True gay love
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. 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.
The Love Issue
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. What is your experience with the above 10 items of difference? Your comments and feedback are welcome.
True Gay Love stock illustration. Illustration of relationship -
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These are the issues that come up repeatedly in couples counseling sessions: Canada U. US News.
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To help remind us that queer love has always been with us, we celebrate five gay love stories for the ages. Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum were Egyptian servants found buried together in the tomb of King Unas. Their bodies were intertwined and their faces were nose-to-nose—funereal gestures usually reserved for married couples. The two, who lived around B. In other scenes, Khnumhotep occupies the place normally associated with wives. When Emperor Hadrian took the throne of Rome in AD, he had already been ceremonially married to a year-old girl for political purposes.
At the time, sexual relationships between older and younger men were common but the elder man was generally expected to parted ways when his young lover reached manhood. Hadrian was so taken with Antinous that he maintained the relationship until , when Antinous drowned under mysterious circumstances.
Sackville-West, a noted English poet and novelist, was married to writer and politician Harold George Nicolson, but both carried on same-sex relationships throughout their marriage. Though both married to men, the two ran off together several times to France, starting in While there, Sackville-West dressed as a man when they went out together. Toklas who was to become her partner for nearly four decades. Gertrude Stein met Alice B. Their salon attracted some of the greatest artists, writers and thinkers of Europe and America—Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, Picasso, Matisse, included.
Stein and Toklas became famous cultural figures with the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas a somewhat fictional memoir. The depth of their relationship was laid bare in the s, when a previously locked cabinet at Yale University was opened: Inside was a trove of hundreds of love letters the two women had written each other.