i wish i liked a boy

liking girls, my personal saga

All my life, I have adored romance. I love silly YA books and romcoms with the most beautiful, sweeping music playing while the characters finally kiss. I am the kind of person who has been talking about her wedding since the age of about five, and the type of girl who cries at wedding vows. I love writing extensive love letters and dreaming of perfect, romantic scenarios to fall asleep to. I live for love.

But I will never have it.

Not in the way most girls get to. Most get to fall in love with a boy, and live in the portrayed fantasy. It will never be mine. I wish I could like a boy, wish the fantasy could be my reality, but it won’t. This is because I can’t like boys.

I remember first realizing I liked girls. It came as a realization that my passionate desire to be very best friends with someone on my soccer team meant something more to me. But after this realization, I still pushed myself to like boys more. I tried dating a boy. I liked telling people I was with a boy and enjoyed the normalcy. I liked telling my parents I was dating a boy, and it was completely conventional. This was how it was meant to be. But then the novelty of it faded, and I was left telling him I had tried, but I couldn’t like him in the way I was meant to.

I don’t dislike liking girls, but there’s always something in me that wishes I wasn’t. I don’t believe that I’m unable to fall in love, I actually find myself quite capable. I’ve fallen in love with a girl and it was the most sweeping and thrilling thing I’ve ever experienced. It was the sort of naive everyone should hope from their first love.

When I went to the Laufey Bewitched Tour last April, so many of her openers quipped about liking a boy. She said it teasingly, as every girl in the room could relate. But then they all chorused in response to agree with her, to be expected. I wasn’t angry at her or the hundreds of fans in the room at all. In that moment, I wanted to badly to relate. I wanted the experience of falling in love with a boy like almost every girl gets to do.  I wish I fit into the societal majority, and relate to all the girls singing about boys alongside Laufey with full passion. 

I hate telling people I like girls. I wish it didn’t make me different, that it didn’t actively submit me to just being the “gay girl”. I remember telling a boy at school once after he asked me if I had a boyfriend, and him being in complete shock when I told him I didn’t like boys. I apparently didn’t look like someone who’s gay. But now he knows. Now I am subjugated to the role of being gay. It is likely the only thing some of my classmates will ever know about me.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m actually straight. Maybe I could really like a boy! And I genuinely convince myself that I feel something for them. I enjoy the normalcy of my forced crushes, and the safety behind them because there’s no romantic intention for me. I crave the validation I get from a boy liking me. I want to post someone on my Instagram story and have no one think we were just best friends.

I’m excellent at tricking myself too. I’ve been mastering the art since fourth grade, fixating on boys who I knew liked me and sharing them in hushed whispers at sleepovers to relate to everyone else. I have been lying to myself longer than I’ve lied to others in my life about liking girls. I’ve deluded myself into having casual crushes on boys, and to immediately regret it the moment it turned to anything serious.

My liking of boys has always been conscious, a decision I’ve carefully selected and curated my feelings for in the most optimal manner. After I broke up with a boy because I couldn’t lie to myself any longer about how I felt, I was scared I’d never experience genuine love. I have now, and even though we’re not together anymore, she serves as living proof that I can fall in love without ever seeing it coming.

I’m sixteen now, and I know there is so much time to grow into who I am, and learn more about love. Sometimes, I wish my teenage naïvety would translate into realizing I truly do like boys as I age. But I also realize this naïvety is my wish that that could happen at all. I know enough about myself to know I don’t like boys, and I’m not okay with that. One day, I hope I will be.