Phase is not a nice word.
Phase… it can mean a stage in a process, or one component of a group of things, but for me, it is how people have decided to classify the love in my life. This word shouldn’t have all this power, but it carries so much painful strength.
I am not sure if people understand what it is like to tell someone that a component of their identity is a phase, whether it is a passion for music, a dream to compete in athletics, or their sexual orientation. It can cripple you. Maybe I thought that I was above having the words of others dictate my feelings. Maybe I thought that I was stronger. But I was wrong.
I never thought this word would hurt me. I thought I was above the stigmas and I believed that the people in my life either knew me well enough or didn’t care whom I loved. The worst part is I actually do not care about whether someone believes I really like girls, or whether it is just “college” or whatever other stereotype. I did not care… until someone I considered a best friend was saying it, and all of a sudden it became real. I thought she knew me so well and that she understood me and who I was, but it turns out she had been believing that my flirtatious, boisterous attitude meant that I wanted to sleep with the men I was nice to. WRONG. But even if I did like men as well (not that it is anyone else’s business, but I do not), every single time she was saying that my homosexual identity was a phase, it was as if my year and a half long relationship did not exist either. She knows my girlfriend and we have spent countless nights out and dinners in together, but if this is a phase, then that relationship is inevitably going to end.
I may never be able to make people understand why I am gay, but the people who know Kaitlyn, my girlfriend, should easily see why I am deeply in love with her. And the day that I heard that one of our best friends believed that I was in a phase, was the day that they told me that our love would not last, that the life I was planning was going to end, due to my “natural and normal” desires for “penetration.”
It was my best friend’s other friend that drunkenly told me their conversations about the validity of lesbianism. And I wish I had never heard those words. I wish I never knew that a millennial with lesbian friends could be so ignorant to sexual and gender orientations. I wish I didn’t spend nights crying over their stupid opinions. My relationship is real and I guess I will just have to marry this amazing girl to prove them wrong.