There’s something that happens often within the lesbian community, and it’s called the “love-hate-love-hate-love-HATE” relationship.

This particular post has nothing to do with romantic relationships, though we all know the same label applies to those.

Once one has been caught in a particular web of a certain lifestyle, it’s extremely difficult to a) get over it, and b) get out of it. Let’s look back on the story of a friend of mine (let’s call her Jane, and if your name is Jane, that’s purely coincidental): Jane discovered the wonder of a certain gay Bar, and a certain gay community, shortly after a breakup, and was immediately sucked in. It was fun, it was free, and it was … dramatic. But the amount of drama didn’t hit Jane at first.

So Jane spent every night, for the next couple of months, hanging out with her new friends at the Bar. She didn’t have to think about anything – it was kind of a release after the stress of “real life” – and therefore neglected other things that otherwise would have played a large part in her existence, namely her old, dependable group of friends.

Jane moved to the same area as all of her new friends. She took a liking to its location and the fact that she could now party all the time, given that the Bar was less than a three-minute drive from her apartment. She started realizing the drama that the bar created, the anger and resentment and ridiculous arguments. She realized that people were not only talking about other people they knew, but they were also talking about her as well.

Jane was laid off from her job for three months – conveniently just in time for summer. Jane learned how to budget her unemployment money so that it paid for rent, bills, and booze, the only things she cared about at the time. And it worked well! Whenever she got bored after applying for many, many jobs, she would head over to the Bar and get tipsy by dinnertime. Afterwards, she would grab some fast food, head home, shower, and then head back to the Bar for the night. She would often have parties at her house after the Bar was closed, to which, thank goodness, cops were never called as her neighbor worked nights. She would invite the same people who talked shit about her, knowing that she herself had been sucked into the same “she said, she said” mold of the others.

Fast-forward a year later: Jane is in a comfortable, monogamous relationship, and lives over twenty miles from the Bar. She has a fantastic job and a very happy home life. And she has cut out all of the drama-filled, angry Bar friends in her life. But she still suffers the ramifications of being stuck in that mold for a long time: she has gained about thirty pounds, is still (in a weird way) intrigued by a lot of the drama (after all, she can find all the dirt on Facebook), and, when she’s bored at night, still thinks of the Bar.

I know a lot of us have very close-knit groups of friends, or at least groups of acquaintances, who are well-read, have good jobs, and can maintain a very interesting conversation about current events, social topics, and so forth. But there is a large number of lesbians whose sole purpose in life is to relish the thought of judging others, though their own lives, when looked at from “outside the bubble,” are hardly impressive and, likely, are just downright sad.

Am I preaching to the choir, or is Jane’s story common with most lesbians?