‘Real-Life Love Stories’ #3: Thanks Twitter and Butchlesque!

This is the third instalment of Lesbian.com’s Valentine’s Love Special, Real-Life Love Stories! Every week, we will be posting love stories submitted by our readers. Want to share your story?

Meet Barbara and Jake, currently living in Florida. Jake was a performer with Butchlesque, a performance troupe driven by music-and-fashion that explores female masculinity as interpreted by butch and masculine-of-center women. Barbara, the writer behind FemmeFairyGodmother, was instantly smitten.

Jake, left, and Barbara.

Jake and I met through Twitter. My friend Kim is the producer for a show called Butchlesque. In May, I was looking at the contestants for the show as she put up the pictures. I saw Jake’s picture and tweeted Kim: “Holy hot butch, Kim! Who is THAT?” She told me that Jake was single and on twitter, so I followed her. We started to chat a little, then she DMed me. We then started talking on the phone, every night, for hours. We lived 1300 miles apart so we had to talk on the phone to get to know one another.

In July, Jake had a business trip to Chicago and I joined her for the week. We had an amazing time! We continued talking and started video chatting. I flew to Florida twice to visit, met her friends and experienced bits of her life.

I got a new job in August, so I expected to stay in Michigan for at least three years. As luck would have it, things went to hell in a handbasket at my job and I decided to leave after 8 weeks. Jake and I talked about it and decided that we didn’t really want to wait for three years… so I packed up and moved to Sarasota, FL at the end of October.

I was putting a lot of faith in Jake and it could have been disastrous. It hasn’t been. The thing that let me know this was the right choice and the right person was that I didn’t have one single misgiving, not one red flag. It wasn’t a case of me ignoring the red flags, either. They just weren’t there. I’ve had relationships where I wasn’t able to be authentically me, for whatever reason. In this one, I decided I was just going to be exactly who I am, good, bad, ugly and she’d either fall in love or she wouldn’t. She did! She says it’s the same for her. I feel passion, excitement and love and at the same time calm, loving, and connected. As soon as we met in person, we knew.

I think that those weeks of talking on the phone for hours was the key for being sure of this relationship. We got to know each other in a way that we might not have if we were in person because, let’s face it, sex frequently gets in the way.

We’re spending this new part of our relationship building a strong foundation. We have very similar values and needs and we wanted the same thing from a relationship. We both needed romance to be accompanied by a friendship that is deeper than that. That’s exactly what we got.

I’m a loud-mouth femme and the child of southerners (which explains a lot about me, I’m told). Jake is an old-school Southern butch, IT professional, mother of 2 and a poet.