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The living room was dark, the only light coming from the TV.

I was alone, even though I was married and had three children sleeping only a room or two away. I felt a mixture of shame, anxiety, longing and desire.

In some ways, attraction and desire feel almost like anxiety, don't they?

When you want something so badly but you know you can't have it, that feeling of longing feels good in some ways, the imagining, the fantasy, the allowing yourself to live another life in your head. But there is also a sense of panic that comes from the gap between what you want and what you have.

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The fantasy I was imagining was one where Mae Martin and I were lovers, like her on-screen relationship with her girlfriend George in the show Feel Good.

That was what I wanted.

What I had was a husband, three children and a mortgage.

I knew that a part of me wasn't straight. I wanted to explore what being with a woman might be like, but I would probably live the rest of my life in a straight marriage and never experience it. 

That was a feeling like grief. I told myself what I had was pretty good, and anyway, don't most fantasies not turn out as well as we imagine they would?

Not to mention, when I actually pictured going down on a woman, it kind of turned me on, but I also thought it might be a bit gross — isn't that what men always said, the way every man who had ever gone down on me had made it clear it was for MY enjoyment, and I should be grateful?

Two years later, I was at dinner with my friends. I was different.

I had left my marriage.

I was in therapy. I had lost weight. I had a tattoo. I was happy. 

My friends and I were discussing our celebrity crushes.  My friends said Chris Hemsworth or Henry Cavill. I said mine was Mae Martin — they were surprised.

They knew I wasn't straight, but I think we all still thought I was mostly straight. After all, I loved men. I was sleeping with a new one every week. I was sucking up all that validation and empowerment, and I was fuelled by it. I felt hot.

That night, I walked up to a guy at the party and said to him, "I'm calling an uber in 10 minutes, do you want to come with me?". 

He looked like he'd just found a winning lotto ticket in his pocket. I couldn't really remember the sex, I'd had so many drinks.

I had a few dates with women but nothing got past the first one. Dating women felt harder than men.

Until I met Lauren. 

When Lauren kissed me, I was struck by how soft she was, her face so small compared to the men I had been kissing.

Hands went inside jeans, and I noticed that I had never enjoyed touching another body so much.

Just brushing my fingers along her waist was insanely pleasurable.  I couldn't stop thinking about it for the entire week. It wasn't fireworks, but it was something that felt fundamentally totally different to sex all my adult life.

There were so many realisations that cracked my head open over the next few months.

I had always thought something was a little wrong about how I loved my husband and how I had loved men before. I thought maybe I was missing the capacity to love like I knew my friends loved their husbands. I thought it was a deficit in me.

They genuinely held their husbands hearts in their hands and treated them with love and care. Having my husband's heart felt a little bit like another job to take care of.

I knew intellectually that gay people loved each other the same way straight people do, but I didn't understand it.

All the talk about queer people was about queer sex. When people talked about lesbians in high school it was about how disgusting it was. When I fantasised about women, I thought about their bodies, not their hearts. 

Sometimes, like when we bought our new car from an adorable older lesbian couple, I would think, in another life, I wouldn't mind that, they seem happy. Happier than I am. But I never really thought about how I could truly love another woman until I realised I was falling in love with one.

All the signs were the same as when I'd fallen in love with men.

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The constant thinking about her, every thought featured Lauren in some way. I would drive for an hour to only see her for two (which we always spent in her bed).

We were like teenagers — except I'd never experienced that insatiable desire to consume another person's body with my body before. We couldn't keep our hands off each other, and we talked about everything — we knew each other on a level I hadn't known my husband who I was married to for 14 years.  

It surprised me, that I was falling in love with her the same way I'd fallen in love with men. I hadn't honestly considered this. All I had been after was to explore my sexuality. I didn't realise my heart would be explored too.

For the first time in my life, sex wasn't a performance. I wasn't wanting her to choose me, or like me, all I thought about was how much I liked her, liked her body, felt a desire to just have her body as close to my body as I physically could. How sleeping next to her felt like a sacred experience.

For the first time in my life, I enjoyed kissing and didn't see it as an annoying pre-cursor to actual sex. I could kiss her for hours.  

Every time I touched Lauren, the first few weeks we were together, there was literally a voice in my head saying, "this is right, this is right, this is right".

I started to feel uncomfortable when I said I was bisexual, that didn't feel right anymore.

The experience of being with men felt nothing like being with Lauren. It felt like I had grown up thinking the best prize in life was to have a man choose me, and I had been so skilled at winning that prize that somehow it was tied up in my identity, but there was a deficit there.

Something was missing — true desire and truly genuine deep romantic love. I finally voiced to Lauren about four months into our relationship a thought that had been bothering me, that I had been unsure about.

"Babe, this is going to sound so weird, because I don't think it's possible to be 36 and not know this until now, but I think maybe I'm gay, not bisexual."

It turns out, "late in life lesbian" is a whole movement (it's very on brand for me to jump on something that's popular). I'm not the only one who has experienced this. While I know sexuality can be fluid, I feel pretty close to certain that I'll never touch a man's body again, and to be honest, it's a relief to know I don't have to. 

Mae Martin is non-binary now, and I loved watching them in Wayward on Netflix with Lauren recently. They still don't stir up those feelings anymore, but I'm actually pretty grateful to them for being part of my awakening.

Feature Image: Supplied.