I wasn’t into it,” she says, “I thought maybe it was because the guy wasn’t cute. So I dumped him and started dating a cute guy.” The first time I thought that Olivia might actually stand a chance at survival was Sunday, the first full day of the cruise, when I attended the welcome mixer for “Generation O,” which is how Olivia refers to its precious few millennial and Generation X clientele. As I walked around the ship, which holds over 2,000 passengers, it was already clear that the average woman here was a couple decades older than me. But it turned out that there were a few other twenty- and thirtysomethings who’d managed to find their way to Olivia.

And that’s how it remained for a long time: a sore spot of a secret. I couldn’t think about it too closely because, like pressing a bruise, it made me flinch with discomfort. I’d consigned it as much as possible to memory until last year when Steven told me that he planned to propose.

Is there a correct name for a lesbian spouse?

In 2016, her husband found out about these conversations and her marriage broke down. He vowed to keep her sexuality a secret from the wider community for the sake of their children. I was less confident. But perhaps it wasn’t that I didn’t trust my partner; it was that I didn’t trust myself. For so long, I’d put off the possibility of us opening up our relationship because — try as I might to be cool and aloof and whatever about casual hookups — I typically like sex best when the person matters to me. There is little data, and there has been no large-scale collection of testimony, so it is almost impossible to get an accurate picture of their lives. She plays the drums, loves cars — like, posts-on-car-forums-level loves cars — and follows tech news. She cares about clothes and buys a lot of hers vintage. She just got a tattoo commemorating Liverpool, her beloved football team.

Before meeting Lynette, she of the multiple grooming products, I’d gotten used to dating people whose own beauty routines consisted of, if anything, 3-in-1 body wash. They tended to gently poke fun at me for all my feminine trappings: the 20 minutes I’d spend each day on my serums. I’m a little ashamed of how, over the years, living beside various permutations of my partners’ easy masculinity, I’d defend my own femme rituals with I’m-not-like-other-girls insistence: Hey, at least I don’t shave! At least I barely wear any makeup! My frivolity was never out of hand. And I prided myself for that, for the ways in which I deliberately limited myself. A North Carolina woman has revealed she is still married to her husband despite coming out as a lesbian two years ago. We didn’t even know how we became friends, let alone best friends. Attending anatomy classes together and spending long hours over big fat books inside an eerie library decorated with skeletons brings people closer. It helped that we both came from a small town and were staying in the same hostel. One day I told her how much I love drawing and would like to sketch her. She stared at me for long before agreeing to be by muse. But that came with one condition—she wanted to see me naked. She thought I wanted to draw her nude (and I didn’t correct her).My family were really supportive, and they still are,” he added. “We still go on family holidays with them, we all get along really well.” I was captivated by what Eileen Myles told me at the time: “I know how to fight for what I want, to say no, when to wait. I’ve been in time for 65 years. I have a lot to share. That supposedly should only be in my teaching life — that’s not the case. It’s amazing on both sides to be able to share the world from different angles. It’s lively. It’s hot.” She had looked up YouTube videos of lesbian vloggers in other parts of the world. She watched films featuring same-sex couples and read a lot of reports on lesbian, bisexual and queer (LBQ) communities. She began to understand the language of the internet.