When do gay men retreat from dating
Sex — Gay male couples tend to approach sex differently. We all know that gay male couples are much more likely to entertain the idea of, or even be in, a non-monogamous relationship. So, part of my job in couples counseling is to help gay men understand this, and to avoid making direct comparisons to straight relationships all the time some of the time is OK, particularly in confronting double-standards and internalized homophobia.
While this is not necessarily unique to gay men, a big factor can be finding time for sex, when often both partners are busy, high-level executives or professionals who work extraordinarily long hours or have jobs that require frequent travel.
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Household Chores — Perhaps surprisingly to a non-clinician, the issue of how to equitably and fairly divide the list of common household chores can be frequent topic in conjoint therapy. While modern straight couples sometimes like to pretend that they are oh-so-liberated, in reality, in many or most cases, the woman is subtly expected to, and ends up doing, the majority of the household chores related to keeping things clean, organized, in good repair, supplied, delivered, monitored, and humming along in a domestic household. In couples counseling, I generally recommend that a Master List of Required Household Chores be written down, which is exhaustive and comprehensive.
Who pays the bills? Who does the cleaning? Or, who supervises the cleaning? Who mows the lawn?
Or, who pays the gardener to mow the lawn? Who supervises the gardener? Who changes the light bulbs? Who cooks?
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Who cleans up? Who grocery shops? Who picks up the dry cleaning? Often, making a list and then discussing how to divide it can be a discussion at home, or in session. Gay male relationships where there is a parenting factor involved differ from straight relationships mostly in that same-sex parenting needs extra support. Family — In gay male relationships, the role of one of the male partners in taking care of aging parents can be an issue, similar to straight couples. Fortunately, for most of the gay couples I have worked with, there have been surprisingly few seriously hostile in-law conflicts.
More often, the son-in-law is treated as a full member of the family, which is a nice thing to be able to say about the current times we live in. Fun — Fortunately, one huge and consistent benefit I have observed in gay male relationships over straight ones is that gay couples consistently demonstrate a youthfulness, playfulness, and sense of fun, especially with peers but also alone with each other.
While this is common to affluent gay male couples, even middle class or working class gay couples seem to have an extra sense of discovering fun, creative pastimes. Men are physically larger than women, so they can go through a lot of alcohol and food at events hence the stories of the first all-gay cruises running out of alcohol on board! A friend of mine once said that he believed gay men had particularly-evolved critical thinking skills. While two gay men might love one another in their relationship, they will still subtly compete with one another to others, like most males in the animal kingdom.
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This can be a certain mutual benefit, but it can also be a source of competition or even resentment of what the other has that he lacks. We want to make ourselves attractive to each other, but we also tend to want to be recognized and admired in our own right by others. For gay male couples, loving and accepting the self individually and in context of each other, and society at large, can be a challenge.
Politics — I think gay male couples are just simply more affected by politics, changes in laws, and changes in society than straight couples are. When we watch the evening news, or read news outlets online, they are often talking about us as gay men. That just puts an extra stress on the day, in addition to the fact that the Internet service provider is down or that the cat just threw up grass on the carpet. Gay male couples tend to be more politically aware, and even more politically active attending protests, writing letters, attending fundraisers, observing boycotts, making donations than straight couples, because their rights and existence are challenged every day these days with a certain urgency and immediacy that straight couples are generally spared.
However, form, endure, and happily, they do, often without my help at all. It culminated in him calling me into work, on a school night, with the pretense of helping him out with closing the store after a particularly busy night. I always demand that intentions be made clear from the jump, and I wish this came from a better place, but I feel so hardened. This incident came at a time when, like I said before, I was really exploring the possibility that I was gay. Would they think I was worth less than dust?
Would they violate me and take advantage of me in similar ways? I was 11 and it was a family friend. This man and his wife were close friends of my parents and we lived on the same street and his children would invite me over. It became sort of a common every-week thing. I think the guilt and shame are pernicious and sort of grind away at who you are. And then you get into this whole thing of Are you worthwhile, and are you deserving of happiness and joy and love? It was a situation that happened multiple times. For me, after that, it was easy to be sexual with people. That was something I desired heavily.
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Sex was a way to live within my own element of what I was comfortable with. With relationships, [how] I was finding love for myself was through receiving validation from somebody else. That was my viewpoint towards relationships: Then there was a marriage that happened four, five years ago; we were married for 11 months and divorced after that.
It was a situation where we both fell in love very quickly, but we both came from traumatic pasts. Within that relationship I started seeking help. I embrace it percent. It started, my best guess is third grade. There was a neighbor who was a little bit older. He was in high school. A lot of times, if my grandpa had something to do, he would put this kid in charge of watching me. And he started out touching me and it proceeded into oral sex and it got more and more physical. Every summer this would happen.
Sex became meaningless. Having sex was not an escalation in a relationship to me. If we had sex, it felt like: Who cares? I also kept a lot of distance, so it was a really terrible combination of me sleeping with people and then just distancing myself and not being close to them and then just disappearing. I really had only two long-term relationships; one was my wife and the other was a longer-term one in high school.
My wife and I literally just divorced. But it was very amicable and not really having to do with any of these issues. I got help while we were married. The divorce was a positive for both of us, and I think part of it was being me able to not be so co-dependent by finally figuring out this part of me.
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I was sexually abused by my father, starting at a very young age, before I even started kindergarten, and it lasted for a long time. I basically blocked it out for many, many years. And in my early 30s I started to really unravel. I started having terrible panic attacks and I had a major anxiety problem. And my memory started coming back.
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And I just thought, This cannot be, this cannot be. And I did finally look at it. And it really made me start to see that I was in for a very rough time. I mean, how do I maintain intimate relationships with men or sexual relationships with men without my past coming back to haunt me? We ended up seeing a couples therapist that really helped us walk through and navigate this territory. My earliest abuse happened when I was 5 to 7 years old, by a female babysitter. When I hit puberty ages I experienced a very sudden and deep depression.
I believe that the trauma from the abuse triggered some extreme self-hatred and what I now realize was an intense shame as I started becoming aware of sex. I was self-harming a lot and escalated to the point of a suicide attempt when I was My parents had me committed to a hospital for an evaluation, and I was raped in the hospital.
It was by another patient and it happened more than once. I started doing drugs almost immediately after the hospitalization. My relationship history is sparse. I had a girlfriend briefly in high school. I definitely was not a good boyfriend and similar to other periods in my life was not addressing the immediate issues I probably should have.