the love medical malpractitioner is in

Happy late Valentines, here are my dating tips. It’s actually more credible that this is late, because on vday I was fucking busy. And since there aren’t as many of these articles for sapphics this counts as social justice, or something.

1. The first date is a casual beverage. Dive bar beer. Cafe chai. No exceptions. Except when the first date is years of friendship. So… I’m happy for y’all. With your beverages. Sounds low presh. Hydrated.

2. I don’t know what any of this business is about women being confusing. Most women, unless y’all are tied up in the time-honored tradition of psychologically decimating one another, are startlingly easy to please. So much so that I’m hesitant to reveal this truth on the The Game’s internet. So know I say this from a sweet angel heart full with devoted and pure joy at pleasing women, akin to that of an infant’s eyes going wide upon seeing the glow of an iPhone for the first time: Bring her a little item, ask how she is feeling, and when she inevitably says “sorry for being crazy,” tell her the accurate and perennially groundbreaking fact that she is not being crazy, she is having emotions, and helping with those is what you are there for. There is a 50% chance she cries. You have, accidentally, just done one thing her mom always did that was nice and one thing her mom never ever did. I can say this because it is reflexive human decency and also works on me.

3. If you haven’t gotten any in a while, boysmells’ Kush candle is a close replica scent-wise. But remember: it’s a candle, not a memory. Nobody needs to call her.

4. If you have moved beyond candle sniffing and have actually conjured via ritual found a lover, watch them while they sleep. /srs. Take three deep breaths in the soft warm dark and count your blessing (singular). Watching your beautiful lover sleep in your arms is one of the apexes (Weird. Weird in the mouth. Apices?) of human experience, akin to Glee’s season 3 nationals performance or when the song stops playing the moment you pull into the driveway or, as I’m told, true love or cocaine. This is a real stop and smell the Kush situation. It’s like how incredible and awe-striking it is that a cat, an animal, will feel drawn to and safe enough with you to fall asleep in your lap, times one million. A human woman who has built up many layers of armor over many years and was unyieldingly coached to control perception of her at every single moment is ASLEEP ON YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THAT IS SO NICE OF HER! LOOK AT HER ANGEL FACE! Like a cat, she too is shedding on you, and YOU WILL SAY THANK YOU! Our waking selves are doing unforgivable darksided shit like running tiktoks or writing internet culture blogs or making “special water” or following the career of Tate McRae or saying shit like “my truth” or “biphobia” but our sleep selves are all little angel children running and dancing and hugging and laughing in a meadow and feeling the sun on our skin and savoring stone fruits by the creek in linen dresses and our prairie mom isn’t anti vaxx per se she just has concerns.

5. My advice to girls who think women are pretty but can’t imagine having s-e-x with one is, and listen closely because this is very nuanced and sexuality is a complex moving target: try it. You will like it <3 

   I was informed by someone I dated that I think this because I am a lesbian. My responses are first, shout out God that I pass as a lesbian (a mode of being nine times cooler than bisexuality by bisexuals’ own historic fumbling), and second, sometimes lesbians are right; for instance, the less we seek our source for some definitive, the closer we are to fine.

6. This is the punnett square of relationships. Either:

1. she has boring media and you have weird media

2. she has weird media and you have boring media

3. she has boring media and you have boring media

4. she has weird media and you have weird media

The answer to all conditions is to find the offbeat sitcom that suits your collective sensibility — sits within your Loverton window, if you will — and ride it until Netflix cancels it and lays off the entire staff even though the staff is Zoe Kravitz or Aya Cash.

Then one of you will have to watch the other’s formative childhood show. The one whose childhood show it is not gets a weed credit for this activity and gets to be very high during, because it simply will never be as entertaining to them, an adult woman, as it was to the other GF as a child, who needed to be given a sexually-active voting-age non-familial example of how to be a person as well as a signature jacket. 

If you are in situation 3, and I’m happy for you girls even though I have never once seen you act like you’re part of this community, Love Island will work just fine. If you are in any arrangement other than 3 — which is to say, if neither of you graduated from business school — and finding yourselves really invested in nightly Love Island, your love is dying. Your relationship is over, and your union is now nothing more than coparenting your simple British tamagotchis through their impending sexual harassment scandals. 

7. If you feel a stomach ulcer forming and/or feel in the body like you are going to have a crying flailing tantrum in the seat of the cart at Costco, something in your relationship is seriously wrong, or you need to have a few days of alone time.

8. This is sex advice. Exposish: some sex advice my ex and I uncovered through the bizarre circuitry of discussing how a particular odious fraternity was in bed (for a powerpoint I was making, which was part of a larger powerpoint covering the then-ongoing death of my father. I’m interesting, guys) was along thus lines: other highminded guys orated ostentaciously about pleasuring women, then spent most of their woman-pleasuring time looking up at said woman with pitiful-puppy eyes, about ready for her world to have been rocked by now. Whereas a particular brotherhood of morally askance finance guys (they ate whole live goldfish. Not the cracker, the animal) did not give a fuck about Bi Wife Energy appearances, and were instead simply ravenous for pussy. They didn’t look up every one and a half seconds to see if the timer was up and they could be done with Women’s Marching now because their primary desire was to keep eating pussy. They, I heard, did an excellent job. (Now, this is a different fucking thing from the Uncontrollable Drive line that Xanax Pong Champions of this ilk employ, fucking obviously.) This is to say that going down on someone is at least half about their pleasure, yeah, thank you professor; but grow up, they are going to have more fun if you are really going fucking at it. Be hungry. Dig in. You should not be thinking “is this right. .. Is THIS right. .. Now, is THIS right?” you should be yelling on the intercom inside your skull THANKSGIVING CAME EARLY THIS YEAR and then turning off the region of your brain responsible for language. Unlock and be fueled by your own curiosity and bloodlust here. What would it be like if Jennifer (of having-a-body fame) was going succubus mode but didn’t have teeth? Consider. I can explain love of the game to you but me and Goldman’s sophomore class cannot understand it for you.

9. Only say things you mean. 

10. Here is what you do. You make the playlist of sweet songs about her that you send her early on, because you’re a person and a lover and a red blooded American, and then when you start feeling weird — and everyone feels weird about everyone sometimes no matter how much they love each other and nobody needs to be scared — you make the second playlist of kind of upsetting songs about her. After you break up you expand the latter playlist to a multi-hour magnum opus that chronicles your every feeling over the duration of the relationship and leave it for her to uncover amidst the haphazardly stacked crates of your Spotify, dust off, in a flash see exactly where you were coming from this whole time, and conclude that you are a perfect angel whom she whiffed horribly. 

11. Get into the record Valentine by Snail Mail. I don’t need to tell you that, actually. You will. Oh, you will. 

12. If you have thought about it for fifteen minutes during and still want to, you can say I love you during sex.