I saw a tweet once where a gay woman said something like "We (LGBTQ people) smoke so much weed because we are gay." In other words her drug use was about coping with homophobia and unaccepting relatives, etc.
I think date rape is strongly associated with alcohol use in part because a lot of heterosexual women don't really know what they want. Men initiate and women say "yes" or "no." We women tend to not be the pursuers.
So to some degree, because men usually do the asking, other people decide for us whom we get with. Women may not even know what their "type" is or even if they have "a type."
If you are LGBTQ, you may have more or less the same issue, but cubed. If you can't even admit to yourself that you like people of the same sex without first being high or something, how do you explore what kind of people might turn your head?
What if you have been deeply closeted for years and possibly pretending to be straight? What now?
During my divorce, I was trying to do something similar in terms of my romantic prospects. I was trying to make sure I did not eliminate men before they could even ask or before the "interview" stage of establishing a relationship.
I wanted to at least hear if they were interested without inadvertently turning them away before they even asked and I also wanted to talk to them enough to decide based on their merits rather than have the selection process unduly influenced by superficial traits like hair color. Firsthand experience had taught me that if I mentioned the hair color of my ex, men with his hair color reacted like "I'm in like Flynn" and men with another hair color acted like kicked puppies who had just been pre-rejected.
So I made an effort to scrub my speech habits clean as much as possible of references to the personal characteristics of my husband and other previous romantic partners. I tried to not mention things like hair color, eye color, age, height, weight, physical build, education level, career field, hobbies and other particulars.
Prior to this experiment, men I got involved with were typically blond haired Caucasian Americans, very close in age to me and in the military. During my divorce, I broke this pattern and saw men of a variety of ages, nationalities, ethnicities and career fields.
New patterns emerged, at least in my mind. Rather than seeing myself as "dating blonds," I saw myself as dating well-traveled, cosmopolitan types who typically either spoke more than one language or played a musical instrument.
If you are LGBTQ and don't know what you like or want in a romantic partner, I encourage you to make a conscious effort to not accidentally signal to other people what you are looking for. Think long and hard about what you do wish to signal and work at scrubbing your speech habits clean of anything that could be misconstrued to mean "I am looking for X, Y and Z" when you aren't.
Maybe start a journal and try to define what you are looking for. Perhaps you should define it experientially, such as "I am looking for short-term fun." or "I am looking to meet a variety of people and find out what I like."
If you tell people what you are looking for, you will likely get more of that. You just may not realize that other people likely already think you are telling them what you are looking for when you talk about past experiences casually.
If those past relationships don't represent what you want, I highly recommend you simply shut up about them as much as you can. Otherwise you may keep waking up to the same pattern of relationship no matter how many people you date because people will react to your remarks and either ask you out or not based on sometimes trivial details shared as part of a silly anecdote because that's all they know about your tastes in romantic partners.
I think date rape is strongly associated with alcohol use in part because a lot of heterosexual women don't really know what they want. Men initiate and women say "yes" or "no." We women tend to not be the pursuers.
So to some degree, because men usually do the asking, other people decide for us whom we get with. Women may not even know what their "type" is or even if they have "a type."
If you are LGBTQ, you may have more or less the same issue, but cubed. If you can't even admit to yourself that you like people of the same sex without first being high or something, how do you explore what kind of people might turn your head?
What if you have been deeply closeted for years and possibly pretending to be straight? What now?
The Rooney Rule is a National Football League policy that requires league teams to interview ethnic-minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation jobs.The Rooney Rulle was instituted to counteract the fact that minorities were being eliminated prior to the interview stage, leading to a strong racial bias in who got hired.
During my divorce, I was trying to do something similar in terms of my romantic prospects. I was trying to make sure I did not eliminate men before they could even ask or before the "interview" stage of establishing a relationship.
I wanted to at least hear if they were interested without inadvertently turning them away before they even asked and I also wanted to talk to them enough to decide based on their merits rather than have the selection process unduly influenced by superficial traits like hair color. Firsthand experience had taught me that if I mentioned the hair color of my ex, men with his hair color reacted like "I'm in like Flynn" and men with another hair color acted like kicked puppies who had just been pre-rejected.
So I made an effort to scrub my speech habits clean as much as possible of references to the personal characteristics of my husband and other previous romantic partners. I tried to not mention things like hair color, eye color, age, height, weight, physical build, education level, career field, hobbies and other particulars.
Prior to this experiment, men I got involved with were typically blond haired Caucasian Americans, very close in age to me and in the military. During my divorce, I broke this pattern and saw men of a variety of ages, nationalities, ethnicities and career fields.
New patterns emerged, at least in my mind. Rather than seeing myself as "dating blonds," I saw myself as dating well-traveled, cosmopolitan types who typically either spoke more than one language or played a musical instrument.
If you are LGBTQ and don't know what you like or want in a romantic partner, I encourage you to make a conscious effort to not accidentally signal to other people what you are looking for. Think long and hard about what you do wish to signal and work at scrubbing your speech habits clean of anything that could be misconstrued to mean "I am looking for X, Y and Z" when you aren't.
Maybe start a journal and try to define what you are looking for. Perhaps you should define it experientially, such as "I am looking for short-term fun." or "I am looking to meet a variety of people and find out what I like."
If you tell people what you are looking for, you will likely get more of that. You just may not realize that other people likely already think you are telling them what you are looking for when you talk about past experiences casually.
If those past relationships don't represent what you want, I highly recommend you simply shut up about them as much as you can. Otherwise you may keep waking up to the same pattern of relationship no matter how many people you date because people will react to your remarks and either ask you out or not based on sometimes trivial details shared as part of a silly anecdote because that's all they know about your tastes in romantic partners.