I have a customer who pays me to sit on cam, and just drink water until I can’t stand it any longer and need to pee myself.

I would go straight to my friend Dom’s house, not even stopping at home to shower first, where I told him that I was, indeed, having a quarter-life crisis. I would try to separate my feelings for Lynette from my feelings about wanting someone or something different in general — out of a desperate desire to feel some sort of control over my choices — and concede that was pretty much impossible.She’s a true Pisces — romantic and dreamy and always processing. (My Capricorn groundedness makes us a good match, allegedly.) She’s known she was gay since she was 5 years old. Her mom still prays that, someday, she’ll find herself a good man. When we boarded, Dana introduced me to the adorable boomer-millennial pair in charge of Olivia’s Solos Program, which caters to women (single or partnered) who decide to go on trips alone. I got my own Solos dog tag and a pink Olivia bracelet to signify my newbie status. 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. How do you justify leaving a perfectly nice relationship, taking a blind chance that there might be something better for you out there — even if you’re right?

I don’t care,” Lynette said, shrugging. She told me she’d lived on this earth for 53 years. She knew what she wanted. And now it was my turn to figure that out for myself.We all formed one big circle, and the staffers got the ball rolling. First things first: How had we all heard about Olivia? Later in the week, Tisha Floratos, the vice president of travel for Olivia, told me that she and her staff think about this a lot. “We’ve talked about how we begin to promote inclusivity while also preserving our core: that this is a company for lesbians. We don’t publicly, historically, say that we’re trans inclusive, but we’re always welcoming to our trans guests.” If you're not doing a large amount of pee play, you can put down a towel. If you're doing a large amount, let's say you're peeing on someone in a place that's not a tub or a shower, you can pee into a vessel first like a bowl or I pee into a chalice because we're ritualizing pee. Definitely there's incontinent pads or puppy pads you can use, they're disposable and you can just throw them out.

I would sob in a car to uptown Manhattan, where my friend Alia would take me in her arms and tell me it was all going to be OK. By this point, I was — somewhat unintentionally — quite drunk. We started making out (I was still peeing) and almost right away, I began writing a goofy story about it in my head, thinking about how I’d relay the anecdote to my friends (“So I had sex in the bathroom of a catamaran???”). But there was another part of me that was very much not into it, especially when the makeout gave way to other things and people started banging on the bathroom door. So I’m surprised to say I might actually travel with Olivia again, skeptical as I remain of cruise ethics in general. And that’s because of all the things that happened in the eight days I spent aboard the Summit — things I wasn’t remotely expecting. When I first pitched this story to my editors, I thought I’d be reporting on a lesbian cultural artifact in its twilight years. 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. Other elements of lesbian culture have been steadily dying; why should Olivia be any different? I would write in my journal, the night before leaving: “There’s something so deliriously pleasurable in the idea of trusting myself enough to know exactly what I want.”

Scott, US

I’d never considered before that being a femme with a butch partner needn’t be some inequitable hetero horror show, but instead could be something imbued with incredible queer comfort and power. It could be fun. It could be hot. Later, when telling friends what had happened, I did laugh about it — one told me it sounded like something pulled straight out of The L Word, which, true — but I was also a little mad at that girl, and even more so at myself for being so sloppy. The consent element there was indeterminate; I had willingly gone along with the hookup, at least for a little while, though I remain uncertain about how much I really could have consented while drunk-peeing in a bathroom the size of a broom closet.