THE MAN

BY KATE LEFFNER

My ex and I were in a Starbucks. I noticed a few people looking our way at her comment. At the very end of my four-year relationship, after the sobbing and fights settled down, we were finally too tired to be jealous or hateful and as I moved out, we rushed towards friendship in the hope to mitigate the loss It wouldn’t work exactly but in this fragile moment, eating breakfast sandwiches and coffee with oat milk (a hot chocolate for her) we watched the veneer of romantic love and expectation lift, and I thought were her eyes always so focused? Was her hair always that color? But still the familiarity remained

We had both been dating other people at this point, and she asked me who I slept with after her. I’m just curious, she said. Was she butch or femme?

Femme, I had finally admitted.

She was laughing and shaking her head I asked her what she meant and she just kept repeating that she knew it My ex was both feminine and masculine so it wasn’t a huge departure from my “type” but the certainty with the way she said this remained in my mind even after we stopped regularly speaking

In the aftermath of this relationship and in a new apartment, I spent a lot of time drinking red wine and watching reality TV. I bought a lot of frozen pizzas and fed my cat at erratic times After all the crying was gone and the grief turned into a sortof relief, I felt flickers of attraction reemerge with baristas and pretty friends

I would consider myself feminine: I like gingham dresses and dangly earrings, my friends and I end phone calls by saying bye cutie, love u!!, I eat salads at Sweetgreen, and mainly enjoy literary fiction that has “girl” in the title: A Very Nice Girl, Story of a Girl, Lives of Girls and Women By default, my ex was seen as more masculine But I found this wasn’t always the truth when we were alone together. In love, I felt myself toss all of my attributes on the table, and see what worked and what didn’t; I found an incredible rightness in being seen for my intelligence or my perspective rather than by my body When my anxiety, outside demands, or relationship pressures tossed me into a negative spiral, I could be hooked into an idea of myself as “the woman/girlfriend/wife,” or other times as “the man/boyfriend/husband” (but not in a hot way, in a stuck sort of way.) I felt this hurt our interactions, it made us two people playing roles, not ourselves

I found myself more and more aware of my interest in feminine women in the wake of my relationship It wasn’t a surprise to my friends, who would tell me the girls I had looked at over the years: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Blanchard, DaisyEdgar Jones But as someone who has been seen as “feminine” and therefore a “bottom,” I was often in a position where more “masculine” women and nonbinary folks approached me and were vocal about their interest In reality, I would often top the butch women and nonbinary people I slept with (per their request) but it wasn’t something we spoke about and it was like a secret I kept for them, and when the bill would come at the restaurant, they would get it With my ex, I settled into being a bottom because it brought me consistency, and I thought love, a relationship where I knew the way I should act and be

I’m not the exception to this dynamic If you go on dating apps you will see lots of femme women looking for butch women, and vice versa I have one (femme) friend who loves wrestlers in particular, and told me, “Kate, I just want a woman who can pick me up,” which is so fair If that’s what you like, that’s what you like But it’s important to realize that just because some women like a certain dynamic, it doesn’t always mean all do, or are required to.

In the past, my attraction to feminine women always felt like a battle I didn’t see myself winning It has made me defensive when feminine women have approached me I would essentially take it off the table, because I know that while I can write you an essay and have a strong sense of self, I will never be able to fix your sink and probably say ew if it spews and call a maintenance man I didn’t realize it was heteronormative to assume that another femme wouldn’t like that, and my assumption was limiting to us both

However, just because I have started to unpack these ideas of thinking doesn’t mean everyone has. As I recently started dating more feminine women, I noticed by others’ responses that there was something more stereotypically erotic about two femme women together. It is easier for people to ignore the complexity of emotions and personalities of two feminine women and limit them to their appearance After having a semisporty girlfriend for years that men recognized

The way I see my interactions with women I date is so different from the way we can be perceived that it makes me feel deeply protective I could see more readily how we could be considered “best friends,” “sisters” or disregarded. While there has been so much social progression, being gay can still be really scary sometimes, and hearing delegitimizing comments or even seeing facial expressions can, especially on a bad day, really hurt your mental health no matter how confident you are or how in love with your partner Having someone to play the designated role can alleviate this fear and make it easier to interact in public domains

But for me the joy of getting to talk about girly things with someone who I am attracted to has made the brief moments of discomfort worth it As I get older, I care less and less, the sting lessens, and I see different ways to navigate in the world It makes me wonder if there was even more I could discover and let go about my ideas of how two women “should” and are “allowed” to be together.