This is a confession of a girl who had been laughed at and ostracised by her friends in college because they believed that she was a lesbian. Per the rules of our loose nonmonogamous agreement, I FaceTimed with my partner about what was happening on the cruise, first telling them about the catamaran girl and then, in so many words, about Lynette. I was so upset that she was going out of her way to not be around me and was giving all her attention to this woman. Fuck ’em,” the girl said, grabbing for me again, but I wrestled my way out, burning with embarrassment at the prospect of facing a bunch of people who’d know exactly what we’d been doing.

I would feel horrible, hurting a person I cared for, even though I was certain they wouldn’t be able to care for me in the years ahead in the way I needed them to — someone who I suspected, ultimately, wanted different things. Hearst UK is the trading name of the National Magazine Company Ltd, 30 Panton Street, Leicester Square, London, SW1Y 4AJ. The three of us were, for the first few minutes, the only people in the room — we’d commandeered the nightclub during daylight hours — but slowly, a crowd of around 20 other people trickled in.

Women from smaller cities thought Olivia could do a better job marketing outside of New York, San Francisco, and LA: “A lot of gay people don’t live in those places. We both like Justin Bieber, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, babies, spicy foods, and romantic comedies, as well as traveling, swimming, dressing up, having sex, being tall, biking (“cycling,” she’d say), and making detailed plans well ahead of time. So this has been going on for about a year and a half with this new job of mine, and in the past 5 months, we have added the baby into the mix. A couple women had GoPro cameras, with which we took a lot of increasingly drunken group shots while we swam.

Plus, most importantly (and most obviously), the word “lesbian” quite literally describes what I am: a woman who loves women in both a feminist way and a super-gay way. She became really good friends with another girl from our gym and they started hanging out and texting a lot. One of the guys running the boat, a youngish dude with dreads, took pity on me and brought me a glass of water. But as the week went on, with everybody’s hormones skyrocketing, things started to get plenty weird.

By that, I mean b-o-i kinds of boys (who may or may not identify as such): nonbinary dykes, twinky tops, Titanic -era Leo DiCaprios.

Before meeting Lynette, she of the multiple grooming products, I’d gotten used to dating people whose own beauty routines consisted of, if anything, 3-in-1 body wash. As we slipped back into our oversize robes, a staff member encouraged us to relax out on the spa’s lawn chairs.My lesbian friends and I have often complained about how much easier it is for our gay guy friends to hook up with abandon — they have way more bars, and they all have back rooms! The women who’ve faithfully gone on dozens of Olivia trips over the decades are getting older, and I didn’t have a lot of faith that younger queer people were going to step in and save companies like this from extinction.

That became the familiar approval message once staff learned of our relationship status, though many seemed to completely misread why two women from New York were traveling together. Not only because I had no intention of falling in love with anyone else, but because I thought hooking up with hot older butches would remain the stuff of my fantasies. The thought of touching her never crossed my mind although we stood next to each other for thirty long minutes under a shower. Lying in bed one night, talking about a hypothetical world in which we could be together outside the dreamy vacation twilight zone we currently occupied, Lynette scooped me up in her arms, kissed my neck, and said, half joking, half serious, that she’d happily be my big, strong butch. I’d been wandering around the ship with some nice older British ladies, one of whom I was almost-but-not-quite-flirting with, when they stopped to chat with Lynette, a fellow Brit.I’d failed to pack ahead for any of the themed nights (including a very culturally questionable “Caribbean Queen” theme), so I fretted about what I’d wear, especially when Lynette showed up at my door wearing a goddamned tuxedo. This was the early aughts, when absolutely no appropriate lesbian television shows or movies or really even books for girls my age existed. Also speaking before Elvira was Rachel Wahba, Olivia’s cofounder, who told us the story of the original record company’s fateful pivot to travel: Olivia president and founder, Judy Dlugacz, wanted to offer a cruise to the women who’d so faithfully bought Olivia albums and concert tickets over the years, but there weren’t a lot of cruise companies eager to charter a boat to a bunch of lesbians. Meanwhile I found out that she was getting in trouble at work for being too friendly with this lesbian woman and all her other work friends. This was Dana’s first Olivia cruise too, though she’d been working for a while as the company’s content strategist.