“They don’t know that I’m in the relationship that I’m in because my mom issued a challenge; she said that I can’t both be excelling in school and also focusing on a relationship,” Salloum said. “So I’m going to try to end this year with straight A’s again and go back home and tell her that I did it in a relationship.”

Rice is currently not a WKU student, Salloum said. They are not a student anywhere as they are focusing on their family.

Rice comes to visit Salloum quite frequently to get the “college experience” on campus, but Rice is needed more at their home than at school. Rice comes to visit Salloum on campus roughly once a month. Rice does not drive, instead taking a bus down to Bowling Green.

“I often feel bad about how long the bus ride is and how bad the conditions [are],” Salloum said. “So, I do not ask as often. If it were up to her, she’d come down every single weekend, but I couldn’t do that to her.”

Salloum said not having her partner nearby all the time is actually beneficial to her and her education, even though it is unfortunate to only see Rice through remote means or in person very sparingly.

“I do think there are a lot more benefits than people would think with a long distance relationship,” Salloum said. “I feel like I can more justifiably equivalate my time between school, friends, myself and a partner. If I had a partner who was a two-minute walk away from me, or was constantly with me, I have a very strong fear that I would skew my priorities and spend a little bit too much time on one.”

Salloum and Rice’s first date was going to be at the Columbus Zoo back in August of last year, but due to complications in their schedules, the date ended up not working out.

In December, when Salloum went back home for winter break, the two of them tried to set up another date.

“I asked if she wanted to go to the zoo lights because that’s a really big thing as well,” Salloum said. “We were able to get the tickets to finally be able to see each other at the zoo lights.”

Due to Salloum’s apprehension about going on a date for the first time in a while, both Salloum and Rice brought a friend with them.

“We had kind of hung out in a group but also separate as well, just so that we could be able to adjust to speaking to each other in person,” Salloum said. “It is, honestly, one of the happiest moments I have experienced thus far.”

She said it is “ecstatic” to go from feeling self conscious to knowing the person you like wants to be with you too. In her ramblings and even in silence, Salloum is comfortable with Rice.

Salloum said she is “extremely” out while on campus. Salloum enjoys being out in college because she had to be “embarrassed” about her identity high school and back at home.

Michaela Snyder (She/Her) & Elizabeth Roth (She/Her)

Unlike Duncan and Robertson and Mitch and Jordan, who met before coming to WKU, Michaela Snyder and Elizabeth Roth met each other at the H4 Honors Retreat the summer before their freshman year.

Snyder is a junior studying computer science and linguistics. She is from Louisville, Kentucky.

Her partner, Elizabeth “Lizzy” Roth, is a junior from Murfreesboro, Tennessee studying creative writing with a minor in communications.

Despite first meeting at H4 all those years ago, Snyder and Roth have only been together for roughly a year and a half due to misinterpretations on both of their parts.

“We had a crush on each other for basically a year before we started dating and we were just too afraid to tell each other,” Roth said.

“So we spent an entire year just flirting with each other and sending compliments to each other,” Snyder said.

Both of their families know Snyder and Roth are together, but Roth’s extended family and grandparents do not. Mostly, Roth said, it is her own anxiety that makes her scared to come out to them.

Snyder has an older sister who is married to a woman. She said this made it easier for her to come out to her family.

“My older sister is also bi, and she’s nine years older than me, so I kind of knew it would be okay to come out,” Snyder said. “Everyone was fine with her coming out, so I knew it would be safe for me too.”

In terms of labels, Snyder and Roth say they are most closely aligned with being bisexuals.

Save for a few instances, Snyder and Roth haven’t had any major issues because of their relationship.

“A lady, from her car behind us, saw us holding hands and she glared at us,” Roth said. “There’s this one time we were in Blaze Pizza and we were talking about the eulogy that we’d give for each other if we died…and I was like ‘I’d tell everyone that you were the best girlfriend.’ The person behind us gave us this glare like ‘I cannot believe they talk about dating in public.’”

Roth said she knows of certain people that would not be positive if she was to come out to them. Because of this, Roth has told people

that she has a boyfriend named “Michael” because having a girlfriend in that “highly Christian” part of Tennessee is “out of the realm of possibility.”

“So Michaela is Michael to them,” Roth said.

Roth said she is not a“huge fan of public displays of affection in any relationship, but they will occasionally hold hands while walking through campus. They both say they feel safe at WKU and have surrounded themselves with accepting people.

Ashley Austin (She/Her) & Rachael Prewitt (She/Her)

In contrast to Roth and Synder, Ashley Austin and Rachael Prewitt are very PDA-friendly in their relationship, holding hands for the duration of their interview.

“We hold hands and kiss each other’s foreheads in public,” Prewitt said.

Prewitt is a senior at WKU majoring in performing arts with a concentration in theater design and technology with a minor in arts administration.

For the past year she has been in a relationship with Austin, a sophomore, pursuing a bachelor’s in performing arts and in Spanish.

Austin, from the Nashville area, and Prewitt, from Lexington, have a long-distance relationship over breaks, but they say it isn’t so bad. They’ve made a plan to work through the problem.

“We trade off on visiting each other,” Prewitt said. “I would go there or she would come here. It just depends on our schedules. It still sucks [though].”

Austin said she has plans to move to Bowling Green over the coming summer to remedy this.

Austin identifies as asexual, but that does not mean she is anti-sex.

“That doesn’t mean you’re sex-repulsed,” Austin said. “For asexual people, sex is like cake. If you get it, cool. If you don’t get it, it’s not the end of the world.”

Austin identifies as homoromantic, meaning she experiences romantic attraction to the same sex.

Prewitt said she identifies as a lesbian. Austin said she was very up front at the start of their relationship that she was asexual, a fact that Prewitt readily accepted.

“At the beginning of our relationship I was pretty open with [Prewitt] about the fact that I don’t know if I’ll ever want to have sex,” Austin said. “It’s not something I’ve completely ruled out, [but] it’s just something I don’t know if I’ll ever be comfortable with or not. She was like, ‘it’s okay, we’ll take it as we go. That’s not a problem for me.’”

The pair met in a Zoom call in September 2020, Austin’s freshman year, that was held by the dance and theater department.

“The theater and dance department did these Zoom plays, and all the rehearsals were done through Zoom,” Austin said. “So, that’s where we found out about each other because I was an actor in one of the shows she staged-managed.”

Since it was the COVID-19 semester, it was not until the following January that they first met in person. They got to know each other through Snapchat before Prewitt drove to Nashville to meet Austin.

“I was insanely nervous because I just genuinely had never liked a person this much [and] like so quickly,” Austin said. “She got there and I was like ‘Oh my god, you’re real. And we hung out all day.”

Fortunately, for Austin and Prewitt, they said their coming out experiences went well with their families.

Austin’s family has been very supportive. Especially her mother, who is a devout Christian. Austin is very grateful for that as it has taught a valuable lesson about Christianity.

“Often the Christian community is a place of fear for a lot of the LGBT people, so having her as a pillar of strength and reassurance that those two can coincide,” Austin said. “You can be Christian and be gay, which has been really important for me.”

As a couple on WKU’s campus, the two agree they feel comfortable and supported.

They’ve never felt afraid and no one has ever come up to them and said something offensive, but they said from time to time they feel awkward and people may give them weird glances.

“It’s just weird vibes sometimes,” Austin said.

Ray Saul (She/They) & Cameron Caskey (They/Them)

Another couple who met on social media was Ray Saul and Cameron Caskey.

Saul is a WKU student from the Louisville area majoring in criminology and psychology. She is the current education and public outreach director at the Queer Student Union.

Saul is in a relationship with Cameron Caskey, another WKU student majoring in psychology and political science

Saul identifies as pansexual, meaning she does not choose dating partners based on gender, biological sex or identity. Saul also identifies as genderfluid. Caskey goes without defining themselves under any one term.

“I really don’t put any labels on myself because I don’t know what fits best,” Caskey said. “In high school, everything was super pressed, it was like trying to be masculine for the sake of fitting in. I don’t enjoy feeling like I’m being perceived as just a man, and I don’t like whenever people use terms strongly associated with masculinity towards me, because it just doesn’t feel like me.”

Despite their non-normative identities, Saul said she and Caskey are often mistaken for a heterosexual couple in public.

“A lot of the people who don’t know Cameron very well will use he/him pronouns for them, but I try to slide it [into] conversation like, ‘yeah my partner’. That kind of establishes that they are not my boyfriend,” Saul said. “I’ve had problems with people being like, ‘I don’t get why they don’t use boyfriend’ or ‘what’s the reason behind ‘partner’?’Well, they’re not male. It’s complicated.”

Saul tells her parents she is bisexual because she “doesn’t feel like trying to explain pansexuality to them.”

While at home, Saul said she has to misgender Caskey because her parents don’t understand that aspect of gender nonconformity,

“I accidentally said they/them when addressing Cameron to my parents and my mother went off on this whole tangent,” Saul said.

Saul and Caskey met on the dating app Bumble, where Saul was originally just looking for friends.

“I matched with their ex-girlfriend first before I matched with them,” Saul said. “Actually I was dating someone else [at the time], but we started seeing each other more when my ex and I broke up last fall, and then we officially put a label on [the relationship] this past February.”

Saul said the pair has the “privilege” of passing as a straight couple when in public, which allows them to feel safe. Saul was also a member of a sorority before leaving for a variety of reasons.

“When I was involved with Greek life, even though I would openly talk about my partner, I would use they/them [pronouns], but they would still say ‘he’ or ‘your boyfriend’. I don’t think [they] were quite getting it,” Saul said.

Both Saul and Caskey said they spend a lot of their time at The Pride Center, a place that Caskey said offers a safe place for everyone.

“Anyone who goes to the Pride Center has a story to tell for themselves,” Caskey said. “They’re all comfortable expressing themselves in the Pride Center. It’s really nice.”

As an editorial member of the QSU, Saul has helped provide students a safe space to feel open and accepted.

“People are a lot more open in relationships and also able to talk about it,” Saul said. “It’s all about being able to present and act like a couple, and not just introduce them as a friend and worry about people judging them.”

In the end, Patrick Collins, faculty adviser for QSU, summed up non-heteronormative relationships best.

“Each is very different, having their own rules and layers to the inner workings of the relationship,” Collins said in an email. “Not one is really any different from our heterosexual counterparts, dates, hanging out and personal interactions. Mostly, the students just want to have someone that loves and cares about them. Many lacked that from families that disowned them or peers that outcasted them.”

News Reporter Michael Crimmins can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @michael_crimm.