Hi! I've come across your girlfriend tag, and I don't know if someone already asked it in the past, but would you mind share your story? How did you two meet, how did you realize you were a couple etc. Also, if you're comfortable with it, please share a picture of the two of you! :)
Hello, and welcome! :D
So the girlfriend and I are actually high school sweethearts! Our story often gets described as lesbian enemies-to friends-to lovers highschool AU, and - what can I say? It kinda fits. XD
Her name is Jill. She’s nine months older than I am. I was born in June 1987, she in September 1986.
The school year starts in September for us, so often children who are born in September get to stay in Kindergarten a year longer than others, which was also the case for her.
So I started high school in 1999, at age 12, alongside Jill. We didn’t know each other previously. I came from a background with a very strict abusive father, and high school was...how can I say? It was the place where I could escape his supervision, where I could let loose. I was a pretty bright kid, so I showed off like crazy, tried to make friends real fast, and to have fun in general. I was super annoying tbh. XD
Jill had been more like that in elementary school, so she had decided since she was joining the Grown Ups™ (pfffft), she would become all serious and study hard and focus (mostly) on only that.
I was the art and language kid. She was the science kid.
We clashed like waves on a rock. We hated each other during that first year; we even got into a legit fist fight with each other, in which she trashed my glasses, lol.
She failed that class and had to retake the year because she was shit at French...and I failed the following year and had to retake it because I was shit at Maths, so we ended up back together in the same class. That was when I was fourteen, and that was when the teacher put us next to each other, and we pulled out the very same book out of our backpacks to read during recess.
We bonded over Star Trek and Harry Potter. As soon as we noticed that we had common interests, we began opening up to each other - reluctantly, but still. Come spring, we were already inseparable friends, and she invited me to visit her father in Switzerland.
Turns out she likes modern art, and French poetry (poetry in general), and traditional Chinese music. She approaches cooking with such a scientific scrutiny that she was, for a while, convinced the Rules Of Cooking were never to be broken, lest the kitchen might explode (adding more spice than written on the package? Add salt to taste? Unthinkable! Also I like Arabic cuisine and she can’t handle spicy stuff, so yeah).
Turns out she has warm eyes and does laugh much if you know what jokes to pull.
(That was the year we became a couple, on a school trip to Germany. She wore her hair short and dyed red back there, and I was way slimmer, lol. I was fifteen, she was sixteen.)
Now the year after, when I was fifteen, things changed. Our high school was an all-girls school (they do accept boys too since a couple of years), and many of the girls were early bloomers and had their first boyfriends and crushes, picking them up after classes. She and I, we were still single, and joked around that we could still date each other, if we wouldn’t find a boy for us to date. We didn’t think much of it at the time.
If I was already feeling something back then, I was totally oblivious. No idea at all. If she was already feeling something, she never let it transpire.
Then we went on a short trip to the Netherlands in February. She, her mum, her cousin, and me. The cottage had two rooms with a double bed in each, and her cousin shared a bed with her mum, and Jill shared a bed with me. We proceeded to talk until the wee hours of the morning each night.
The night before we were scheduled to drive home, she asked me whether I had ever thought about kissing a girl. I replied that I had not, and that I had, in fact, never kissed anyone in my life. She asked if I would be willing to try. I said: “Sure, why not?”
We both hesitated, but she was bolder than me, and kissed me.
I - it’s hard to describe what happened. It’s as someone had flipped a switch, and everything fell into place, as it always should have been. It’s like I had seen the world in black and white only, and suddenly everything was bright and colourful and saturated. That was when I realised I was in love, and that’s when she did too.
It was the morning of February 17th, at around 02:15 am, 17 years ago as I am typing this in June 2020.
We were both...unsure about how to proceed, but we decided we would just let everything run its natural course. If this was to end in a month, so be it; if it was to last longer, so be it. I was terrified to let anything show at home, because my father was that kind of person who told me to my face that “people like that” should be, in his opinion, “lined up against a wall and shot one by one” - he died before he could find out. There were definetely things we had to learn, like - we used to be glued at the hip in the beginning, but I sometimes need some time to myself, just to think and reflect and breathe. In the beginning, whenever I requested that time, Jill thought I didn’t enjoy her company, or that I was angry with her. It took a while for her to realise that she was allowed to request time on her own, too. These days, we do many things together, but not everything. Sometimes we sit in the same room, and do wildly different things at the same time. I can completely be myself with her.
I’ve never looked back. Never regretted anything. I fall in love again and again each time we meet.
There aren’t many pictures of the two of us together, for reasons we both cannot comprehend, but there’s a selfie of me, and below it there’s a picture I took of her last September, on the train to the Steampunk Festival (hence the costume). It’s one of my favourites.