Q: I am a 22-year-old Italian man, 100 percent straight, sensitive and sporty. I have been reading Savage Love for years in Internazionale. I have one question for you: Why do I always fall in love with lesbians? Why do I instantly fall in love with girls who have that something more in their eyes? Something melancholy and perhaps insecure? Girls whom I’d rather protect and embrace than take to bed? The last three girls who fit this description all turned out to be lesbians. The last girl with whom this happened told me it was my “Red Cross” mind-set that made me fall in love with girls who are insecure/sad/melancholy, so I have a sort of selection bias that excludes most straight girls I meet. I do not believe this, because the world is full of straight girls who need saving. So why then, Dan? WHY? I have a girlfriend. I truly love her. Since September, we have been living in two different cities because she went away to study. I am afraid that one day she is going to tell me she’s gay too. She always talks with me about a new supercute female friend. Is she a lesbian? I have recently met another girl, superempathetic. She is gay, and I knew it after an all-night conversation in my car listening to Cigarettes After Sex. Why do I always fall in love with gay girls? Can I love two people at the same time? This is the fourth time that this has happened. Is my girlfriend gay? Why do I find lesbians so attractive? I’m freaking. —Increasingly Tormented About Lesbian Yearnings
(2) Women—straight or bi or lesbian—don’t need “saving.” They need respect, they need to be taken seriously, they need bodily autonomy, and they need loving partners and political allies.
More Savage Love:
When there’s incompatibility in the bedroom
What happened to the early, funny Savage Love columnist?
Righteous anger or ‘freak-out’?
Could this be Savage Love’s biggest jerk ever?
A: Gee, I don’t recall any whining from you right-wing he-men back when a black guy who didn’t collude with a hostile foreign power and wasn’t poisoning our air and water and didn’t undermine our Democratic norms and wasn’t surrounded by a cadre of deeply corrupt sycophants was president—you guys were so stoic during the Obama years, so he-manly. You ova’d up, you didn’t whine or moan, you didn’t spread wild conspiracy theories or march on Washington waving signs that proved you were every bit as misinformed as you are illiterate. (Wake up, dude.) v
