Dec 17, 2004  |  By: Meryl Cohn  | COMMENTS     

Dear Ms. Behavior:
I am a lesbian looking forward with nervous excitement to attending my 15th year high school reunion. Unlike many of my gay friends, I had a great time in high school. I was a cheerleader, had boyfriends, played sports, and was even homecoming queen.

My girlfriend Margo refuses to go to the reunion with me. She’s a bit older and went to her reunion a long time ago and hated it. She says my so-called friends will not be as perky and happy to see me as I am to see them. She says they are straight and suburban and “not very imaginative.”

I expect to connect with them intellectually and emotionally, even though many years have passed. But Margo says I will need to prepare myself for disappointment, and she seems judgmental that I want to go.

Margo was a bit of a stoner/outcast in high school and I think she still takes it all too personally. She seems to want me to be hurt and angry like she is. She’s told me straight out that she’d prefer I stay home with her because I’m in for a sorry awakening.

What do you think? Should I press Margo to go with me? Should I expect a warm welcome, or should I stay home with Margo and stew in my sour lesbian juices?
Queen in 1989

Dear Queen:
If you feel compelled to attend your high school reunion, dust off your pom-poms and go, but don’t drag your recovering-outcast girlfriend with you. Let Margo stay home and relive her unhappy high school memories, perhaps after smoking some weed and eating a few fluffernutters.

Don’t expect your reunion to feel like a homecoming. You may have fond memories of wearing your tiara and presiding over the prom, but if you were doing the nasty with boys back then, you probably weren’t quite the same person as you are now.

Despite your fantasy, reunions are not typically a place where people connect at a deep level. (For this experience, you must enroll in yoga camp or a tantric sex workshop.) Your old friends will probably squeal a bit and then comment on everyone’s hair and weight and children, but you probably won’t get much intellectual or spiritual camaraderie from your old pals.

Try not to be crushed if people don’t remember you, perhaps because you used to pluck your eyebrows and don’t anymore.

If you do have a lousy time you can praise Margo for being right. Then, as a healing exercise, you can write a little essay in your blog about visiting the foreign land of your somber adolescent past. Aching disappointment and hazy adolescent memories are the stuff that blogs and memoirs are made of.

Dear Ms. Behavior:
My girlfriend Andrea left me a few months ago because I’m ready to have a baby and she’s not. It wasn’t an impulsive decision; we’ve discussed it endlessly and we’re just in different places. I’m sad about losing Andrea, but I understand how she feels. We ended it well, for what that’s worth.

Now I’ve lined up a sperm donor (through a sperm bank), and I’ve changed my job enough to accommodate childcare. I’m a little apprehensive about doing it alone. This isn’t exactly what I’d imagined, but I’m basically ready.

The problem is that I’m suddenly meeting all kinds of resistance from my mother and my friends, who are begging me not to rush, as if I’m 25 and haven’t spent the last 10 years talking about having a baby. They are warning me that a baby will put the kibosh on any romantic possibility I might have for the future.

I hope that’s not true. But if I were pushed to make a choice, I’d probably choose the baby over some theoretical girlfriend. Am I crazy? Should I listen to my mother and wait a few months?
Nervous

Dear Nervous:
Don’t let your mother’s spinster fears influence your decision. Your plan hardly sounds impulsive, and you can’t exactly put your life on hold while waiting for a new partner to ring your buzzer.

Besides, a baby isn’t quite the scourge on a relationship that some people like to imagine. Many of your luscious lesbian ...