Dannielle Says:
I think I’m getting old, it took me five minutes to figure out that ‘BFD’ meant ‘BIG F-ING DEAL’…or freaking…right?
You just have to be patient, put on your TLC (tender loving care) gloves and as delicately as possible talk to her about it. The thing that’s difficult about your love’s coming out issssssss…you can suggest things, you can tell her about your past, you can hold her when she cries ETC ETC, but you can’t REALLY do a ton; you can’t force her to come out, you can’t tell her what to say, you can’t change her feelings, you can’t tell her when to come out or how to do it or where… you just have to be there for her. It’s hard, it is VERY hard, regardless of situation or age, coming out is a BFD #seewhatididthere and it’s a lot easier when you have the support of a loved one.
Coming out isn’t supposed to be a cake walk, you don’t win an upside down pineapple cake for landing on three at the end of it #cakewalk #right? Remind her of that. Tell her it isn’t going to be easy and she doesn’t have to pretend she’s okay. It’s completely okay for her to feel lost and confused and crazy. Tell her that you want to be her escape from thinking about it all the time.
Make her laugh, do dumb stuff together, cuddle and make her mix cds. Try to be the thing that doesn’t stress her out even more. ANNNDD communicate to her that that’s totally what you’re trying to do. Don’t try to shut her up if she wants to talk, but remind her that you guys are really fun and cute, and that’s what you love about her. Tell her one day it’ll make sense, soon it’ll be a tiny bit easier and as soon as it is, she’s going to feel a million times better. EVEN MORE SO, as often as possible, she can escape for a moment to giggle at Family Guy and bury her head in your shoulder.
You’re her girlfriend first, you know?
Kristin Says:
Patience in the morning, patience in the evenin’, patience at suppertime…when patience on a bagel you can eat patience anytime…
You guys. Those are the lyrics to the Bagel Bites’ commercial from the 1990s, but I took out the word ‘pizza’ and replaced it with ‘patience’. No big deal.
Moving on to the part where I say something intelligent.
You not only need to have patience with her through this process, but you also need to encourage her to have patience with herself (hence all those times mentioned above where patience was had). What is probably happening in this situation is that, instead of you being able to help her bounce out of her hole #thatswhatshesaid, you might be getting frustrated by her frustration…and that just makes things go downhill.
It’s like, if she comes into your dorm room and crawls into bed and is like, “I CAN’T DO THIS. I just totally flipped out in my Psych class and couldn’t remember anything I studied because all I was thinking about the whole time was that my mom is going to disown me and that I will never have a baby that looks like my husband,” and then YOU say, “I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH YOU, YOU ARE FLIPPING OUT ALL THE TIME,” then she is going to…well, keep flipping out all the time.
If, however, you can just act as her little lilypad of sanity, and you rub her back and say, “Hey boo, I want to tell you something, okay? We need to take this one day at a time. You will do better on your next psych test, because I will help you study by showing you my boobs every time you get something right…and you don’t have to tell your mom until your ready…and I will make sure our kid can burp the alphabet just like me, okay?” …then she might cry more because she doesn’t want a burping baby, or she might laugh, but either way you haven’t let her drag you down, and that alone will help her begin to see that things aren’t as dark as they seem.
Now I must go find a pizza bagel.
Anonymous
