Drafted spring 2026.
Revised September 23, 2026.

I’ve been dating women, for the first time in my life, for about six months. Although I have definitely tried to find people out in the wild and at LGBTQ events, most of my successful early dating forays (which I’d define as anything that goes past one date with someone) have occurred through being active on dating apps. This certainly doesn’t make me an expert (far from it, lol), but I’ve accumulated enough data that I can make some informed comparisons to what I’m experiencing now versus back when I only dated men. My observations so far are only for early stage dating, since I haven’t managed to U-haul with anyone quite yet. 

For what it’s worth, I technically haven’t dated any new men for more than a decade since my ex-husband and I were together for 14 years…. So, some of my observations are probably also reflective of the world of app-based dating/dating within late stage capitalism/dating in my 40s, not just the world of sapphic dating. I’ve filled in some of my observational gaps from conversations with women friends who date men.

One thing I want to say off the bat is that I simply cannot identify with other queer women who have significant experience with men, who say they find dating women to be more difficult than men. Dating is hard for everyone, period, but I don’t find dating women to be “harder” compared to dating men. I have never been conventionally attractive in a way that the median heterosexual man finds desirable, and so dating men was never a thing I found to be particularly “easy” in my formerly straight era. If anything, I find dating women to be much easier and more fun than dating men, no doubt because I’m not as repressed! 

So without further ado, here are the major differences between dating women versus dating men: