nowisaugust, your post could have been written a decade ago by one of my female relatives. Her concerns were identical to those you voiced, right down to every single issue. The only difference is that she had family acceptance, which made her situation easier than yours in many ways.

She had always been oriented toward women and had never dated men. When she decided to give men a try, she soon found an excellent fellow who was her professional equal and who appeared to provide the same stoicism and stability she'd admired in her father. They fell in love, moved in together and married. The honeymoon lasted about three years.

Slowly, over time, the relationship became more dramatic, emotional and uncertain. There were disagreements about money and responsibilities.

Neither one was more to blame than the other. Both had entered the relationship with unrealistic expectations about how this would be different from past relationships that hadn't turned out well.

She learned in her marriage and in subsequent dating that men can create as much drama, emotion and uncertainty as women. They just manifest differently. She had told me prior to her marriage she knew being with a man would be better because there would never be the living hell of two women with PMS living in the same house. I told her men could be just as hormonal, emotional and irrational as PMSy women -- they just had different hormones.

When push came to shove, nothing was really all that different from her previous relationships with women, except she found men didn't, in the long-run, voluntarily do as many household chores as the women she'd lived with and that was a whole new area of conflict. The best thing that came out of it, in her own opinion, is she became less gender biased in her thinking. She started liking and understanding men as human beings a lot more than she had in the past. She's now working on the issues within herself that have sabotaged her relationships ever since the earliest days of kissing her first girl -- the drama, emotions and uncertainty. She finally decided that she was equally guilty as anyone else she'd ever loved.

If your past relationships have been overly dramatic, uncertain and emotional, I strongly urge you to seek guidance before you marry to help you look into your own psyche and behavior to see if you're somehow bringing that into a relationship yourself or choosing partners who do so.

I wish you the best of good fortune in your future life, whether you're with a man or a woman or even if you're alone. All three states can bring joy or sorrow. But, of course, we all knew that.