in public. But she didn’t want that. She was too afraid of what everyone would think and say about her. She was worried about what her Catholic, Italian family would do. She wasn’t ready to officially make me a part of her life.

Its now almost a year later. One whole year of secret dating. Secret phone calls and visits. Secret dinners and gifts. So many secrets that I’ve lost count. And I’m tired of counting. I’m tired of hiding our relationship from our friends and families. I’m tired of feeling like she’s ashamed of me and what we have. But how do I get the girl I love to take such a drastic step? I can’t make her do something she’s not willing to do. How am I supposed to get through another year of this?