One of the most common things I’ve been asked ever since I started dating women is this:

“What’s with women that you didn’t see in men?”

This question always gets me confused. It implies that the first and foremost criteria I should have for dating is biological sex: whether a person is a man or a woman. It assumes a certain failure in my quest for love with the opposite sex which led me to look for it in my own gender. It also hints at a unique and exclusive quality in females that males lack. I’ve never known how to answer it.

Now let me tell you about her.

At that time in my life, I didn’t have any concept of straight or bisexual or gay. I didn’t want to date anyone; I thought holding hands was icky, and don’t even get me started about kissing or sex. I had plenty of friends and I was adamant that I won’t let a single person monopolize my affection or time.

So when our friendship started, I was unprepared for what happened eventually.

We talked for hours late into the night and woke up early the next morning so we could start talking again. We talked mostly about nothing, always about everything. I told her the things I couldn’t tell anyone else and she did the same to me. I let her hold my hand that day we were walking down the street and there were so many people it was hard to keep up with each other. She kissed me that night I was on the verge of a break down and her stubborn self wouldn’t let me shatter alone. We fell so hard that gravity was almost non-existent.

I learned how to trust to the point of intimacy. I found that I could spend hours and days with a single person and still want more. I found happiness in falling asleep beside her knowing that her face is the first thing I’ll see in the morning. We met each other’s families and friends, always with a sense of pride and excitement at being able to say, “Hey, this is my girlfriend.” I realized what it felt like to hurt for another person and to see her tears and want to move the whole world just to make her happy again. We made plans and the future became one my favorite things to be in.

It ended up being one of the first relationships I had and I learned so many things from it. The thing is, I never thought that I was falling for a woman, specifically. I was falling for her. Only her. You could have paraded all the beautiful girls in campus in front of me, and I wouldn’t have given a fuck. I saw her and her alone, and wanted no one else.

My story is personal, but it is not original. What I felt has been felt by people a thousand years ago and will still be felt a thousand years after. This is true because our stories of love, though the details and circumstances may vary, will always be universal. Ultimately, falling in love has nothing to do with gender because love is gender blind.

Falling is such a sudden thing, it won’t even give you time to think about what’s (literally) in his or her pants. You fall and the story begins.

Have you had this feeling in your life before? Who is he? What’s her name?

“What’s with women that you didn’t see with men?”

I know it’s annoying to answer a question with another question, but if you want the right answers, you have to ask the right things. When you are asking people about love, the final question should be:

“What’s with that person that you didn’t see with anyone else?”

And in such a massive universe, it’s always a lucky thing to be able to have an answer to that.