What It Feels Like To Fall For A Straight Boy (It Sucks)

Falling for a straight boy when you’re gay like, totally sucks. It’s as if someone is calling names for Hunger Game tributes, and you are SUPER relieved that it wasn’t you called, but then, the announcer is like, “Oops, actually I meant [your name]” and you then you get impaled by a blunt spear after five seconds on the battlefield. Then you die, except slowly, and also your hair is totally messed up on live TV as the camera zooms in on you and that’s the last thought you have before you croak. Yeah, it basically feels like that.

And it usually happens so innocently. Like it’s not like you sign up for this, ya know? You don’t wake up one day and think, “Gee, I really want to complicate my life by catching feelings for someone who has a 0.000% chance of reciprocating!” Like as if life wasn’t hard enough. It’s probably someone you work with, or hang out with, or someone who is in your life just enough to constantly make your heart feel warm and fuzzy and shit. Someone who makes things feel right. Someone who makes you laugh. Someone you find yourself laughing with a lot, until you find yourself crying because, “SHIT WTF IS HAPPENING.” But you know what’s happening.

And so you take a step back away from their perfect face and think, “Okay, so this is a thing, but it doesn’t HAVE to be a thing.” And so you inhale, take a drink straight from your bottle of Pinot Grigio and agree to fall out of love with this beautiful disaster of a heterosexual specimen. You straighten your back, you put a smile on your face, and then you hang out with them again and realize that your resolution was bullshit and you’re still lost AF.

You can’t help it. I can’t help it. We can’t help it. When you find someone who makes you happy, who makes you feel whole, there is no easy way to cut it off. It’s like your brain is trying to tell your heart, “HEY HOMEBOY, this ain’t happening!” but your heart doesn’t give a fuck. It doesn’t understand why it can’t happen. It just thinks your brain is being a dumbshit, like that time you forgot the Pythagorean Theorem on your 8th grade Geometry quiz.

And so you lumber through life double-fisting two bottles of wine and start hysterically laughing at jokes that aren’t funny because it’s your life that’s funny. Then your friends ask you what’s up, and you mumble something about the weather and take another gulp of wine until there is no more wine and you end up confessing everything to some distant acquaintance who probably doesn’t even know your last name.

But then it slowly becomes old news, and it begins to melt from the forefront of your mind — prolly because your brain understand this shit isn’t happening — and you just feel a constant tinge of sadness. Because there is a part of you, somewhere, that truly doesn’t understand why you can’t be with someone who makes you feel so happy and valued. There is a part of you that just cannot, cannot understand what pulls you back from kissing the fuck out of this cute boy who never fails to make you smile.

And so the intense emotional pain becomes a dull soreness. But as the pain fades, it takes a little color out of life with it. How does this shit happen? There are like a billion boys in the world, but you had to fall for THIS one that is as straight as a John Deere warehouse. It’s like, stupid ironic, considering you spend a ton of time at gay bars, or chatting up gay people on gay apps, and talking to your super gay gay friends, that your heart decided that this stupid (but wonderful) person had to be the one.

Through the soreness, you content yourself with being their friend. You watch their romantic misadventures, encourage them in their opposite-sex (ew) pursuits, and watch them entangle themselves with so many different people who have so many different ways of not treating them right. And it makes you a little sad, because you know that you would.

And you can’t get over them. And you can’t find someone else, because you ARE ALREADY IN LOVE. But it’s fine, you’re fine, we’re fine.