It all started at the bar. With a girl. And I was drunk.


Not exactly a recipe for success, is it? Still, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea at the time.


Every Friday I go to my favorite bar with some of my friends and drink away the stress of the week. Saturday is recovery day, and Sunday I spend doing all the work I’ve got to get done. This week though, I was by myself. My two regular drinking buddies, James and Alex, had bailed on me for some frat event. They’re both super into Greek life, but it’s never really been my scene. I’m more of a “get tipsy with some close friends” than “a get smashed in front of everyone I’ve ever known” kinda guy. Plus, it’s just all a little too… dudey. I mean, there’s just a lot of sweating and chest beating and dick measuring and “bros” and it’s really not my thing at all. James and Alex are good guys though. They’re a bit saner than most of their frat brothers.


Anyway, I was at the bar alone, drinking away the thought of my physics midterm, when she walked in. She was beautiful. I mean completely fucking gorgeous, with long wavy red hair, sapphire blue eyes, and legs up to here. Her dress, a little dark green number showed just the right amount of her impressive cleavage, and was so tight around her ass that I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Neither could any of the other guys in the room. She sat down a few seats away from me, and gave the bartender a long list of instructions on how to make her a drink that she had apparently designed herself. He didn’t seem to mind, especially since her emphatic gesturing as she laid out the process made her breasts jiggle in all the right ways.


I’m not the bravest guy, but as soon as she walked in I knew that I had to talk to her. I’d never forgive myself if I let this beautiful vision slip away without even giving it a shot.


I scooted my stool closer to hers. “Mind if I sit here?”


“Not at all,” she said with a smile. If I thought she was beautiful before, her smile was awe-inspiring. I almost lost my train of thought, just basking in her attention.


We talked for a while, just chatting it up. I was surprisingly smooth for me, making her laugh a few times and getting some information out of her. Her name was Elena, she went to school here, she was an English major just about to graduate, and we ended up going off on a long talk about our favorite books. I was head over heels and it hadn’t even been fifteen minutes.


“Alright, I have to be honest with you, Elena. I think you’re amazing and beautiful and I’d really like to get to know you better. Would you like to grab coffee sometime?” Okay, maybe not as smooth as I’d been earlier, a bit direct, but I didn’t actually fall over so I counted that as a success. She looked at me with a bit of a sad smile on her face.


“Oh. Listen, I really like you Ash, but-“


“That’s okay I totally understand sorry to bother you” I interrupted, flushing with embarrassment.


She grabbed my arm when I tried to stand up and walk away.“No wait, please. I really do like you. I just don’t exactly swing that way.”


“Oh. Uh. You mean?” At this point I wasn’t really up to anything more than monosyllables.


“If you were a girl Ash, I’d be all over you,” she said with a wink. “As it is, I’d really like it if we could be friends.”


“Oh yeah, friends, definitely. I’d really like that.”


And that was it. We had a really nice evening, talking until 2 am. I got more than a little drunk, and she helped me back to my apartment, and scrawled her number on my arm (So I could text her and let her know I was okay. Pathetic, but I’ll take it).


It was the wink that did it for me though. Without that wink, I probably could have let it go. But that wink… God, I was completely out of my mind crazy for this girl. I couldn’t just give up now.


So in my drunken stupor, I grabbed my laptop and googled “How to convert a lesbian”. Alright, yes. Not my proudest moment. But I was desperate for something, anything that would let me be with her. I was obsessed.


I sifted through results for about an hour, reading everything from angry forum discussions to web-pamphlets on how to “pray the gay away”. Finally, around 3 in the morning, I found it.
It didn’t look like much at first, but at this point I was happy just to run into something that was formatted like it had been written this millennium. A website called Her Point of View, a resource “for the straight man with a lesbian soulmate”. I guess that’s me.


The gist of their argument seemed to be that there wasn’t anything that a girl could provide that a guy couldn’t. What I had to do was figure out what Elena wanted from a partner, and make myself into that. I was more than a little skeptical, but like I said, I was desperate. And besides, it made some kind of sense. A woman can do anything a man can, so a man should be able to do anything a woman can, right? I had a woman’s name already anyways (thanks Mom and Dad, really appreciated the name Ashley all the way through middle school but I guess it’s coming through for me now), so I had some kind of head start.


They had a multi-step guide set up. You unlocked each step a full day after starting the one before it and apparently you needed to use what you learned each lesson on the next one. Basically, I had a day to do each lesson, and I had to do it well if I wanted to succeed.


I would win her over. I needed to. Whatever I had to do, I would do it. And so, at 3:30 am on a Saturday, I began my journey.