the feminine urge to kiss other women

i tasted her again last night

When I knew, for the first time, that I wanted to kiss another woman, I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. It was familiar, but foreign. I discovered it in an almost split second while she was looking intently at me with what I recognised as hunger in her eyes. It stirred something inside of me, in the pit of my belly, that I knew meant we were going to kiss. Not in the premeditated way I’d felt so many times before with men, but in a more instinctive way; like something I suddenly just knew.

A few days later, we found ourselves in a storage closet—an irony that isn’t lost on me—making out like our lives depended on it. It was hunger like I’d never felt it. Soft, but intense. A yearning, somehow natural but never practised. Although it was a sexual act, I didn’t feel sexualised in the way I’d come to expect. I found myself wondering if I’d ever really been turned on by men, or if I’d just been going through the motions.

I wanted to gobble her whole. Breathe her in. Press her body into mine hard enough that we would become one, but gentle enough that she’d feel taken care of.

It felt magic in the way that things do before you know that they exist. I’d never imagined myself mouth to mouth with a woman for my own pleasure. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that it was an option—unless it was a one-off performance to impress boys at high school parties. I’d learnt to perform queerness, not to live inside it. No one had ever told me it could be a choice—not the stories I read, or the love stories happening around me. My parents had lesbian friends, but they didn’t look like me. And they didn’t make me feel this kind of guttural yearning, so I assumed I wasn’t one for kissing girls.

It just wasn’t something I’d thought about really, until her eye contact asked something of me I couldn’t ignore.

Since that moment I’ve learnt a lot about myself and about sexuality in general.

I learnt that I find some women undeniably attractive. That sexuality is not a linear thing. That you can be into people for who they are, for their energy—rather than their gender. That there’s so much more to discover within ourselves if we’re open to our sexuality taking on forms we never imagined, unfamiliar in ways we couldn’t have predicted, and probably a little scared of at first.

I’d always imagined myself with boys and men partly because I was raised in a Catholic Italian family and that was the norm, but also because it was the social and cultural story. Boys had crushes on girls and girls had crushes on boys. Especially feminine girls who liked to cook and whose favourite colour was pink. I was one of those girls.

To imagine myself with a woman felt surreal. Like it just wasn’t possible. But when I first kissed a girl, it became abundantly clear that, in fact, it very much was.

scarlett johansson and penélope cruz kissing in the darkroom. vicky christina barcelona (2008)

I spent the next couple of years exploring my sexuality. I embarked on a years-long on-again-off-again relationship—which I’m told is very lesbian—with the girl who first stirred my desire for women, and found myself in incense-filled bedrooms and dive bar bathroom stalls, making out with women of all varieties. I felt like I’d rediscovered intimacy all over again, as something entirely new.

There was the woman with the pink hair I’d known for years, whose energy toward me I’d never quite understood (turns out she wanted to make out). The stern older woman I worked for, who never gave me the good shifts (she later told me had a crush on me, and didn’t want us rostered together for the sake of her professionalism). The girl behind the bar at one of my favourite local haunts, who always glared at me with what I thought was disapproval—when really, she was devouring me with her eyes.

I went beyond the surface with these women, too. Found myself in their beds. Going down on them. Touching the softest parts of their bodies with a familiarity. It felt natural and strangely familiar, like I was touching my own. I constantly surprised myself with knowing exactly what I was doing, how to touch them, where to apply pressure, where to kiss their neck, where they wanted to be grabbed, when to be hard and when to be soft, what to ask them in moments of intense emotion, how to compliment them without sounding corny. It was like I was stepping into a role I already knew the lines to. An art form. A poetry.

I found that I could be both hard and soft. In some cases, with more masculine women, I was submissive; took on more of a feminine-feeling roll. In others, with women who were physically smaller than me, I took a more dominant role. Told them what to do, held them in place. I found intimate parts of myself I’d never exercised with men. I found real vulnerability. I started learning how to communicate better during, before and after sex. They asked me questions about ‘what I liked’ that no one had ever asked me before, and so I started to think about my answers. Why did I like to be choked sometimes? Did I always need penetration to cum? What were my fantasies outside of heteronormative sexual intercourse? They introduced me to other ways of pleasuring myself, outside of the sex I’d always known.

Despite bringing a newfound sensuality into my life and uncovering a part of me that had previously laid dormant, being with women didn’t take away from my attraction towards men. I felt less wedded to heteronormativity—literally and figuratively—as a relationship and sexual construct, which came as a bit of a relief from the patriarchal narrative. Still, I found myself drawn to men—especially on a physical level.

I’ve often wondered if my—and other women’s—attraction to men is simply driven by the fact that they make sense to us. They’re easy to navigate in a romantic relationship dynamic, because we’ve been handed a script on how-to. I’ve always found it remarkably easy to seduce men, understand men, get what I want from men. Women feel complicated to me, especially when it comes to longer-term dynamics. I’ve found them challenging in both long-term romantic relationships and platonic friendships. It’s almost like we’re too the same. Too aware, caring and worried about each other to be really honest. Like we’re so afraid of hurting each other that we don’t always know how to say what we mean.

In any case, I’ve ended up in relationships with mostly men. My first love was a man, my most significant ex (together for four years) was a man, and the person I’m currently in love with is also a man. I’ve kissed and slept with a few women in between, some of which have meant a lot to me. But my comfort-zone is men. I love them in a way that feels simple, meant-to-be.

But about every six months or so, sometimes more sometimes less, I find myself yearning to kiss another woman. I’ll wake up feverishly from a dream that involves me and a woman I’ve had a moment with in the past, making up for lost time by devouring each other while I sleep.

It happened just this morning. I dreamt about a girl I kissed before I got into the relationship I’m in now.

She served me at a restaurant one night. I was at the end of a bad relationship and hadn’t been out with friends in months. I’d dressed up—black jumpsuit, red lipstick—and for a few hours, I almost felt like myself again. She served us, her blonde hair in a low bun, her life stories scattered across her arms in the form of stick-and-poke tattoos, visible as she poured our Chablis. I recognised her from a TV show I’d watched the year before, and something had stirred in me then, as it did now. She did her best not to meet my eyes all night. I felt an energy from her that I thought I recognised as attraction, but it had been so long, I doubted myself. Maybe she doesn’t like me at all, I thought. I often confuse the two. And she wasn’t looking at me—what else was I supposed to think?

An hour after we left the restaurant, I had a DM in my message requests. How she found me, I still don’t know—but she told me I was the most beautiful woman she’d ever seen, and so it didn’t matter. We agreed to meet when I got back from Europe. I was pretty sure my boyfriend and I were about to break up, so by the time I returned, I’d be single and free to kiss her. I was right.

the initial DM in question

It took a few failed attempts for us to meet. She ghosted me on our first date. Having just made my way out of a difficult relationship, I wasn’t having it—so I called her out. Politely but with defiance. Told her I’d been looking forward to kissing her and that a lack of comms is both disrespectful and a bit cowardly. It was something I’d put up with plenty of times before and had decided to do no more.

She took it well. Showed up the second time. Told me I was a real woman. Said it was sexy that I’d called her out. She was sorry, she said—but she was going through something complicated, caught in the residue of a toxic dynamic herself. She didn’t know what she wanted.

I forgave her, but I knew then that our kisses wouldn’t amount to anything lasting. We ended up only kissing once—in her car, after our third date—but it was enough to leave me pining. Hence, last night’s dream.

She was soft but firm. There was a hunger in the way she moved her face and body to the rhythm of my own, the way she watched my mouth move as I spoke, the way her hands softly grabbed at my face and shoulders. I could’ve melted into her mouth, like a toffee, slow and sweet, begging to be held on the warmth of her tongue. Dissolving under just enough pressure to make it last. The flavour of our kiss lingered, coating the entire inside of my mouth. I still think about it all the time (in case that wasn’t obvious).

Later, when I met my friend at a bar, I hesitated to order a drink—afraid to wash the taste of her away.

And I still want to remember it, the taste of kissing a woman I’m strongly attracted to. It feels like a part of my identity that I’m afraid will slip away, now that I’m in love with a man I think I might be with forever. I think that fear might be why I dream of women, as a way to experience the softness of feminine intimacy without actually exercising it in real life.

Intimacy with women has always been something I savour. Whether it’s in my dreams or in real life, I’ve never felt the urge to share it with others. Until now, I guess, in this open-love letter of sorts. I might’ve felt confused about it in the past, unsure if it was something that would fade over time, if it would turn into something else. I might’ve felt self-conscious, not as seductive or powerful in a world of feminine intimacy compared to the heteronormative world I fit so intuitively into.

But I’ve been wondering if this urge to kiss women, for softness in intimacy, for things that deviate from the scripts we’ve been told, is something all of us have the capacity for. If all sexuality is, is just this giant spectrum. That we find our place on depending on where we’re at in our life, what’s happened in our past, how our identity is evolving.

Women forming deep and intimate bonds isn’t new. Such connections have been historically referenced as “romantic friendships” or “Boston marriages”, defining emotional—and sometimes physical—closeness between women, that sits outside the bounds of heterosexual relationships. Think of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Iconic women who have meant devastatingly passionate amounts to each other throughout history.

virginia and vita

The specifics of that passion are still open to speculation—but I can keenly imagine. Their bond is a reminder that the feminine intimacy I crave at times, isn’t a deviation. It’s part of a longer, less-documented lineage.

My dreams of women come and go but the desire is always there. At any moment, on the right day with the right mix of pheromones, I might meet a woman who stirs something inside of me that will lead me to thinking about kissing her. It’s not something that takes away from my relationship with the man I’m in love with, but simply a part of my sexual identity.

I’ve shared this part of myself with him; even slept with a woman with him before. I predict that’s something we’ll do again—quite soon, I think. It’s not something to be ashamed of, to hide, or to try and fully understand. I feel lucky to have experienced it.

To know pleasure outside the bounds of what I thought was possible.