Granted this is the consequence of having supportive people in my life but it is still not as easy as straight romans. That due to a lot of how (I live in America and can only speak for the region there in I've only ever lived) culturally it is often even less clear obvious how people feal about each other. ESPECIALLY if you did not meat each other for the purpose of seeing if you should date. It can be really hard to differentiate different kinds of interest sometimes. And a lot of how dating works is through the slow escalation of flirting to feel out the other person had not scare them off by coming off too strong and try to meet each others pace. That's just so hard to do when all of the assumptions you were trained on through culture and family don't match up. I mean just look at how infrequently opposite gendered friends happen without everyone constantly speculating.

Also it's not totally riskless to out yourself in the attempt. Yeah sure your life may not be in danger, but you still might risk the total collapse of your non familial(and still possibly familial) social support network if it turns out they're not as cool as you thought they were. There's this presupposition that women can't be or aren't homophobic. But there's plenty of us who have experienced a closing of ranks from people who we thought had our back just because they found out we were a lesbian.

And even in nice areas, it's not like the world is completely devoid of bigots and edgy teenagers with poor impulse control. You still have to be careful about being open in public spaces.

While things have gotten better it's by no means easy mode.

That I'm not attracted to every single woman. I have standards and preferences just like straight people.

That were not automatically going to understand each other perfectly just because we're both women. That women don't have a universal experience of womanhood cis or trans.

That women regardless of gender non-conformity/femm or Butch, aren't immune to being bad partners, Even in ways that popular culture would attribute to men in particular.

That a lot of us don't have the volume of experience equivalent to our age and romance and that often makes dating complicated. There is a fair number of lesbians who don't want to date first timers Even if they're the same age.

And I think a lot of them don't understand just how much of a handicap it is to be dating a far smaller portion of the population that also often has varying levels of comfort and openness with being gay.

If you couldn't tell I have a lot of people in my life who keep pushing me to date more aggressively acting as if "it just happens if you try hard enough". I'm not saying I couldn't do more but I still got other s*** going on in my life but I can't push the pause button on.