GAYS AND TIME

In the career of an athlete, sooner or later the time comes to choose the day on which he will have to withdraw from competitive activity. Some argue that the ideal time to retire coincides with that of maximum success, others have different opinions, but the fact remains that if the time to retire is too much postponed, the athlete ends up being considered a survivor and, in practice, a caricature of what he was in better times.

In the life of ordinary people there are many moments of choice and each of them marks the transition to a further phase, if we want more mature and more aware, but from which there is no going back. Obviously “there is a time for everything” and this also applies to gays. There is a time to understand that you are gay and one to accept it, there is a time to fall in love and a time to be indifferent, a time to long for a partner and a time to long for solitude, a time to hope, a time to get busy and a time to forget. Time limits are generally elastic but cannot be postponed indefinitely. This means that they are choices that must in any case take place and that only the determination of when is left to us, and many times with very strong restrictions.

The time limits within which to make a choice or behave in a particular way are defined with two different criteria, that of possibility and that of opportunity. Both, despite appearances and with a few exceptions, are very nuanced criteria. The possibility is defined by physical or legal parameters: you cannot choose to civilly join another person before the age of 18, because law doesn’t allow it, and you cannot decide to retire at any age, because law sets precise deadlines, but you cannot even think of bringing help to a person who needs it when you are no longer in suitable physical condition to do so. The criteria of necessity, although sometimes even very elastic, have an intrinsic cogency, in the sense that if it is true that something can become increasingly difficult over time, without any theoretical limit, it is true, that after a certain time that “something” will become so difficult as to be in fact impossible.

The opportunity is something radically different from the possibility, it is a social criterion and is therefore questionable, as in the case of this statement: “It is appropriate to start a coexistence when you are between 23 and 35 years old!” In this case “appropriate” means socially accepted and nothing more, which means that making the choice of coexistence beyond certain time limits exposes to social discredit for failure to comply with the social rules of opportunity, but nothing prevents that coexistence can begin at any age.

So far I have talked about possible and opportune choices, which are in any case choices, that is voluntary and conscious acts, but the problem of “time” sometimes arises even in a very heavy way in relation to the acceptance of inevitable things such as disease and death itself, realities that induce defensive behaviors, aimed at denying the problem or relegating it to a future to which we try in every way to give the halo of uncertain and hypothetical.

I don’t intend here to address universal problems such as that of the acceptance of death, on which too much has been written, but I would rather focus on the problems related to the choice of times by gays in issues that are typical of gays. Among these problems there is the choice of the time of coming out. It is true that coming out is not an obligatory choice and therefore the full determination of whether or not to come out is left to our freedom, but certainly coming out at 15, 25, 50 or 80 has very different meanings and purposes, that is the time, in this case, qualifies the action in a substantial way.

Among the problems connected to the better times for the “forced” choices, there are those related to attitudes and behaviors that undergo an inevitable deterioration connected to the passage of time. It is not said that you have to live as a couple, you can also live as a single and, at least in theory, there is no time limit to start a couple life, but on the other hand, if the couple life must really be a couple life and not a substitute for a mutual assistance relationship, there are certainly times “within which” that choice must be made. Also in this case, going to live with your partner at 20, 40, 60 or 80 has very different meanings and purposes.

When we talk about gays in general we mean referring to a particular subset of gays and that is to say young gays, and we identify as classic gay problems the discovery of being gay, the acceptance of being gay, the coming out, the looking for a partner and the building a couple’s life or friendships within which to live one’s own affectivity-sexuality. All these things, as it is easy to notice, refer mainly to young gays, but identifying gays with gay boys who go to the disco on Saturday night means forgetting that being gay is a fact that pervades the entire life of an individual up to at its end. Nobody talks about middle-aged gays (50 years old) or sick ones, or old ones who end up in nursing homes. They too were young, certainly in other periods, and then they grew old, but they are still gay.

The dimension of flowing time is often neglected or forgotten even in the use of words and we sometimes refer to one’s age group as if it were something stable and not something subject to change due to the passage of time. Young people reason as if the category of “young” were their stable characteristic, forgetting that they are young “now” but they will no longer be in twenty years and old men try to evade the evidence that they are old “now” but in twenty years, and perhaps much earlier, they simply will no longer exist.

A gay man, like any human person, follows a parable from birth to death. The acceptance of homosexuality or the coming out or the search for a partner are classic gay problems which are either exclusively gay, like the acceptance of homosexuality and the coming out, or they are universal, like the search for a partner, but, for gays they take on a so particular and specific connotation that they become problems substantially different from those of hetero people.

I will now try to deal with three typically gay problems from the point of view of the times:
1) The acceptance of one’s homosexuality
2) The coming out
3) The search for a partner
Let’s start from the first topic.

THE TIME OF ACCEPTANCE OF YOUR HOMOSEXUALITY

To clear the field of possible misunderstandings, I must start by saying that I will only speak of guys who are properly homosexual, not bisexual. Acceptance is not in itself a problem, because experience teaches that in environments where there is no homophobia and there is a correct sex education (as in Scandinavian countries), the acceptance of homosexuality by boys coincides with puberty. Genital sexuality already has a homosexual connotation at its birth, the thing is not a taboo, it is possible to talk about it without problems in the family, with classmates and with friends of the same age or even adults without meeting questioning and perplexed looks. Summing up, in an atmosphere of this kind homosexuality is a normal fact and to say: “I’m gay” is not a problem, as it is not to say: “I’m straight”. The two are both part of the domain of normalcy.

Of course, imagining a society without homophobia means thinking only based on theoretical concepts, however, there are societies that reflect that model quite faithfully and in which homophobic attitudes are objectively rare; and at the other end there are societies in which homophobia is instilled through religion and becomes a common cultural heritage and is sometimes even protected by law as a value capable of moralizing society.

May 17th is the world day against homo-, bi- and trans-phobia. This date was chosen because thirty years ago, on May 17, 1990, the World Health Organization finally removed homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses! Even today, despite repeated appeals coming from the European Parliament, there are countries within the European Union that don’t recognize any legal legitimacy for homosexual unions. In Italy civil unions between people of the same sex were introduced with the Cirinnà Law, Law 20 May 2016 n. 76. In some countries, such as Italy, there is no specific law for the suppression of homophobia, but outside Italy there is much worse, always in the European Union, in Hungary and Poland, levels of discrimination on a homophobic basis are widely covered and protected by law and institutions, but it is enough to look beyond the Atlantic to see, under the Trump presidency, the resurgence of homophobic attitudes, not only not repressed but encouraged and legally protected. In some Islamic countries homosexuality is still punished today with the death penalty, a death penalty which is in itself and in any case a sign of incivility. I remember incidentally that on November 30, 1786, 234 years ago, Pietro Leopoldo of Habsburg-Lorraine, Grand Duke of Tuscany, abolished the death penalty in his Grand Duchy without exception, paving the way for a modern criminal code. It was the first explicit abolition of the death penalty in the world. But let’s get back to the topic. On the occasion of the world day against homophobia, the President of Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, took a very clear position stating that homophobia violates human rights whose respect is necessary for the full development of the personality. In essence, homophobia deprives homosexual people of the serenity necessary for the full development of their personality and compels them to stressful defensive behaviors that effectively limit their individual freedom.

In the various countries of the world homophobia manifests itself in various ways and degrees and consequently the acceptance of one’s homosexuality becomes a more or less serious problem depending on the pressure that environmental homophobia is able to exert, such pressure can go from simple cancellation of any reference to homosexuality, up to violent bullying by the family itself and work colleagues and in some cases the consequences can be extreme, as it happens in the film “Viharsarok”, a Hungarian film of 2014, released also in English with the title “Land of Storms”, in which a gay guy suffers homophobic environmental violence, exercised on him in such a systematic and persecutory way, that to free himself from the induced “guilt feelings” related to homosexuality, he ends up to kill the his partner. In this case the murder, more than to the exasperated guy, it must be attributed to the environmental homophobia that led him to that extreme gesture. In situations such as those described in this film, accepting one’s homosexuality is truly dramatic. But between the extreme levels of the radical absence of environmental homophobia and of the violent homophobic climate there is an infinite gradation of attitudes, more or less aggressive and more or less persecutory.

Becoming aware of one’s homosexuality when homosexuality is openly subject to social discredit, because it is considered a psychiatric illness, a behavior against nature, a moral degeneration or a guilty “choice”, is objectively difficult. It is not a matter of declaring yourself gay publicly but simply of accepting that you are who you are, but in order to accept that you are who you are, you must become aware of the absurdity of what is commonly told about homosexuality, therefore you must have access to objective information not spoiled by ideological prejudices and you must realize that, due to the effect of environmental homophobia, a gay guy will never be able to freely express his way of being and loving. But all this is not enough, because once you have acquired these awareness, sometimes the idea of having to integrate in any case into the world of others dramatically takes over. But for a gay guy this means forcing himself to live a fake hetero life, that is, forcing himself to play the role of a straight guy even through marriage, or simply to put aside sexuality altogether, perhaps sublimating it in work or in something so “high” that it appears worthy of such a sacrifice.

Those who live in Western European countries tend to give the word homophobia a reductive meaning, because they see homophobia as a fact “still present” and perhaps “still faintly present” but destined to disappear anyway and not as a distressing and heavily persecutory problem, as it is still today in many countries of the world. The problems of homosexuals do not come from homosexuality but from ignorance and prejudice and for this reason, the real solution to those problems consists in the diffusion of a free and honest culture able to provide gays with the indispensable tools to understand and judge consciously and in the same time to provide others the means to prevent homophobia, against which the only effective antidote is true culture, which undermines prejudices and accustoms the brain to think autonomously.

The time that elapses between puberty and the acceptance of one’s homosexuality by a gay boy represents the measure of environmental homophobia which, of course, is far from uniform within a state and indeed has very strong local components, linked to individual communities and even to individual families. I would add that traditionally religions, and I would say above all the great monotheistic religions, have always been directly and indirectly among the main sources of inspiration for very deep homophobic sentiments.
In conclusion, the time of awareness is not in substance an autonomous individual characteristic, but is the result of the widespread cultural climate in which we find ourselves living.

THE TIME OF COMING OUT

What has been said about environmental homophobia in the previous section obviously also applies in relation to the problem of coming out. However, a clarification must be made: the problem of “coming out” is a problem that has arisen only in recent years. Already in my time, 50 years ago, the idea of coming out (I’m obviously speaking of public coming out) could have had some connotation of concreteness, perhaps, for some movie star or for some super-billionaire, but also in Western Europe, it didn’t even touch the brains of gay boys, as today it doesn’t even touch the brains of boys who live in Iran. Today, in Western Europe and in the USA, the idea of a coming out limited to a more or less restricted group of reliable people is much more common than the idea of a coming out without limitations. Still today the idea of public coming out is not taken seriously as a possible hypothesis by the great majority of gays, because the consequences of a public and generalized coming out can be and have been in fact disruptive even years later. In Italy, of course, there are no laws that discriminate against homosexuals, but homophobia exists all the same and is exercised in an undeclared but substantially effective way. To dismiss a gay employee, an employer can’t at all motivate the dismissal with the sexual orientation of the employee, he must be able to carry out targeted mobbing actions to obtain a “voluntary” resignation or may resort to disciplinary proceedings based on a real presumed fault of the employee. It is true that it is possible to appeal to the employment judge but it is expensive and in any case with an uncertain outcome and so homophobia, if properly hidden, can continue undisturbed to do its job.

In general, the coming out with close friends is today much more anticipated than in previous generations. Many youngsters already at 14-15 have confided their homosexuality to their most trusted friends, although the cases in which these confidences are delayed even by 5 or even 10 years are not uncommon. The specific environmental situations condition these postponements much more than general rules and prudence itself do.

Among the forms of restricted coming out, coming out with parents is of particular importance and has a rather characteristic timing. Given that coming out with parents is still an uncommon thing (3-4%), even if it is spreading, albeit in a very limited way and slowly over the years, I observe that or coming out with parents happens very early, between 14 and 16-17 years of age, or is postponed indefinitely, using a formula more or less like this: “I will only tell my parents about my homosexuality when I’m economically independent, because thus, if the climate were to become unlivable, I could permanently break up my family relationship.” That this type of postponement is actually a definitive removal of the problem can clearly be deduced from the fact that no “coming out” with the parents follows the achievement of economic independence. The cases of coming out with parents of adult and cohabiting gay sons are very rare and in general they are the seal of a very rare dimension of respect and substantial family affection.

THE TIME OF SEARCHING FOR A PARTNER

I come now to the last subject that I had proposed to face: the time of the search for a partner. Here it is not a question of carrying out an action in this or that moment or of reaching an awareness in tis or that moment, it’s not question of defining the time of an action that is substantially “punctual” but of defining a period, normally very long, in which the research of a partner can materialize. The time of searching for a partner therefore has a beginning and an end, normally located in very distant phases of life. For a young man it makes sense to ask himself when it is possible or it is appropriate to look for a partner, for a mature man it makes sense to ask himself when it becomes impossible or at least inappropriate to look for a partner, obviously these are extremely different situations both of which are part of the gay dimension.

For a teenager, there is nothing more unwelcome than being told: “Wait! You have to grow up! Before making your choices you have to mature! ” The word maturity has become so important that at least in Italy it has given its name to the exams that conclude high school. Before the high school final exam (“maturity exam”) all the choices are actually made by the parents, after the high school final exam there is the first real choice made by the boy, which is the choice of the university faculty. It is an extremely important choice that often young guys faced with the total unawareness that they are about to decide something fundamental for the future, in other words, such an important choice is made on the basis of the hearsay, without collecting serious information and often pursuing the intent to please the parents by adapting to their expectations. In other words, very often the choice of the university faculty is faced in a deeply immature way.

An adequate level of maturity is also required for the search for a partner, the phenomenon is not substantially different from the choice of university faculty. To look for a partner you should have a realistic idea of the true life of a couple of gay men and you should also understand why many gays don’t like the couple life, but not only, you should also know where to look for a serious partner and how to behave in the initial stages of a possible relationship, but also in looking for a partner guys rely on the hearsay and very often choices are made in an immature way. A serious sex education and a specific information on the true experiences of other gay guys would be very useful and would favor informed choices built on the basis of reliable data, but, at least in Italy, sex education, which until a few decades ago was in entrusted in fact only to the church, is now delegated, also this time “in fact”, only to pornography and dating sites. In such a situation it is inevitable that guys make immature choices and make mistakes of various kinds, which result in states of unease, intolerance and frustration.

Just as science proceeds by trial and error, also the acquisition of experience in the emotional and sexual field proceed by trial and error. If you learn from experience and don’t make the same mistakes again, then the experience makes you grow up and the vision of relational and couple problems becomes more and more mature. If, on the contrary, experience easily put aside and one enters a vicious circle within which the same mistakes are repeated, even if with different people, one never manages to accumulate an experience that allows conscious and mature choices.

The search for a partner is precisely a search and can end with the creation of a stable couple, or at least hypothetically stable at the beginning, but it can also lead to a long and more or less frustrating series of attempts that anyhow contribute to the maturation of an experience on the basis of which the criteria for continuing the research can be refined, expectations can be reduced and previous experiences can be differently assessed.

Among the many possible determinations to which the experience accumulated in the search for a partner can lead there is a very particular one which is the decision to end the search, because lowering expectations too much or waiting without any time limit for the arrival of the ideal partner means in essence trying to settle for something that will not be satisfactory anyway or wasting your time in an activity that is likely to not achieve any result. The conclusion of the speech can be summed up with the expression: “Enough! I can’t waste years and years of my life running after dreams that probably will never come true!” Certainly, the affective-sexual life will continue anyhow, but as for the future at least the couple model of “two hearts and a hut” will be put aside. At what age does all this happen? First of all it should be clarified that this is not a formal decision taken in a precise moment but something that matures slowly over the years and gradually takes on greater concreteness. The heavier the series of frustrations we have faced, the faster we reach these decisions.

Let’s admit that there has been someone who has accumulated few experiences and all in all just a little frustrating or who has perhaps accumulated many disappointing experiences but is animated by an indomitable enthusiasm, in such cases the decision to say “Enough!” it may not mature at all and, at least in theory, the search for a partner could go on without time limits. But the passage of time creates so profound physiological and psychological transformations that many of the motivations that had been the basis of the search for a partner in youthful years and also during maturity, become much less strong and fade away due to the passing of time. Sexual libido is no longer that of youth, the desire for novelty is clearly reduced, health is no longer something which can be taken for granted and any change in the pace of life becomes problematic. In essence, the problems of the couple life, in the individual balance, end up prevailing over the possible advantages. In this way the couple’s life loses its charm and solitude becomes, for a few more years, the most accessible surrogate of bliss. All this obviously lasts as long as solitude remains in fact a manageable hypothesis, that is, as long as individual physical autonomy lasts.

I would like to close these reflections with a passage of an email I received about ten days ago from a thirty-two-year-old guy, that can help to understand a way of dealing with the search for a partner that is increasingly spreading today.

“… I had a lot of guys, they were good guys, but I wasn’t in love with them, with some of them I tried to build something, but when the basic push is missing there is little to do, in the end you can’t build anything. I also fell in love with some guys but they didn’t care about me. I had a decent guy with whom I felt not so bad, although I wasn’t really well. With him, perhaps, I could have built something, but he was afraid of everything, he was hypochondriac, he was even afraid of touching me, and after a series of steps forward and backward he preferred to leave than to overcome his fears.

At the end of all these stories what’s left? I lost years and years of my life and I realized that maybe being alone is not the worst solution in the end and then, I’m not alone, I don’t have a boyfriend but I have many friends, I have a job that is not that great but at least it keeps me calm from that point of view. I don’t know if there will ever be a guy for me, but I’m tired of thinking about these things! If that guy will come then I will think about him, but for me the time for chats and dating sites is really over.”

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If you want, you can participate in the discussion on this post open on the Gay Project Forum: http://gayprojectforum.altervista.org/T-gays-and-time

SEXUAL ABUSE AND OBSESSIVE CONTENTS

The connection between sexual abuse and obsessive content related to sexuality deserves further study. I will consider two different situations, the first concerning a gay guy who has been abused in childhood and who presents a gay sexuality deeply conditioned by the experience of the abuse, the second concerning a straight guy who has been abused in adolescence and has developed a gay-themed OCD (I will only deal with the case of a OCD that had already manifested before the abuse). The situations, despite their substantial differences, have a fundamental aspect in common: the identification of the victim with the abuser. Let’s start with the first situation.

1) A gay guy, who has been sexually abused in childhood, has a gay sexuality that in the first meetings with his partners does not present particular problems but, if the relationship deepens, the guy gets to confess to his partner that he has been sexually abused, nevertheless he does not tend to feel as the victim but almost as the co-responsible if not as the promoter of the abuse, he tries anyhow to involve his partner in his obsessive fantasies concerning the abuse with insistently (obsessively) repeated questions about the circumstances of the abuse, asking him what he would do if he found himself in similar situations; faced with evasive or patently disinterested responses, the guy seems incredulous and attributes the lack of interest in sharing that particular sexual fantasies on the part of his partner to an alleged moralism of the partner himself, however the insistence does not cease even in the face of an obvious lack of interest but becomes even more pressing, as if the guy wanted to obtain a confession analogous to his own. The obsessive insistence on the partner goes as far as to induce him, in more or less long time, to distance himself and interrupt the relationship.

It is evident that the memory of the abuse has become a sexual archetype from which it is difficult to get free, and here a mechanism characteristic of the abuse is triggered: the victim imagines himself in the role of the abuser, situations of discomfort even very strong are created this way, because the victim sees himself as a potential pedophile and develops pedophile fantasies in which he assumes, in an oscillating manner, both the role of victim and abuser.

Basically the projective identification with the abuser and his behaviors favors guilt feelings and strongly weakens the possibility of rationalizing the memory of the abuse and of living a sexuality not deeply conditioned by the abuse itself.

2) In the case of the straight guy with a pre-existing gay themed OCD, the abuse in adolescence creates objective complications that cannot be ignored because it does nothing but feed the OCD, even though it cannot actually destroy the guy’s straight sexuality. The mechanism of identification with the abuser, in this case, cannot lead to true gay sexual fantasies (because the guy is a straight guy) but only to obsessions and gay compulsions which, as is usually the case in the OCD, remain, at most, at the level of masturbation and, in almost all cases, never materialize in real sexual relationships. The gay-themed compulsions and obsessions are perceived as deeply disturbing compared to the true sexuality that is and anyway remains straight.

The identification with the abuser can however be more complex when the abuser is not really a gay man but he is a married man or a man who has children, that is when the abuser is or appears to be a straight adult, with whom the straight guy with OCD can easily identify on the basis of the following projective mechanism: ”He is straight because he is married and has children, but if he abused me it means he also had gay fantasies and could not refrain from putting them into practice, but I am straight too, because I have a girlfriend and I have sex with her, but I also have gay fantasies, so in the end I won’t be able to stop myself and I’ll end up needing to have sex with a man. How can I be with a girl if I already desire men and know that sooner or later I will betray her with a man? I am fooling my girlfriend into believing that I am straight, but it is not so!”

In this case the identification mechanism acts through different paths but it is no less disruptive than in the case of the gay guy and creates the risk, sometimes lived obsessively, but objectively not very concrete, to lead to the breakdown the relationship with the girl.

The deeper identification with the abuser leads to two closely related consequences:

1) the responsibility of the abuser appears to be much lighter;

2) even if in such situations it’s evident that in any case no responsibility can be charged on the victim, the victim himself overestimates his own presumed responsibility up to the point to consider his own behavior decisive, and consequently to experience guilt feelings objectively unjustified.

In the two cases presented, the most suitable conditions to overcome obsessive thinking are realized when the guys have their ”real” emotional life, that is:

1) in the first case, when the gay guy lives not a unilateral falling in love but an authentic love story with a guy with whom a relationship is created that is completely independent of the fantasies related to abuse, fantasies which can also remain but marginalized and spontaneously not shared, fantasies that are not considered as a taboo but are very rarely argument of conversation. In essence the stories that materialize or tend to materialize only or mainly in terms of more or less spontaneous sharing of fantasies linked to abuse are not true love stories and therefore do not contribute to the overcoming of obsessive thinking;

2) in the second case, when the straight guy lives a love story in which the girl knows that the guy has been abused and realizes that the obsessive thought linked to the OCD can cause the guy to question his heterosexuality. The OCD has a strong conditioning capacity in two cases:

a) when the girl tries to ignore obsessive contents, pretending that they do not exist;
b) when the girl emphasizes the obsessive contents and offers them a sound box that amplifies their effect.

OCD must be tackled with awareness but without dramatization.

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If you want, you can participate in the discussion of this post open on the Gay Project Forum:  http://gayprojectforum.altervista.org/T-sexual-abuse-and-obsessive-contents

A GIRL IN LOVE WITH A GAY GUY

I too have been was with a guy who has literally destroyed my life, finally after years of profound solitude (many have consoled me but no one really understood me, not having lived the same things in first person), only in this forum finally I found someone who knows how these situations can be painful. Even my ex, while never having loved me, obsessively sought me when I left him, and I came back with him many times, he had declared his feeling to me too early, he used to kiss me mechanically … it’s all so familiar, so similar to what a had read many times on the forum!

My ex is also very misogynist. He writes very angry postings on Facebook in which he says that in his life he has been only with some bitches, for him a woman is worth the other, and when I asked him reassurance about us he seemed amused not giving me any answer, he was sorry for my “affective rants”, he said I was stupid because I was a girl, a girl who doesn’t like being contradicted, and he would have liked me to be more military, harder, a real shitty woman, solar and strong. Moreover, he compared me to all the women he had known, even to my friends, to my sister, letting me understand that they were better than me.

Then when I tried to leave him he threw himself at my feet and said he had a sickness inside, which led him to treat people badly … then when I “got back” with him, he immediately became another time the usual asshole. When we had sex it seemed like a funeral march, it was something that he did without joy, and I didn’t know what he was thinking about, but he never hugged me warmly, never pampered if not with embarrassment and a sort of disgust, superficial caresses, then he immediately he used to snort saying I was a person accustomed to ask for too much. He liked, however, to receive cuddles, like a child, with the excuse that he was sick. I felt like I was his mother or a whore to be despised, depending on the moments. You cannot understand, or perhaps only you who read here, you can understand that suffering, that absurdity I have experienced.

But I do not think I’m a victim because I partly knew he was gay. I was aware of some things, the relationship he had with his best friend and his anaffectiveness, the relationship he had with his mother (this is perhaps a common place), the total disinterest he had for intimacy with me … It was as if he was missing * that thing *, and I don’t want to say the penis, but the instinct to be close to me emotionally and physically, which then becomes a body in the sexual act. He is fixed with girls, he always speaks with this tone of … I don’t know, of blame, horror, it is not clear why he runs behind them, according to what he tells about it, and in general girls refuse even his friendship because he is not able to enter their sympathies, treating them as badly as he usually does.

All this is despite his being a handsome guy, that pushes initially all girls to speak to him and become curious about him (he is also clever and witty, original and creative) … Looking back I know that he loves me very much, he simply doesn’t accept me for what I’m: a woman. He used to say that I was playing the role of the female while I behaved in an absolutely natural way. He used to watch me cry in silence as if he could not connect with my pain. Sometimes he was kind, he was not a monster, let’s be clear. But he couldn’t be a loving guy. He used to show me affection only in the scene in which he was ill and I took care of him as a mother-nurse, and he in the grip of his “depression” (which I suspect is his repression) pretended to be dying and asked me to soothe his pain with my magical power or something, he asked me to feel his heart, to be near him … all the things he missed in normal moments, only that they were totally disconnected from the sexual dimension. His sexuality was all sadism in practice.

I talked a lot about him because what we lived still hurts. We were very close, symbiotic, and we really loved each other, even if we hurt ourselves and it is better for both of us to stay away (these situations are so absurd and contradictory) … I didn’t say anything about myself because I was with him even though I felt he was gay. But I want to say it because other people can pass through here and they could benefit from my experience as it happened to me.

So, first of all, I could not be sure that he was gay. He used to throw me many clues but he never told me it clearly and openly. Nor could he do it, because the problem between us was just that, he could not open up with me, there was place only to hurt me to vent his pain and to lie (even to himself), tell me stories, sell me his fictitious personality … there was no space neither to listen to me nor to truly express himself. If he is really gay, I don’t think he has accepted it at all, and if he has accepted it he denies it with all his strength.

Second: having a guy probably homosexual but who can have sex with women and has really sex with you from a certain point of view is a good move if you’re an insecure girl, because you know he cannot betray you. And also because (sorry if I use a stereotype but in my case it was so) with a gay guy you can have a friendship that with a straight guy is impossible to have. I remember that I really appreciated his patience, his passion for psychology, his gossip, his eye for aesthetics, the way we could talk for hours about how our male friends were, how they reasoned and so on … then when we wanted to, we also had sex, and I didn’t feel tested by him, because I knew he was thinking more than anything to himself while we were doing it, it was the affection towards me and his need to “unload” that motivated him, not my desirability as a woman … The price I paid for this “comfortable” relationship was the frustration of my real need, which is not only physical but also emotional and psychological. I had much more desire than him, and he began to say that I was nymphomaniac, he went around saying that even after we had separated.

So it was the fault of both of us for me. I knew, deeply, that I wasn’t really in love with him. He missed that light in the eyes that seemed to me to be the most important characteristic of the man I dreamed to have beside me. But when I tried to get away he was chasing me in every way. When I changed the phone number, he wrote to my sister, to my best friends, insistently, to know where I was … He didn’t respect my very simple request to be left alone to get over our story. When he thought I had canceled him he tried to come back with me. Perhaps he didn’t want to lose me because I had been more or less the only one who had seen him, albeit consciously deluding herself, like the straight man he wanted at all costs to be. Losing me meant losing the person who most believed in his artificial personality, the one he spent and still spends his life to sculpt and finish, full of artificial justifications about why he’s not normal, he is not like the other guys, he cannot stay in touch with people or women, because women are stupid and have to be more like men …

There is perhaps a third reason, sweet-bitter, that pushed me to stay with him, apart from the fear of a true love and the fear of be wrong about him, and it’s a mixture of voyeurism and pity. Something morbid, a curiosity almost like a reporter. He seemed to me and still seems, a striking case of how the repression can completely destroy the life of an individual.

Standing near to him I lived a kind of perverse reality show in which I expected at every step that he betrayed himself and that it turned out that he was gay with irrefutable proofs, or better I expected him to confess it clearly. Although perhaps I would have preferred to sadistically catch him on the fact, as in a yellow. I cannot really blame him for his feeling himself cornered and with his back to the wall or for his continuous questioning the sincerity of my love, because there was also a dark element in it, and I knew it. It seemed to me also my legitimate compensation for all the things I endured from him.

With the time I accepted the situation, I understood that it was not me who was wrong, that I cannot change him, that he is like that with everyone and not only with me because he suffers deeply. Sometimes I would like to help him, but I don’t know how to do it and I tend to say that maybe because I was his only girl and he was my most important guy in spite of everything … maybe I’m the last person who can help him. And this is very sorry for me because nobody has ever been so close to me, and for him it’s substantially the same … Now I hope the future leads me to a normal story, with a guy who wants to kiss his girlfriend, to cuddle her, to stay well together with her, and all this keeping calm and living quietly. It seems impossible to me because I’m very cynical about it, partly because of traumas related to my parents. I’m afraid that if I met a good guy I wouldn’t be attracted to him. But okay, I’ll see what happens. I needed to tell how much I felt understood on this forum. Thanks again to the OP and to all the others. Greetings.

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A GIRL IN LOVE FOR TWO YEARS WITH A REPRESSED GAY GUY

I’m reluctantly going out from a story with a repressed guy man I loved and love so much still now, despite all the evil he did to me. I only left him for two weeks ago because I realized that he had never really loved me. I state that I’m 26 years old and he is 23.

We met at an internship, we exchanged the numbers and for commitments of both we met two months later to go for a coffee together. Well, that night we talked about this and that, nothing more.

Arrived home I got a text message in which he confessed me his love and he hoped that it was reciprocated. Honestly this thing made me think a lot, because it is unthinkable to love a person so quickly, especially because he had just come out of a story that had lasted two years. In the following days we started to meet, he seemed really a sweet and tender guy and so at the end I tied myself to him and after a week or so we got together, even though initially I was a little hesitant.

The first kiss was sought by him, and so even the first time we made love it was he the one who did the first step, let’s say it all happened fast enough.

After only 3 weeks, he wanted to take me to his parents because he cared very much about this thing, and so I went into his family.

The more time passed the more that sweet and good guy became a distant memory. He was a type who later was discovered to be a great liar, but of the chronic ones; even though he knew he had lied to me he managed to treat me badly and to tell me bad things because I had allowed myself to doubt him. I don’t tell you how many tears I have shed, he often and gladly treated me badly even when I worried about him.

For example, once we were at the beginning of our engagement, he had to take an exam at the university, so in the afternoon, as usual, I called him to know how it went. Immediately after seeing my text messages and my calls he turned off the phone, and I, desperate, not knowing what had happened and imagining that something had not gone well with the exam, I decided to go to his house to see how he was and to lift a little his spirits, in case.

I arrive behind the door and find him ready to go out with his roommate friend to buy something, I saw him quite serene, but seeing me he got angry, he took me aside and told me that he didn’t want to answer because he was nervous because he hadn’t taken the exam and I would never have to allow myself to go to his house without warning. I felt very bad of course, because instead of appreciating that his girlfriend was worried about him, he got angry, and I didn’t understand why he was calm when he was with that friend and became almost rancorous with me! He was always like that with me, if he was nervous about his business he treated me badly for no reason, he told me the worst things, while for his friends he was another person.

He didn’t even want me to approach his phone for a matter of privacy and so over time I discovered he was hiding many things from me: he messaged secretly with other girls.

I have always been very sincere with him and I wanted him to do the same, because if he didn’t do anything wrong he wouldn’t need to hide. At the beginning he was really a chronic liar, he even came to lie about his past. Over time and with various speeches that I did he changed enough.

On a sentimental level instead I found myself with a person completely different from what he was at the beginning. He was not the type who kissed me on my cheek, who hugged me tightly, who cuddled me, these things were not spontaneous for him. Even when he was kissing me I didn’t feel passion and complicity, sometimes I happened to have to interrupt a kiss because it seemed no more than a play consisting in rhythmically move the tongue! I felt that those kisses were detached, and he justified his mistakes and his behavior as “inexperience”.

Even on a sexual level things were not going very well, he was very selfish, and we made love quite rarely because he was always stressed and tired. Only once I allowed myself to say with all the sweetness “I want you” but the ruckus broke loose, he began to shout against me and tell me that I didn’t understand that he was tired and that I used to make love only for “venting”. I don’t tell you the tears! As usual I was the one who had to pay for everything and who felt bad about the discussions, he, on the contrary, was totally indifferent, and rather than clarifying he preferred to go for a good night’s sleep. I thought it was a matter of character. Once after a discussion in which I had finished crying because he had treated me badly, he had understood that he was wrong and in order to show himself really sorry (I saw him out of the corner of the eye) he licked his hand and then wetted his eyes. I was puzzled by that gesture, but I didn’t say anything to prevent him from being uncomfortable.

Returning to the previous speech, to prevent him from reacting badly, I waited for him to make the first step to make love, based on how he felt! The intercourse, however, wasn’t very satisfying, he liked better to be masturbated by me rather than to make love classically. In time, talking about it, however, I made it clear to him that it was more important for me to make love classically because it was much more beautiful and intimate in a couple in love and so he changed his behavior to please me.

I had always noticed that his penis was not hard enough and that came out almost nothing of sperm. Initially talking to him he wanted me to believe it could be a pathology. In time he confessed to me that he used to masturbate 5-6 times a day, and from there I understood why he almost never wanted to make love. This thing made me feel very ill, because I thought that it was I was who was the problem, to be ugly and undesirable, so much so that my boyfriend preferred to do it by himself.

He simply told me that he loved me and that this was his longtime habit. I remember sadly the first night on vacation where we had the chance to sleep in the double bed together. As soon as I approached him looking for cuddles he turned away and with a serious and annoyed tone told me: “turn the other way and sleep!”, I remained silent, I did not understand why he reacted like that, I did as he told me and without making him notice I cried a lot.

I come now to tell an episode that dates back to a period before his “crisis”. One afternoon he had to study with a very esteemed friend, his college mate. We should have met after they had finished studying. That evening for no apparent reason he treated me badly with an unprecedented wickedness, told me that I had ugly dark circles, that my hair was ugly and he also pointed out other physical defects with a face literally “disgusted”. Obviously I was felt badly, and my self-esteem was affected again.

A few weeks later (we are talking about a year ago) it was a period when he was very nervous and he treated me very badly, he came to tell me that we could not be together because he could not love me, and he would never have succeeded, that he didn’t want make fun of me anymore and delude me. He said that in his own way he had loved me, but that always, not only with me then, he couldn’t feel feelings for anyone, even in old stories, he couldn’t even cry (and now I understand why he thought I was pretending when I cried because of him).

He asks me not to abandon him and I, who was anyway very attached to him, understand his discomfort and decide to stay close to him to try to understand where his malaise was coming from. In this period I try to talk a lot and to find the origin of his discomfort. He manages to tell me that he, compared to the other guys, he has never felt much attraction for women, for example if he saw a girl in a miniskirt he felt nothing at all. He comes to hypothesize to be gay, and he seems more and more convinced of it to the point of wanting to stay forever on his own because he would never have accepted the truth.

His dream would have been to go away and live his life away from everyone.

In this period I am his confidant and try to pull out of him the toad he had inside. It also comes out that as a child he discovered sexuality with an uncle 9-10 years older. In this “game” he had to masturbate his uncle, and he did it for a while … he didn’t tell me more. However I try to reassure him and try to minimize everything by saying that anyway they are experiences that can happen when sexuality is not yet developed and doesn’t mean that for this he is gay. I was convinced that maybe he was becoming obsessed by the idea of being gay, and that anyhow he was not.

When he told me this, it was as if he felt a bit of resentment towards this uncle, as if his uncle had taken advantage of him who at the time was a boy, somehow an easy prey. But in reality he loves this uncle (I too know this uncle), he loves him very much and vice versa, this uncle loves him very much. He has always considered him a good person … for him he is his best uncle!

Once become aware of such thing and seeing his discomfort I propose to go together with to a psychologist but in the end he is never ready to go, always postpones until he ends up saying that he doesn’t need it.

In the meantime he, convinced that we cannot go back together, for my own sake, pushes me to go out with other guys and stay only friends with him, and slowly he moves away more and more. At the end I decide to go out with a friend with whom there had been something in the past, even to test his reaction. Starting from this episode he approached me again telling me that he loved me, that he had only had a bad time and that he wanted to care about me. Shortly thereafter, after 3 months of “friendship”, a little naively perhaps, because I was too much in love with him, I believe him and we come back together.

Things with him are not going very well, he continues to be nervous and stressed for no apparent reason, the exams went great, he was finishing all in time, there were only 2 small easy exams to overcome and he was one step away from graduation. Secretly he began to smoke because of anxiety, and in his life he had never smoked! Even with me things were not good, on a sexual level I was not looking for a lot, and every time we made love he lose the erection, and sometimes even blamed me because he said he saw me absent and it was not true at all!

Just two months after our returning together, he falls again into crisis, we are in late July, last year, and he once again come to tell me that he doesn’t love me, and never will, that the fault is not mine but he doesn’t feel feelings for anyone; he leaves me this time for two and a half months, in August, the first month, he sent me messages telling me that he loved me, that he was wrong and that he wanted to see me again, but he never did anything concrete to see me again.

In September and mid-October it disappears completely and afterwards he goes back to show himself sending me a lot of text messages and I, tired and still hurt, I call him and ask him to leave me in peace after all the evil he did to me.

He arrives up to tell me that he has been a month with another girl, and punctually like always, also because he saw me agitated, because it seemed that I was the problem, he starts to totally denies what he had just said perhaps for fear of losing me, but I don’t believe him.

I find him one morning behind the door with a bouquet of flowers and my heart still weak could not say no! He told me that he had only left because he was stressed out by the thesis but that he always loved me, it was nonsense but the heart sometimes doesn’t want to see certain things and I believed him! He told me that during this period he did nothing and told me that he had been with a girl for a month just to know if I was engaged with someone else (the reality is that he had disappeared also with text messages for a month so I’m well aware that the story he told me is just a lie). Honestly I think he could do it because, not feeling anything for anybody, according to his thought, one girl or other doesn’t matter at all, the important thing is to appear heterosexual, especially if it is a dear friend of his the one who introduces him to the girls in question … all easy girls!

Things immediately went wrong, even the first time we did it as soon as we got back together his erection faded and his penis became soft quite immediately and so all the other times, he didn’t have a good (hard) erection. I didn’t feel in him the desire to have sex with me, as I have never felt it in two years of our story. Many times I told him that I had the impression that he mechanically made love, and he punctually got mad at it! Lately he told me that those caresses, those kisses and those cuddles he did to me, which he never had done before, were a play, were only a “recitation” because he hadn’t really changed. I felt very bad, and even more, because I believed he had unlocked himself since at the beginning I had asked him to make me some cuddle and do me some caress every now and then.

I was wrong! He punctually said that it was not true and that he had said it because he was nervous … I think instead that it was just when he was nervous that he was really telling me how things were … with a cold mind he was inclined to deny everything not to let me get away.

One of the last times we made love, immediately after putting the condom, in a few seconds, without giving me even time to undress, his erection became soft, and once again he blamed me saying “Asshole! Hurry up!”; understanding his embarrassment I didn’t even answer, it was clear that it was not my fault! It was he who, in his haste to put on a condom, had given me no time to undress! Usually, knowing his problem, I preferred to wait a while and was not in a hurry. The fact is that I was tired of his humiliations … once, after we did, perhaps because I had kept inside the anger for his gratuitous wickedness, I cried … and he obviously believed I was pretending! I don’t even know how he could have thought such a thing … and oh well!

I arrive to the drop that broke the jar and that made me say “now it’s enough” even if I love him I want a little love for myself! While I was doing oral sex on him he was very excited with a fantasy so much so that he expressed it aloud, in practice he imagined another man who together with him penetrated me. Such a fantasy left me a little disconcerted because I love him I don’t need to think about anything else, I only need him! I would never enjoy seeing him with another girl, rather I die from jealousy! He told me that it didn’t mean that he didn’t love me but that there is a distinction between sex and love.

Then to understand how things really were, I “pretend” to understand his point of view and I tell him that maybe he’s right, that maybe I’m a bit closed because with him I conceived only the classical making love. I tell him that I would like to make this fantasy come true, and that I would have been looking for a guy in the chat! At first he refuses but with a little insistence he accepts (at that moment I would have preferred to die) and he advised me to find a young guy, better if already engaged, who was not inclined to fall in love with someone else … and coming from a different city.

Then he thought of where to do it … he didn’t know if in the car … or in some house! However at the end being a little hesitant he decided to drop it for the moment … maybe later we would have talked about it! Inside me, however, there was a huge disappointment, because I’m convinced that a man who loves would not do a similar rubbish with his woman, but not even for a joke! The fact is that he was angry with me because I didn’t have to play with his imagination and told me that I not having such fantasies I was an amorphous girl.

After two years of great love for him in which if I had been allowed, I would have given my soul for him, if, according to him, thinking only of him when we made love was an “amorphous” thing well, this was not the man I wanted at my side, because as he has often said to me “he never loved me” and certainly he does not know what true love means, I am convinced! And I am even more convinced that he was a repressed gay who for fear of the reality held me bound to him doing me an evil that he couldn’t even imagine.

I’m tired of suffering, I want someone to make me feel loved and that at least cares about me. I still want to believe in true love … I hope it exists!

I only regret having given an immense love to a guy who has never understood it, because he was too devoid of feelings to be able to perceive mine, I was simply for him “the girl with whom he was” no more and no less than many other girls! Which girl in my place would have accepted so much stress if she hadn’t been madly in love? I think certainly none … pity he never understood such things!

This is my story ended on 18/4/2014 … from that day I’m trying a new rebirth, even if we are still at the beginning and for me everything is difficult … I have to suffer long before I can smile again … also because this was for me the first big love of my life, and I really believed it! I apologize if I have been too wordy and thank all those who will want to comment on my story, the opinions are always welcome!

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FALLING IN LOVE WITH A MARRIED GUY – A VERY COMPLICATED SITUATION

I’m 31 years old, I was born and raised in Italy but I lived abroad for many years. I have always been “different” from others, grown up between adults and with a keen interest in being with adults. I figured out that I was gay during high school but the acceptance phase was long and hard. I started declaring myself 5-6 years ago with my female best friend and with my male best friend. I told my parents everything last December, but they had already guessed it. I’m proud of how my dad took it, the person I was most afraid of. Being told by my father that now I would have been even more appreciated, made me feel good.

In more than 31 years I only had a “story” with a guy, 5 years ago. The thing was over after two months for the distance and perhaps because he, just out of a relationship, was not ready to start a new one with me. I had been in love with him, I felt destroyed but then, slowly, I reconstructed a group of friends. I met guys / men, I attended people to understand if and how I liked them. But apart from the infatuations, I have never met a person who, in addition to reciprocating certain feelings, was also compatible with me.

Until August of last year, when after two and a half years of peace of mind, a guy writes to me on Planet Romeo. He was a few years younger than me, intriguing, we began to chat, cuddling each other. It has to be noted that, despite I said I was not looking for sex, he continued to write: a true rarity. 4 days later we go on Whatsapp and the same day he tells me that he was married. I still remember the scene: I was in a coffee break, I felt stunned.

I asked him what he was doing in a chat like Planet Romeo and if his wife knew. Of course his wife was totally unaware. He apologized, he thought he had already told me it the first night we had chatted, and tells me that he understands that I don’t want to meet him anymore. But voice inside me told me to meet him. I wanted to understand, only understand. We continue to write to each other nonstop, I from my office (empty for summer holidays), he from his workplace. The next day we decide to see each other spontaneously and I invite him to have a coffee at my house. The moment he enters my house and extends his hand to introduce himself, I feel a lump in my throat and my stomach closes. Beyond the fact that already in the picture I had understood that he was my type, seeing him live was love at first sight.

The strange thing is that I, generally very nervous, after not even 2 minutes, was calm and happy with him on the balcony drinking coffee as if we were friends of a lifetime. I felt so comfortable, as if we had always known each other.

Because of the heat, we move into the living room, in the cool, and we keep talking. He tells me about him, born and raised abroad, in this country for a couple of years and married for just over two years with a girl from here known in his country years before. He tells me that he has problems with his wife (too little sex in his opinion) and that he has many doubts, that he doesn’t feel integrated, that his linguistic knowledge is not enough to work in his field, blablabla. He asks me about me, I tell my story. We never stop talking a second … we have so many things to say … everything is so natural … and an hour later he tries to kiss me, I reject him and say that I have to reflect on what I’m doing. He understands and does not insist.

He tells me that at the time of the university he had thoughts for the guys, but he never tried (perhaps for fear, or I don’t know what for) and that these thoughts never ceased, that he masturbates while watching gay porn and feels guilty … and tells me that, when he got married, he promised to abandon and repress this side of his life because of which he feels guilty. A few months before meeting me, however, he cannot take it anymore and decides to meet a man with whom to have sex. He says that before he met me he had met three men in all and he had sex with them, cheating on his wife. He says that sex with men is exciting but at the same time it disgusts him, and he reiterates how the feelings of guilt are destroying him … he loves his wife, he wouldn’t want to betray her … but he needs guys, although he continues to repeat that sex with men doesn’t convince him. And I tell him that, perhaps, this is due to his non-acceptance. Strange situation, I think … then he says he is 80% happy and tells many other things. We say goodbye, I accompany him to the door and he goes home.

No more than 10 minutes after, climbed on the train, he writes to me: “where have you been for all my life? I have eternally been looking for someone like you.” In the following days we continue to write so … uninterruptedly … in the evening we say goodnight and good morning in the morning. Crazy things. He writes to me that he would like to see me again … and, please, don’t ask me why, I accept.

4 days later we meet again at my house, we talk, drink coffee, we kiss and start cuddling (not sex). We also spend 4-5 hours, after my work, talking, cooking together, having dinner, etc. I repeat, crazy things. When the train is about move, from the train itself he writes to me that I am his ideal man, he wonders how I can be single and above all he tells me that 4-5 years before he would have had no doubts about me, but that at that time he was 100% hetero and shy.

And he asks me if, in a future life, he can have a chance to be together with me. I’m clearly upset … you can imagine the emotions of hear such things from the person you spontaneously like better … Even if then he tells me that, unfortunately, in this constellation someone would have suffered (his wife). The story goes on … or better starts … we meet every time we can, I go to work, he changes the shifts to be with me at my house … we go together to the cinema … go walking in the evening … his wife, unaware of everything, works until late. On Saturdays, very often, he has to work … so we get to see each other 4-5 times a week and we often spend Saturday nights together, either by him at work or at my house … After work we walk together towards the station … and then it happens that one evening he takes me by hand and in the station he kisses me. The first time I kiss a man in public. And he, married, keeps on going hand in hand with me with the risk of being seen by someone.

My family has always made me feel loved, but the sensations I start feeling are special … this feeling light … desired, etc. … Two weeks later we end up in bed … and there we understand that the harmony is total. I sincerely hoped that he would turn out to be a landslide in bed. At least I would have had a reason to close … to forget him … All the story really scared me. We go on … in September I have two weeks of vacation … he insists to take me to the airport … and a week later he comes to pick me up and spends his Saturday with me. Obviously he had told his wife a lot of fake stories. He feels uncomfortable because he had lied and also because he is fine with me.

That Saturday he tells me that in the previous week, while I was at a sea site, he thought that maybe he can live without me … but anyway he was always with me. Even during the second week of vacation, while I was at my house, we keep on hearing and calling each other. And then he writes to me that he misses me, etc. … I come back home … the story goes on. He asks me if I’m in love, I do not answer him. But he understands. He says it’s not right for me, that I deserve a man who is 100% available, not one with problems like him. But we are in touch every day … messages … he often comes for lunch in the neighborhood where I work … even just to spend an hour with me … and to shake my hand under the table, at the restaurant.

Speaking of his wife, he says that he loves her but that sex with her is not enough … that they do it once a week if all goes well. He says he has talked to her and that she only needs no more that. He often cries when we see each other. When we make love he’s in seventh heaven … we talk, we laugh … there’s total involvement. He says that with me it’s something else, not just for the performance but for the harmony, for what you feel … trust … the bond. Anyway … then he cries … he feels guilty … and tells me that he loves her … etc. .. But then we do it another time. When he leaves my house, I never understand how he feels.

Then he goes on vacation, at the end of October, with her. For three weeks we stay in touch very little because there is no field. When he comes back he closes the story with me. He says he cannot take it anymore, he says it’s not right for me nor for her. He says that he got married and made her a promise … he tells me that he loves her … that sex with her is not bad … that having sex with me doesn’t convince him … And here, for the first time I burst: I explain to him that when you are really happy there is no reason to look for sex elsewhere and especially not with the opposite sex. I tell him that maybe he didn’t realize it … but what binds us is not a friendship …

I didn’t tell him it’s love … I told him that in my opinion he feels a great affection for his wife … but that this is different from love, and that, always in my opinion, he suffers from internalized homophobia. He asks me what the solution would be and I reply that, the best thing would be to take a break with her, to stay alone (even without seeing me) and understand what he really wants. He tells me it’s not true … he tells me that he started going with men because he felt not integrated, without a work and depressed. And I tell him that if all men betrayed their wife with other men for the above reasons, we would no longer have happy marriages. The usual things … I explained that he must look for the reasons, talk to a psychologist, etc. I explained to him how it was for me … and that in any case, the fact of feeling the need to stay / go with men, combined with homo-affectivity, has its roots in his own sexuality.

I was patient … a lot, but hearing from him that sex with his wife was not bad … and then the opposite … well, it made me go out of my mind, even if in that moment I didn’t realize clearly why. I spent a horrible week. Empty, discouraged, sad, alone. The following Saturday I wanted to see him again to talk to him and in the end we made “peace” if we can say so. And we started seeing each other again and again, etc. For the first time, it seemed to me that he understood that my goal was not that he left his wife … but that he was calm, happy, fulfilled. Everything went on normally … we saw each other when we could, I went to get him at work. As for the afternoons, his wife had changed jobs and now worked with office hours, he could no longer lie and so, to see him, I choose the free day of the week coinciding with his. He came to me at home, he reached me in bed, he woke me, we spent time together … he helped me with the work at home … as a couple that we were really not. I was the lover in love with a man of another person.

Then, at the end of November, he gets his much-hoped job … and the same evening, celebrating with me (and not with his wife), he tells me that he loves me … in his own way … but he loves me. I was happy, I was beginning to hope to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Then I spent the Christmas holidays with my parents … we stayed in touch normally … I didn’t tell him that I had done my coming out so as not to burden him with further worries and when I got back we met … and there, crying, I he tells me that he has decided to close … that he wants to save his marriage … that he made a promise to his wife … that he is fine with me, but neither sex nor life with a man convince him … etc. … a bitter blow. We cried for two hours .. and he told me that he doesn’t want to lose me … that he loves me, that I’m important etc. He didn’t leave me for a minute. He said he had not yet made a choice … but that he could not take it anymore. He even told me that he had to be careful not to mention me too much … otherwise his wife would have asked questions. He tells me he cannot give me what I want from him, but that I’m very important in his life and he doesn’t want to lose me … he wants to keep hearing me.

But in the meantime he attended chats on the net … and I saw him online many times… I thought: he wants to save his marriage … but he’s always chatting with other men and maybe he also meets them! Well, do you know what? We continued with good morning, goodnight … uninterrupted messages … we conducted a relationship without sex, because I was afraid of the HIV, … just like before.

He assured me that he saw only a friend in me … then, he was constantly looking for me and wanted to see me regularly … he came regularly to my house for dinner … when his wife was out to dinner with her friends … I told him more than once that I was sorry … but even if he didn’t admit it, we were not friends … because two friends don’t hug each other … don’t give each other kisses on the neck … and above all they don’t have an erection with every hug. When I complained it he said I was exaggerating … My friends said he was an egoist and I had to close. But I, in order not to lose him, accepted everything.

At a certain point he tells me that his wife would like to meet me … and that everything would be easier for him if she knew me … because he wanted to integrate me in his life … And I tell him that I would never do such a thing, that seamed to me disrespectful and disgusting. And what was the reason? If she had known me, he would not have to answer any more questions … He asked me it, even though I had never asked too many questions about his wife and had never spoken badly about her, not even once.

Nevertheless, I asked myself what kind of wife doesn’t want to have sex with her husband at that age and above all I asked myself how she didn’t notice her husband’s moods. Perhaps it was because I realize quickly if something / someone doesn’t go but I had the impression that his was a marriage already finished. I carried on the thing feeling uncomfortable, not sleeping at night, not being able to concentrate on the studies … then I tried to discuss it with him … and he cried a lot, etc. … until in the end of March we went to walk in the mountains and once arrived at the top I extracted the thermos of coffee and a pack of biscuits … and he told me: “Why are you doing all this? Why do you bring all the things that I like?” I told him that I do it for all the people I love (which is absolutely true). And he said: “But do you know that ours is only a friendship?” … and I didn’t say anything. I just thought: “You tell me it all the time … but only because it makes you feel good”.

Then I proposed to go for dinner after the walk and he told me: “And how would you see this dinner? As a romantic meeting or as a dinner with friends?” And there I really lost patience … we walked for more than an hour in silence, then we sat on a bench … always in silence. And after ten minutes he says to me: “Don’t you have anything to say?” And I let myself explode: I told him that his behavior was unjust, that he didn’t make any choice in order not to have to take a position but in fact he was with her (heterosexuality of the facade) and nevertheless continued to get all the attentions on my part (homosexuality).

I reiterated the fact that it was not right, either for me or for her … and that I could not take it anymore. My life was not peaceful. The chat topic too came out. I told him that I knew he was always online, etc. … and he swore to me that he had not attended other men after me but that, as I knew, he could not stand without that part. And I screamed in face of him that it would have been right to let his wife go because she had every right to live with a man who really loved her. My friends said I couldn’t really know if he really loved her. And I repeated that when there is love, certain things are not to be done. And that if he were in love with his wife, he wouldn’t be so attached to me as a lover. Also because I consider myself able to recognize the difference between love and well-being.

I patiently explained to him that I thought it was right not to see /hear each other anymore. I advised him to consult a psychologist (we had been talking about it for months) and to solve his problems. And then I added that, if his problems were resolved in my direction, my door would be always open to him, but as a partner, not as a friend. Well … I have not seen him since the beginning of April. The same evening he wrote me a myriad of messages … he left me vocal messages asking me to think again about it … crying … that it was not right to close a friendship … telling me that I was not behaving well.

He proposed to me to let me heard even less, in order not to stress me too much, etc. … I didn’t listen to him, I held on. We have not seen each other since. He looks for me regularly … once a week he writes … he misses me, he concludes the messages with a big hug … every excuse is good to write. I sometimes answer politely but in a detached way.

Clearly his wife is still unaware of everything … but so … why tell her strange things… he is straight!! His perpetual searching for me makes me sick … but it gives me the confirmation that he doesn’t accept my choice and that he cannot be without me. In a message he wrote to me that he had represses himself so as not to write to me. On Monday I received a message from him: “I went by the psychologist and told him about you. I cried a lot. I miss you a lot. I hope your phrase in your Whatsapp profile doesn’t refer to me, otherwise I don’t understand why you don’t make yourself heard. I hope you’re better and that I can go to the concert with you in June.”

In March he had bought tickets for a concert to go there together in June. I replied to him with a long message … reiterating the fact that I hope the psychologist can help him find himself and live lightly … explaining that I feel not at ease, that I miss him more than ever but staying close is not a viable solution. As for the concert, I told him that I cannot give him what he needs … as he cannot give it to me. And that he can go there with other friends or with his wife. His answer was “dumb!”. The next day I wrote to him, just to know if he had slept. I did it because I needed it. I know what it means to go to the psychologist the first time and I felt compelled to write to him. He replied that he is well, that he had dreamed so much and that he feels alone … he misses me, but he cannot expect anything more from me. And still a hug …

Sorry if I was verbose … this is my story … at the moment, despite five months have passed since January, I feel really uncomfortable. I’m in love more than ever and I think he realized that maybe I’m more important than what he wanted to believe. But as my best friend says: “My dear, the facts, only the facts matter. And he’s there with her, not here with you!” My opinion is that he is gay, repressed, with a strong homophobia and that he still has to make his acceptance path. I believe that in life we need balls and courage to follow our heart and I think he is not ready yet. I don’t know how to behave anymore. I don’t know how to stop this story and go further. The idea of seeing other men makes me vomit. And the fact that I cannot have the love of my life (because I know that we are exactly this one for the other), it tears me apart.

________________

If you like, you can join the discussion on this post on Gay Project Forum: http://gayprojectforum.altervista.org/T-falling-in-love-with-a-married-guy-a-very-complicated-situation

GAY FANTASIES OF A MARRIED MAN

Hello Project, only in this days I have met your beautiful and very useful site and I have found several answers to my “troubles” and I must say that at least in part and thanks to you I feel a little less agitated. I am writing to you, however, because I think that my experience may also be useful to others (so I authorize you to post this email, if you think it appropriate), and above all because I would like to have advice on how to behave or better, on what is your best way to deal with my situation with less anxiety. And then I’m just fine to talk about it, because I’ve never talked to anyone and then I’ve been carrying this weight for 30 years now. So I would like it to be clear what a great step I’m going to make.

I am 44 years old (and also because of this I have written because I read that you like to increase the number of “no longer boys”, as you call them, who bring their experiences.

I am happily married to a wonderful woman and I have two beautiful kids. I want to underline it because I love my wife to madness and she loves me even more, if possible, and with her there is also a good sexual harmony: I find myself satisfied on that side, also because, without exaggerating, we occasionally experience something new. The only flaw is that over the years (12 of marriage) the frequency of the sexual intercourses has diminished. She too seems to me to be satisfied, but she would like to have a greater frequency in the intercourses.

But let’s get to the point. Ever since I started masturbating, that is, at 11, if I remember well, my sexual fantasies have always turned, at 95%, to homosexual contents. In most cases, depending on the time, the fantasies have seen me and see me even now in the passive role and in fact, from the beginning I had and still have a great pleasure in anal self-stimulation. I have never had any kind of sexual intercourse until the age of 28 and this does not seem normal to me. My sexuality was then expressed through masturbation. In truth, my discovery of attraction to the guys has never led me to any particular sense of guilt or to attempts of repression: I accepted it immediately, but at the same time I realized that it would not be easy to live my sexuality freely.

Girls for the truth I have always liked them, and even today if I see beautiful women, sexual thoughts come to my mind. Conversely, as many do, if you exclude the adolescent phase, I feel that I cannot find any affective interest in a man/boy: at best I could fall “sexually” in love with someone of them. As far as I’m concerned, honestly, I do not believe in love between two men; the true love I could have found, and really found presently is only with women, which I consider to be superior to men in this respect (I know you will not agree but that’s not the point).

Given the above, in adolescence, I was having trouble communicating with girls, both because of shyness and because I was conditioned by the social environment (at that time I lived in a small town) and by my mother in the sense that I did not want to be seen around with not nice girls because my mother always told me I was a good guy (that’s true) and that cute girls had to line up for me (obviously it’s not true, because I’m not particularly attractive). Perhaps I missed a strong push to have heterosexual intercourses because I probably liked more those gay. Surely I always liked better the male body. I also have always been involved in the studies and probably at that time masturbation was enough to calm my sexual appetites.

As far as the possibility of gay intercourses is concerned, even though, as has already been said, there was no problem neither moral nor of personal acceptance, living in a small town, even though there was no internet, there was anyway, of course, a strong social conditioning. etc. etc. I have never had real opportunities, nor have I really been looking for such opportunities (except for some timid approaches which have not led to anything). However, I lived quite serenely (blessed masturbation!) And by the truth I said to myself that the sexual intercourse between men was superior to that hetero because it gives the opportunity to enjoy with all parts of the body. Probably if I had more opportunities and more explicit, had there been internet with its beautiful sites (like this) that would help me overcome my shyness and, why not, less beautiful sites (porn movies) that would still make me understand many things about the gay world, I would have had my homosexual, traumatic or beautiful but still right experiences, because that was the age to make those experiences!

At that time, however, I could also have fallen in love with guys, what really happened with some comrades (without any possibility). When I left my little town to go to college in a big city, you could suppose that, freeing me from the conditioning of my old town and of my family, I could have experienced my first gay relationships but no! Again in this case, I was overwhelmed by other types of conditioning: first of all, and maybe it was also right, the commitment to the study, since I felt obliged to my parents who spent a lot of money to keep me in college, but also the fact that I was living in an apartment with one of my high school friends (and that’s where the little town comes back to me) plus two absolutely hetero guys totally locked up at any dialog. So I didn’t even have time to look for boys and girls and didn’t even have such a big desire.

I kept masturbating thinking of homo intercourses (during this time both active and passive, I imagine because, without having any experience, any way of feeling pleasure attracted me) and I was there “drooling” when I was seeing guys around or on television. When I finished my studies and started working, always in the big city, I went to live alone. At that point I said, “Finally I can arrange my life as I want, I can decide whether to have gay relationships or not, or go looking for girls!” But it was not that easy: I didn’t have a computer neither I was really interested in buying a computer, and at that time social networks and chats were still in the early days, during the university years I had been isolated from the social context and I almost had to fit into the social environment of the city, I did not know how to meet people, women or men, and those were even the first few months of the new job with all this entails, and I did not have the luck to have some bisexual colleague with whom to try something! I really was not so bad physically: not much beautiful in the face but with a muscular body, tall, wide shoulders, only with a slightly prominent belly but with a nice seat. I had started a first approach to gay pornography (magazines), but nothing more.

When at last (at the age of 28!) maybe because I felt alone, I decided that it was time to have sex (hetero or even gay), I first went with a female prostitute and lost my virginity. I must say that it was not traumatic, but I did not feel a particular pleasure. Then I started thinking that I could not go on like that and that I had to experience gay intercourses.

At that point, however, and I don’t know why (what do you think about, Project?) I felt also a strong need for paternity and “normality”: I absolutely wanted to have a family with a woman who loved me and that I could love, and also have children. I really wanted such things and not just to suppress my gay sexuality! So I thought that it was absolutely crucial to make a choice, a choice that really influenced all my life and that’s why I’m now writing to you: had I to follow the “sexual” part of me and then give vent my desire to have fun with guys every time I wanted it, but with the prospect, on the other hand, of living a life not easy (it is useless to turn around) as a bisexual single because I never wanted to “live” with a male? This would have forced me to remain basically alone, whether I chose to remain hidden or to expose my nature, causing great pain to my family. Or had I to give up a part, even important, of my sexuality, continuing to take refuge in masturbation, but having for the rest a serene life, (what then actually happened)?

I decided that sex wasn’t certainly the most important part of life and that in the end you cannot have everything and therefore I made my choice. Today I don’t regret it and this choice for the truth is very similar to that of a heterosexual man who marries and decides to be faithful, to renounce having sex with other women. Nevertheless I regret, that I didn’t have gay relationships in adolescence and youth. I wish I could say today: “I still like guys, but I’ve already done what I wanted to do, I have had my many relationships, and have experienced what was to be experienced and then I made the right choice.”

Unfortunately, things are not so and after so many years, now I feel a little in crisis because it seems to me that masturbation is not enough anymore, nor it’s enough to feel very excited when on public transport I see good guys; I would like to feel a male’s body with all my senses, let a gay penetrate me, and also enjoy him. But in my situation it’s not easy. I would not have moral inhibitions to go with male escorts, but in addition to the obvious fear of illness, however overwhelming, I would not have had time or opportunity to stay at the computer choosing this or that one because I obviously have a family and from whew I’m working I cannot go to these sites.

I could put an ad and then just wait, but in this case too, the thing should be handled by the home computer and I would have difficulties for the above reasons. And then, it’s really worth? Ah, had I too had the luck of several people who write to you, who can, by “normal” ways, get in touch with gay or bisexual people! I could make contacts with men who are in my own situation and only experience sex stories, but my wife probably would not forgive me and I do not know if I would do it. And for the truth I do not know how much I can enjoy having sex with men of my age: I still like teenagers but at my age it’s ridiculous to think that you can find someone willing to have sex with one of over 40, moreover passive, if not for money. Besides, I’m no longer as handsome as when I was young because with growing age I got a little belly. Of course, a thirty-year-old man would theoretically have more experience and know how to make me enjoy.

I didn’t said anything yet to my wife, I don’t feel like it yet, I don’t know if she would understand. maybe in the coming months I will do it, perhaps just to get rid of such a weight and maybe this could make our relationship even better, because she would understand that I am honest. Lately, I’ve given her some signal, because during sexual intercourses I asked her to penetrate me with phallic objects. At first she hesitated, but then she said to me, “Because I love you, if you like it, I’ll do” and then she asked me if I like males but I did not have the courage to say it and indeed I told her that if a man wants to feel pleasure in that way it’s not an index of homosexuality. She told me something I was happy about, that is if I had sex (and I suppose, sporadically) with a male, it would be less harming than if I had sex with a woman for the simple reason that I would go looking for a kind of pleasure that she could not give me. But soon after that she started crying and I felt my heart wounded!

Project, what do you suggest to face my situation more serenely? I would like to have your reply. Lastly, I would like to send positive messages. I hope my experience will be useful to the young guys who are now living the same things I have experienced, I hope they reflect before acting to avoid my own mistakes, putting away any hesitation in experiencing gay relationships if they feel they want to do it, and putting also away every external conditionings (which, contrary to what people think, still today are common among the guys, although in very different manners according to the context). Even today, even for those who live in the little towns, thanks to the internet there are more ways to get to know each other and compare their anxieties. And then I also think of my children, both boys: I think that what I’ve been and still I’m through is not useless because, when the time will be right, I will be able to educate them correctly about affectivity and sexuality. For charity, I will not encourage them to be gay, rather I will explain to them that gay life is tough, but I will tell them that their dad has no problem if they want to experience gay, sexual or sentimental relationships. And then they will decide what is best for them.

I wish you all the best.

P.S .: I cannot use chats and the like, I’m ignorant of the matter and on the other hand in my situation I would not even have the chance; so please give me an e-mail reply; if you think it appropriate, you can also post this mail and your answer.

What follows is my answer.

Hi, I go straight to the point. What you write does not have much of gay, rather it is a mentality far removed from that of most gays, I can tell you better, for you it is important to experience a kind of sexuality, not to build a love story with a guy. For you there is only one of the two components of homosexuality, that is, the typically sexual one, and it lacks the affective one and you tend to read gay sexuality as a set of sexual practices that are not even the majoritarian in the gay world (penetration) and are a vague transposition in a homosexual key of a typically heterosexual sexuality.

Experimentation of sexuality has nothing to do with sexuality, it is an experiment not an act of love and on the other hand you say and underline in any way that you do not believe in love stories between two men, which for a gay guy is absolutely essential. A married man gratified by heterosexuality, having a relationship with a guy or wanting to have a relationship with a guy is not a gay but a heterosexual who goes or wants to go with the guys but will in all likelihood transpose into a homosexual relationship things that with the gay world have little to do. In the heterosexual dimension, sexuality is inevitably with fixed roles, in the homosexual dimension the existence of roles doesn’t even make sense, despite what people believe, there is a principle of substantial equality, it is the sexuality of similarity and not of complementarity.

A gay guy falls in love with another guy (even heterosexual) and doesn’t fall in love because he wants to experience some sexual practice with him, but because for that guy he feels love and tenderness. I would like to clarify one thing, according to the common language a man is homosexual if and only if he has sexual intercourses with another man but this does not make sense, on the contrary it happens often that guys not yet openly gay fall in love with guys with whom they could never have sexual intercourses. A gay guy may regret a love story ended badly but not the lost opportunity of having sex with a guy.

A gay falls in love with a guy and then sees him sexually, masturbates thinking about that guy, wants him but wants him as a person, because it must be just that boy and not another one, he does not want him because he’s a guy but because he is just that guy. A gay would not think of going to search for an escort to try a sexual contact or put ads for sexual purposes, could even put ads but dreaming of doing almost miraculously in certain environments the encounter he had dreamed of all his life, that is to find there the guy who really loves him and that will be his boyfriend steadily.

A gay guy does not dream of gay sexual intercourses but of a love story with a guy and when he is in love is brought to do anything for his boyfriend. I have seen authentically heroic gestures, incredible courage and abnegation manifestations of gay guys in love for the good of the guy they love. A gay guy in love, for the guy he loves, is capable of giving up everything because he realizes that the relationship he has created, if real, is able to change his life 100%. But you tell me, in any case I still feel the strong impetus to try a gay sexuality. Given that you cannot build any serious affective affair with a gay guy, you will find only guys or men who, like you, just want to try or continue to experience sexual intercourses, if you allow me, this is the anteroom of a deep frustration. I don’t say it for moralism but because I have seen these things a lot of times.

A forty-year-old guy seriously looking for an affective relationship with a man can also find answers worthy of being taken into consideration. But when I saw married men go looking for “just” homosexual experiences to say that they experienced it as wall, inevitably, a few months later, I saw the consequences in terms of frustration and sometimes of sexual dependence. I add another thing that seems to me to be absolutely fundamental, and it is the relationship of a married man with his wife, especially in families with children. If I try to think about how a woman can feel when she understands to have a husband looking for sex out of the house and with a man, I get shivered. You are destroying your wife’s life in this way, and moreover when she made her choice she was not aware of what really you had in mind. Let’s not talk about the kids. I have seen great children who have accepted that the father was gay and that he lived with another man but in a relationship that nevertheless appeared in the eyes of the children (because it really was) a true love affair, but of course those children would not accept that the father wanted try to prove gay sexuality.

When you married you didn’t speak clearly to your wife, until now even if you didn’t really allow her to understand who you are, however, you have considered that your relationship should not be crushed by different sex fantasies (hetero or gay) but if you’re looking for sex from a man, your wife would feel betrayed and no less than if you were looking for sex from a woman. I would strongly disagree with your invitation to the guys to “experience gay intercourses.” It is good not to be “afraid of external conditioning” if it is to build true gay love stories but to push people to experience gay sexuality without an affective basis means just not having the pale idea of what gay life really is. I apologize for my perhaps too much determined way to deal with the problem, but I have to clarify and point out that what you consider gay are the typical gay fantasies of a heterosexual man, that of gay only have the appearance.

I add here below the answer to my email.

Thank you so much for the wonderful answer, it has been very helpful, you are really a nice person. The perception of me as bisexual or gay or otherwise attracted to males stemmed from the fact that my free sexuality (masturbation) has always been addressed to guys and still excites me to see beautiful males. If things are different then ok. In the meantime (and I hope I did well) I took courage and I told my wife everything! In confirmation of what you say, she felt betrayed because I did not tell her everything before marrying and maybe she would have accepted me the same but in a conscious way: she said practically the same thing you said to confirm that she is definitely a person better than me. But better late than never and also now I know, above all thanks to you, that I must not betray her for any reason in the world because I love her immensely and now more than ever I need her love and she needs mine.

I hope my wife will be able to metabolize the suffering that I created her, she who simply dreams of a normal life with a normal man, thanks to the fact that she knows that now I would never betray her and that I need her. Paradoxically, however, I feel better, because I have freed myself of a burden that I have worn for too many years and because now I know I can masturbate without hiding from her who is willing, out of love, to participate in these fantasies of mine and also accepted more serenely to practice anal penetration for me. Yesterday, after I told her, every time I approached her there was an erection and it seems to me that couple sexuality can gain, I feel even more satisfied: always a compromise solution but less hypocritical and freer.

Excuse me if I said that guys have to experience gay relationships, I was wrong to write and in fact if you read the part dedicated to my children, I spoke, more correctly, to experience gay relationships both sexually and sentimentally, if they feel they want to do such things. I just wanted to say, in fact, that if a guy in adolescence feels he wants to have a gay relationship in his sexual and sentimental fullness, he can do it without hesitation, so as not to find himself living in regret, like me.

Feel free to publish this e-mail, if you think it appropriate, I’d like to read your opinion and also those of the guys of the forum, even with reference to developments with my wife. You’re a big, Bye.

Here below my answer.

Your mail makes me immensely pleased, because you did what had to be done, that is, you spoke clearly with your wife. Sure she felt betrayed for not having known everything before, but at least now she can have the certainty of having an authentic relationship with her husband, in which there are not things that are not said. Of course you feel better! You did what you had to do. See, the relationship with your wife, just from what you write, has all the characteristics of a true emotional relationship, in which there is sex, of course, but there is also a community of life and a cooperation to build something together. Being accepted by his own wife even after such an admission is a sign that the relationship is very strong.

You can also have your fantasies about guys but loving a person is a different thing. To love means to live together, to build together, to have a common world, in two, to be a couple and no longer to two individuals.
A hug! And good luck!
Project

I report below the answer I received.

Dear Project, I’m always “the man married who experiences gay fantasies”. Excuse me if I write to you again, I’m far from taking advantage of your immense availability. But I read the discussion that followed on my case with great interest. I would have liked to register on the forum and answer the numerous comments, but my wife wouldn’t have approved.

I was pleased about the interest, but things have been said about the relationship of love with my wife that I didn’t like too much: I’m good to be considered a repressed gay or a schizophrenic bisexual (yes, I always knew that my behavior is not 100% normal and in my life I never felt heterosexual, I felt gay at times, before getting to know my wife, bisexual almost always), but it hurts me when one calls into question my deep love (both feeling and sex) for my wife. You can understand that for me it would be terrifying: it means that for all these years of marriage with my wife I only pretended to love her first of all if front of myself and unknowingly, even though I am deeply convinced of loving her in the highest sense of the term and above all of feeling sexual fulfillment: if I think about it, I feel like crying!
But I wanted to tell you that you’re really great and do you know why? I went to read a post of March 31, 2010 entitled “Gay Sexuality and Transgression”. I quote here two passages:

” It sometimes happens that some guys who have a typically heterosexual and fully satisfying emotional and sexual couple life don’t ever masturbate thinking of a girl but they do it thinking exclusively of guys with whom they don’t feel emotionally involved, but their sexual fantasies are concentrated only on a particular sexual behavior, considered very transgressive. In such situations, the classic principle of free sexuality, according to which sexual orientation emerges through the masturbation (free sexuality) and not through the couple sexuality, cannot be applied precisely because in these situations masturbation is not really free and the fact of masturbating with transgressive gay fantasies (or considered such) indicates that masturbation is experienced not as sexuality but as an act of rebellion against taboos. The more transgressive the fantasies that accompany masturbation are the greater is the gratification that is obtained by overcoming the taboo. I mean that for these guys masturbation is not really a sexual experience but an act of self-assertion as a person who got rid of taboos. This mechanism of overcoming taboos through transgressive masturbation can in some cases evolve into forms of transgressive couple sexuality.”

“It is evident that in this case masturbation is not at all a form of free sexuality and, I would say, it is not even a form of true sexuality. It often happens that the “transgressive” masturbation of a guy who is really a heterosexual accompanies the temptation to put into practice masturbation fantasies. It should be noted that in these cases the affective dimension is totally lacking and the problem is reduced to bringing the overcoming of taboos from the masturbatory dimension, that appears reductive, to a far more “transgressive” dimension of couple sexuality. I emphasize that the guys who have a “transgressive” gay masturbation generally have a rather distorted view of gay sexuality that for them, even if they say otherwise, is basically something anomalous that becomes interesting precisely because “transgressive”, the idea of gay sexuality and affectivity as normal for these guys is difficult to accept, in a sense, if they considered gay sexuality normal, it would lose all attraction for them. It must be said that these guys in the vast majority have never fallen in love with a guy and consider at least unnatural that two guys can live a deep and mutual love. All this with being gay has clearly nothing to do.”

In the aforementioned post you describe exactly how my situation is after I met my wife, except, in my opinion, that I’m not exactly hetero. You wrote this thing 3 months before I told you my experience! So to insist on the theory that is the free sexuality, without other specifications, that determines the true sexual orientation seems to me too simplifying in my case. I would like to say that, without having read the post above (I swear it, before anyone doubts it) after my coming out with my wife, as I said, we are having sex more “transgressively” (I admit, in this period I cannot help but be penetrated by her almost every night, I’m sexually happy, also because pleasure comes to me not only from the act itself, but also from the fact that it is exactly my wife who makes it to me and such a thought makes me feel like in the early days of marriage). Not only this, but the things I learned from your site have made me better understand the gay reality as something less transgressive and coincidentally, at least for the moment, I don’t masturbate with certain fantasies!

I realize that claiming to describe my sexual and affective life in 3 pages was a mistake, because I cannot make people understand all the nuances, but I couldn’t bore you by focusing on the details. After all, my goal was not to know what I’m (I am a person very self-interested: I’ve been forming a precise idea of myself for a few years now), but to have an advice on the best way to live my situation and you gave me that advice very well, Project: you made me understand that looking for occasional intercourse even on payment would be detrimental, first of all for me, even before than for my family. Of course, before knowing my wife I thought almost exclusively of guys in masturbation but it was almost always anaffective masturbation: even when I was thinking about specific guys (for example high school or college mates) I always thought of them as sexual objects. I almost never felt in love with guys, while in happened with girls (with a lot of sexual desires that anyway only for very short periods accompanied my masturbation fantasies: Jek is right, I’m not normal).

With my wife I was engaged 3 years and they were beautiful years like the first years after marriage, when we were sexually very active and not only because upstream there was a deep love relationship. In those 3 years I should have realized if something was wrong and I should have given everything up, instead everything was fine: the other night I remembered with my wife that it was enough for me to hear her voice on the phone to get an erection! Not that I stopped masturbating thinking about homosexual relationships, but my sexual fantasies oriented themselves exclusively to imaginary transgressive relationships, no longer thinking about specific guys. After all, the emotional part of love for my wife has never failed: she is the most beautiful thing that has happened to me in life and I want to scream at all! The sexual interest has waned, starting from the birth of the first child, but it is a normal thing in couples (isn’t it true, Barbara?). I would not charge it to my being bisexual or if you prefer repressed gay, if anything it’s the other way around. Those who know the life of a couple know that at a certain point it is no longer enough to see the partner naked to get excited, also because the body is not as beautiful as it once was, but it is necessary to know how to touch, how to caress, etc. in a crescendo of new sexual stimuli that for those who have a very high libido like me can mean experiencing “more” transgressive “games”. This needs time, dedication and with two children, the work, the house, I assure you that it is not easy. That’s why masturbation for me is not the only form of sexuality due to the fact that I don’t like that expressed with my wife, but the valve to vent my own instincts in a simple way, without too much effort and intellectual or sentimental involvement. What I wanted to say then is that for years I have convinced myself that I was bisexual and I believe that the discussion on the forum does nothing but confirm it, but I don’t place too much emphasis on the dissociation between heterosexual affectivity and gay sexuality, because also from a sexual point of view the hetero side is satisfying for me and it is so much more because at the base there is a deep emotional bond! (and, Project, you took it immediately).

I would not then unleash your ethical reactions (don’t be too bad with me), but I would say that I have always been happy to be bisexual: it is nice to be able to love one’s own female partner and feel sexually satisfied with her and at the same time feel excited to see beautiful guys on the street and then if I can share this excitement with the woman of my life it is even more beautiful! It is obvious that a bisexual who places the “traditional” family at the top of the scale of his values should at some point make a choice: hence my regret for not having fully lived the homo part when I could. I thank you all, no one excluded and I would really like to embrace you not only virtually, even that “bad guy” of Publisher, whose analyzes have been very useful to understand me even better. A special thanks, as well as to Project, also to Barbara, who was able to express in a sublime way my mood and of which I share every single word. Congratulations to Telemaco for his sensitivity: it is a quality that is always a pleasure to find in guys his age and I wish him to find the person who can make him happy because he deserves it. Congratulations also to Aster, who from his blog appears to be a sweet boy, cultured and also cute: in my next masturbation fantasies I’ll get excited thinking of him who says “ugly typical repressed fennel!”. Joking aside, he is a smart guy and not just for the coming out story (as a parent I hope things with his father are settled: for a father to feel close to his son who “cheated” him has not price). Indeed, as far as I’m concerned, these coming out stories have a bit fed up even for controversies. Rather, Aster, let us dream and tell us your love story with your boyfriend (sentimentally eh, I better specify it before you start to think that I’m a pervert). I regret not being able to participate actively in the forum, but maybe I will follow you and who knows, in a few years, when my eldest will be in age, I hope you can enjoy reading what I have to say about education on sexual and sentimental orientation. I hope I will be a good father, and this thanks to my “experience” and thanks to you. Best wishes.

Peter

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HOMOSEXUALITY AS A GUILT-PATHOLOGY AND MARRIAGE AS A REMEDY

This post is dedicated to married gays, so I will leave aside all the considerations related to sexual orientation of guys who have a straight sex life at the couple level and having a sex life typically gay at the level of masturbation, because these considerations have an important sense only before you get married.

I will start here from the situation of married gays, as I see it through the chats with people living in this condition. In my dialogues with married gay guys of all ages, the idea that when we are young, we are very often led to underestimate homosexuality and to consider it a choice and, even worse, a reversible choice, is always present. Too many times one hears people telling that one chooses to be gay and this totally false statement creeps into the brains of the guys who, forgive me the desecrating but instructive example, consider homosexuality not as their nature, i.e. as a personal fundamental characteristic but as a kind of drug that is a bad thing in itself but that can be taken in the end, in small doses, because it is taken for granted that one can come out of it when and how one wants.

Homosexuality has nothing negative and it is not a habit that leads to addiction, such as the use of drugs but it is a reality about which it makes no sense to say: “I go out of it when I want” because being gay is not a choice. The idea coming from a religious matrix of the homosexuality as a vice that if rooted leads to an addiction, that is to a vice no longer eradicable, is still widespread and continues to produce incalculable damages, inducing gays to marriage in the belief that, in the end, with an act of will, they can also choose to be straight.

The married gays know very well how much this wrong vision of things is deleterious. Very often, in socially backward reality in which homophobia dominates, children learn from an early age to see homosexuality as a disvalue, all traditional education presupposes the heterosexuality of guys and, where there are gay guys, who are eight percent of the guys and therefore are practically everywhere, causes them to repress any gay drive through feelings of guilt.

The Catholic Church still officially has attitudes that are substantially homophobic and, in substance even if not in words, incites hatred against homosexuals. With Pope Francis the tone, at the top, has changed, but eradicating homophobia from the Church is a something that seems to be destined for failure, admitted and not granted that someone really intends to attempt it.

The attitudes of the family are often backwarded and violently repressive. I invite those who have not seen it to see a very significant French film: “Juste une question d’amour” in which parents who embody two different attitudes have to face the homosexuality of the sons. When the repression of homosexuality is so strong as to induce the guys not only to eliminate external behaviors that may make people think of homosexuality but even to fight against their own homosexual instincts at a very private level by repressing spontaneous masturbation in a gay key, it becomes unfortunately possible and concrete the possibility that a guy can think not only of forcing himself not to be gay but even to be straight.

These are forms of profound violence that completely alter and I would say completely distort the affectivity and sexuality of a gay guy, who is encouraged to create a heterosexual relationships and to cultivate it by “imitating” the attitudes of other guys; in these cases the removal of homosexuality is seen as a moral merit and heterosexual sexuality is accepted as “medicine of homosexuality”.

Behind all this, the idea of sexuality as a vice and therefore as a fault is evident. On closer inspection, it is easy to understand that where very elementary and dogmatic conceptions of nature dominate, the complexity of reality is compressed into schemes derived from pure prejudices. To think that sexuality is aimed only at procreation is an assumption of principle that is systematically contradicted at the social level and in individual behavior.

The expression “against nature” has been and is still used systematically with regard to behaviors and to the same homosexual libido. Instead of knowing what variants of human sexuality are, it is much easier to consider them as deviations “against nature” or as acquired vices, or cultural choices, more or less induced from the outside. To consider homosexuality a vice rather than a variant of human sexuality means to base the whole approach to homosexuality on totally wrong grounds.

When a guy evaluates his homosexuality as a vice against which one must resist to return to true sexuality according to nature, in fact, he takes an attempt of self-repression that results in an attempt to avoid or contain masturbation, to escape from the occasions in which homosexual instincts can be more easily reawakened, to sublimate homosexuality in affectionate friendship, and, at the end, to choose of a way without return like marriage. I report here (with the consent of the author) an email I received.

“I am writing to you with great fear because I don’t know who you are, and the fact that you are gay embarrasses me. I’m 25 years old, I have distinctly felt an interest in guys for a few years, but I don’t feel repulsed by girls, now I have a girlfriend for a few months and all in all I feel quite at ease with her, she’s very sweet and she’s not obsessed with sex like some girls that I had before, we love each other, she is not at the top of my thoughts, I sometimes let myself go to pornography and in particular gay pornography, but with my girlfriend I think that a serious relationship could also be built. I want to say that if I work hard I can do without gay porn and even without masturbation for several days and I think if I had a family I could put all these things aside to dedicate myself to my family. I feel that I’m at a turning point, because if I wanted, I could arrive to the wedding and even in a short time and my girlfriend would be very happy and even our parents, and in the end, it would be good for me, but honestly for me it’s very hard to decide because then I could not go back. I would love to get married and do away with pornography once and for all. etc., but I’m afraid of doing the biggest stupid thing in my life. There is something that makes me reflect and it is the fact that I talk with my girlfriend about everything but I could not talk about my homosexual fantasies because I think that she wouldn’t really understand the meaning of such a thing, she’s fine with me, we pamper each other with a minimum of petting but she would never understand that for me there is something else, she is convinced that homosexuality is a vice that can be overcome with good will and perhaps with the help of a good psychologist. I too, years ago, tended to give for granted all these things but lately I started to think that things are much less easy than people make them look. I asked myself many questions about my future and what I really want. Recently I met a guy at the university and I started to look at him with interest, but not only for reasons of sex, as I did before, but to look at him with emotional interest, he made me feel tenderness, I wanted to stay next to him, there was also sex, but not just sex, and for the first time I began to think that for me a love story could be possible even with a guy and maybe even more with a guy than with a girl. I don’t know anything about the gay reality, which objectively scares me but I’m not at all sure that I want to give up my private and tiny gay world to go to a wedding that honestly scares me a little because in the end it could be a real trap. But now what have I to do? My girlfriend expects the wedding, like our parents and friends, etc. etc .. I think I need someone who forces me to admit things that I now see even by myself, even if then transforming the clarity of ideas that I’m gaining into concrete actions is really difficult.”

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IS HE A LATENT GAY?

Hello Project, I just read your article about gay guys who have a sexual friendship with guys with latent homosexuality who will never admit that they are gay. I found what you wrote quite similar to what I experienced, in the sense that I have this friend, even engaged (with a girl), I meet each summer on vacation, and it is thanks to him that I came out of my latency, even if I’ve been trying to find a definition of my sexuality for three years and I cannot find one that fits me, I called myself bisex, but only because I happened to have feelings towards girls, despite my masturbations are in a gay key and just a little hetero. That is, during masturbation I tend to spontaneously have hetero fantasies, but I need to conclude in a gay key.

However I said that I found myself in the article because it is three summers that I end up sleeping with this friend of mine, in crescendo, it started with mutual masturbation and every summer we add something more, but the kisses are forbidden, and cuddling etc. Every time after having behaved the usual way he starts to denigrate me and begins to say phrases like, “it is getting too pleasant”, “it take me a lot of time to come”, “I came too little, with my girlfriend it is more pleasant, you’re dangerous, we don’t have to do such things anymore” . . . but in the meantime we do it every time, he says he is straight, but by texting he asks me if I’m active or passive, he probes the ground, he asks me to come and visit him in his university residence where he lives alone. And every time we do it, then, he pretends nothing, tries to make me understand that he is just a friend, showing off with his girlfriend, not calculating me at all if I look at him, as if nothing had happened between us, because for him it’s just a thing without meaning. Because he cannot afford to be gay.

This September I chose not to call him, and he complained that I never call him. I told him that I needed to think, and he was strangely understanding and told me: okay, when you want, call me. After two months I decided to contact him again but because I love him and I would really like to be his friend, now I no longer expect him to wake up and stay with me, because now I have lost hope.

Also this time the same problem, if I try to be a friend, he starts talking about sex and asks me questions to probe the ground, even flirting. Every time we meet, he shows himself half naked, and I see him bare-chested and cannot resist, I don’t understand anything anymore and I always fall back on it.

It’s a friendship that has lasted for more than 10 years, and I’d be wrong to have to cut it off and not hear him anymore. And I no longer know what to do, because I don’t like anymore this relationship, where there are no cuddles but only denigration; I prefer a normal friendship at this point. What do you advise me to do?
A hug. Richard

Hi Richard. The first question that arises is whether we are really facing a guy with latent homosexuality, what is possible, or a guy who is really aware of his homosexuality or at least bisexuality, perhaps with a strong hetero prevalence. The discriminating element (of which only the person concerned is aware) are the masturbation fantasies: if that guy was really a latent homosexual, his masturbation would be exclusively hetero, if instead there were “also”, perhaps episodically, gay fantasies, then the category of latent homosexual should be totally put aside, because, in practice, the latency of homosexuality means that the same subject is not aware of it; and in essence in all cases the consciousness of one’s sexual orientation is obtained precisely from masturbation and, paradoxically, not from the couple sexuality.

I add a corollary to the basic theorem: if the sex he did with you has not become the object of his masturbation fantasies then there is in practice the certainty that he is a latent homosexual but, I have to stress it, latent homosexuality is a rare thing. In the other hypothesis, if the memory of what he lived with you is instead the object of his masturbation fantasies, perhaps episodically, then you can think that you are facing a guy who is at least partially bisexual and who is in strong condition of sexual repression. If this guy is really a latent homosexual, well, either he wakes up by himself (something unlikely and in any case not predictable or controllable) or there is little to do, the situation will remain that of a friendship, perhaps episodically sexualized.

If instead a homosexual component really exists, well, then it would make sense, more for his own sake than for yours, to arrive at a clear discourse, because marriage for a bisexual means having to give up the other half of the sky, what isn’t certainly a simple thing, unless it is an almost straight bisexuality; if then his gay component was important (and the fact of having a girl, in conditions of social obligation is really not significant), i.e. if he was bisexual with a strong gay component or even a gay that has adapted to have a relationship with a girl (what is not so infrequent), then the marriage would be really to be avoided, because it would be like being shut up in a cage with the prospect of remaining there for a lifetime.

Then there is a third hypothesis, not to be neglected at all, that is that of the hetero-curious (and there are many), it is about men or guys, usually frustrated in their straight sexuality, who seek a gay contact exclusively on the sexual level, excluding any emotional implication, because their affectivity is fully dedicated to women. The hetero-curious are the biggest users of so-called gay pornography. The hypothesis that this guy is just a hetero-curious (who will always consider himself heterosexual and will consider his own gay sexual adventures only as adventures) finds support in the fact that, in your relationship, on his part, it is systematically underlined that his true sexuality is straight, and in from the fact, anything but marginal, that he asked you if you are active or passive, a question that is typical of the hetero-curious (of which are full of erotic chats) and that a true gay would not ask because gay sexuality is not an imitation of the straight one.

I summarize here for you a story I have seen closely and that best configures the relationship between a gay and a latent homosexual. We’ll call “G” the gay and “L” the latent gay.

L knows that G is gay. G has had several girls, and is known to be able to do a lot with women, girls themselves who have been with him say it, but he is not engaged and has never had a stable girlfriend. All his girls come from the same group as G. G and L go to the mountain sites together with the girls of the group. G and L are usually in the same room together. L is very uninhibited, when he is in the room with G he wears only the briefs, physical contact with G is frequent, tests of strength, fighting, etc., but also cuddles in the same bed. Over the days G becomes more enterprising and L lets him do and gets to get masturbated by G (but L doesn’t masturbate G).

G thinks that L is gay and after many uncertainties comes to the idea of making him explicitly understand it. G speaks clearly and the whole story ends, L leaves before the end of the holidays and disappears at all. For him, being masturbated by his friend was just an uninhibited game because on a conscious level his sexuality was radically hetero and it was precisely this that allowed him to behave so freely with his friend without particular problems. Therefore, maximum caution and above all, keep your feet on the ground! Be cautious with flights of fantasy!

So let’s sum up. Maybe my answer may seem strange to you, but I would stay away from him, because if he’s just a repressed, if he’s a repressed gay, then ok, it makes sense, but if he’s a repressed bisexual who wants to stay straight, well, even taking away the repression there is not much to be satisfied, because a bisexual will never build a strong and above all exclusive relationship with you.

The hypothesis that he is a repressed gay is the only one that could give you an adequate motivation to go on, but in that case he should also have the courage to overcome the things that repress him, perhaps not in public, but at least in private, and should begin to understand that going on with girls means enter a road that leads straight to marriage, which for a gay is the worst trap. If you stay away and he really cares about you, he will not let you go, but I wouldn’t follow him, because to build something as a couple you have to want it in two! A hug.
Project

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GAYS AND AVAILABLE GUYS WITH LATENT HOMOSEXUALITY

It often happens that a gay guy creates a strong emotional relationship, sometimes with sexual implications, with guys who present themselves as straight, but don’t have the typical behavior of heterosexuals, i.e. with guys who demonstrate a certain sexual disposition towards gays; I refer to the hetero-curious guys, bisexuals, latent gays and repressed gays.

The order of these four categories is not accidental: the hetero-curious guys, who are very numerous, are properly hetero, but because of strong frustrations in their straight sexuality, they go in search of exclusively sexual adventures in the gay field; the bisexuals, much less numerous than gays, have a true gay sexuality and a true gay affectivity, well integrated, but also present a true hetero sexuality and a true hetero affectivity, bisexuality can present the two components, hetero and gay, in all the possible proportions; latent gays, who are very less numerous even than bisexuals, consider themselves exclusively hetero and behave in all respects as 100% hetero guys, even in masturbation, which is always hetero oriented, their homosexual tendencies are manifested in behaviors of considerable disinhibition with other guys, and also with other gay guys, the freedom of behavior reaches the point that a latent gay, considering himself 100% hetero, doesn’t feel any discomfort in getting involved in openly sexual games with gay friends, up to be masturbated by them, and this happens because these behaviors are not seen by latent gays as gay behavior but as sexual camaraderie; the gays repressed are instead fully gay on a conscious level, with a masturbation exclusively in gay key, who have adapted to live also relationships with girls, including sex, because pressed by families and the social environment, these guys are essentially forced to play the part of the hetero.

When for a guy sexuality is split from affectivity or when sexual orientation is not univocal, signs of discomfort may appear. We must bear in mind that the union of affectivity and sexuality in a relationship in which there is emotional and sexual reciprocity between two guys leads to psycho-sexual well-being and satisfaction in sexuality. When there is no real reciprocity in a couple relationship, there is the typical sense of frustration that gay guys who fall in love with straight guys know very well. In that case the discomfort comes from an objective “couple impossibility “. When the complementarity of affectivity and sexuality is lacking in one of the two partners, the discomfort is not originally interpersonal but is created in the first instance inside the subject, a clearly unresolved subject.

There are guys who, because of the heavy influences suffered through education, which has conveyed to them profound sexual taboos, despite experiencing homosexual drives, continue to live a straight sexual life. If for these guys, homosexuality remains under the limit of conscious thought, in these cases we speak of “latent homosexuality”.

Let us dwell now in particular on guys with latent homosexuality; they generally have characteristic traits:

1) They have a frenzied hetero sexual life, they have many girls and they change them often, and this increases the fame of these guys as heterosexuals, but they have never had a steady girl for long periods (years), what is typical of the heterosexuals. In other words, they live a frenetic sexuality with the girls but without constructing truly meaningful emotional relationships. Their affectivity is addressed elsewhere. Heterosexual sexuality experienced by guys with latent homosexuality is often unsatisfactory due to erectile impotence or difficulty in achieving orgasm. It should be emphasized that guys with latent homosexuality masturbate thinking about girls, which confirms them in their presumption of heterosexuality. These guys don’t have usually, not even partially, gay masturbation fantasies, their homosexuality is totally latent. That is, it is not lived on a conscious level.

2) They have an emotional life focused on a very small number of friends, all or almost male, and often have only one long-standing friend who is their real point of reference on an emotional level. This decisive friendship has such a weight that the same sexual choices of the guy with latent homosexuality, despite being in a hetero direction, are closely linked to the dominant friendship in the sense that the guy tends to choose the girl in the group frequented by the best friend, in this way on the occasions in which he meets the girl in public he doesn’t lose contact with his friend anyway. It should be emphasized that guys who are latent homosexuals often choose girls who are very friendly to their special friend. These guys sometimes fall in love with the girlfriends or the ex-girlfriends of their special friend.

3) The friendship between a guy with latent homosexuality and his special “hetero” friend often goes far beyond the boundaries of a common friendship between two straight guys. It is an emotional or even a loving friendship whose limits are dictated essentially by the hetero guy and are easily accepted by the guy with latent homosexuality. If the limits are narrow, the relationship, even seen from the outside, has no sexual meaning, that is, homosexuality remains totally latent.

4) A friendship between a guy with latent homosexuality and his special “gay” friend instead presents a completely different dynamic and this is what I intend to deal with later.

Let’s consider now two typical non-infrequent situations.

Case A
Two friends (whose friendship dated 30 years ago) both had heterosexual intercourses, both had been considered heterosexual for years and had always lived forms of emotional complicity only in a heterosexual key. Let’s say that one of them, let’s call him Mark, arrives at the awareness of his homosexuality through the most natural way, that is, falling in love with his friend, let’s call him Andrew, who continues to show only a straight sexuality (latent homosexuality). In this case, the old relationship of friendship, on the side of the gay guy, acquires a new value and is experienced as a relationship of love and all the moments of intimacy that can occur between two straight friends, like the nudity in the showers of the gym, or sleeping in the same bed, will have for Mark a sexual value that will not have for Andrew. The dimension of intimacy can still increase at least within certain limits because Andrew’s emotional attachment to Mark will lead Andrew to accept Mark’s particularly free behavior without too many difficulties, and this is a sign of the explicit though unconscious sexual interest od Andrew towards Mark. In real situations of this type it is possible to come to true sexual games in which Andrew will accept “in the form of a game” even Mark’s openly sexual behaviors. Andrew and Mark can take a shower together even going into erection and laughing at this fact, can cuddle themselves for hours on the couch or even in bed without openly sexual gestures, can live substantially the life of a gay couple with a limitation: sexuality, that must remain latent.

Case B
Two young guys (18/20 years old), friends from childhood, one (Mark) comes to recognize himself gay, while the other (Andrew) remains in a state of latent homosexuality. Mark falls in love with Andrew, the mutual disinhibition is stronger at the level of gestures than at the level of words. Mark and Andrew never talk about sex explicitly. Mark perceives Andrew’s resistance to admit that the relationship that has established can have some homosexual meanings, on the other hand Andrew shows himself always available towards Mark, seeks him, sends him text messages, spends evenings with him in chat, tells him affectionate phrases that are formally in the limit of a tender friendship but that that Mark tends to interpret in another key. It happens in a completely unexpected way that Andrew lets himself go to a drift of situation increasingly gay, up to even accepting sexual contacts (intimate caresses) without any embarrassment, but without any attempt at reciprocity. Sexual intimacy can even become habitual and in these terms doesn’t create particular problems for Andrew who accepts it as something now normal (sexualized friendship). Andrea falls in love with girls who are Mark’s friends, tries to create a group in which Mark is always involved and combines without apparent contradiction a straight couple sexuality with the sexual friendship towards Mark. Andrew’s heterosexual sexuality is an assumption of principle and Andrew, while living daily sexual contacts with Mark, masturbates only thinking about girls.

In the case A there is no homosexual behavior of Andrew, in the case B Andrew is involved in real sexual activities with Mark but framed in the dimension of sexualized friendship and not of homosexuality. In both cases the guy conscious of his homosexuality (Mark) finds himself in situations of deep affective contact with his friend and of partial sexual contact. What pushes Mark (a gay guy) to continue his relationship with Andrew (a guy with latent homosexuality)? The possible answers are many:

1) Marco waits for Andrew to take autonomously an awareness of the situation, which in Mark’s eyes is unequivocal.
2) Marco hopes to be able to take, in small steps, Andrew towards an explicitly gay sexuality.
3) Mark is in love with Andrew and is willing to sacrifice his sexuality in order to remain close to Andrew whose emotional warmth he cannot do without. In this regard, experience teaches some things which it is always good to take into account :

a) Latent homosexuality is generally not a stage that is a prelude to conscious homosexuality. Latent homosexuality can last and often lasts a lifetime. The exit from the latency is linked in most cases to absolutely new and unexpected factors that pose a guy quickly in front of reality, it is usually a meeting with people not previously known or unexpected episodes with a homosexual background that begin to be the object of masturbatory fantasies. This is often the first spark that leads to the exit from latent homosexuality. Generally the gay guy who falls in love with a guy in a state of latent homosexuality is extremely cautious for fear of losing him and this makes it more unlikely that the other guy can get out of latency.

b) Gay guys who fall in love with guys with latent homosexuality often say they are totally satisfied with the relationship they live but, going deeper, they realize that frustrations are many in the first place because a gay guy, in this situation, is forced to curb his own sexuality and then because there is no possibility of addressing the discourse explicitly. A guy with latent homosexuality reasons in all respects as a straight guy, in other words his homosexuality is unknown even to himself and manifests itself only in the amorous friendship that he interprets exclusively as a simple and deep friendship. The frustrations of gay guys involved in relationships of this kind last for years, they are forced to sublimate sexuality and to make a constant effort of self-control.

c) Within a couple consisting of a gay guy and a guy with latent homosexuality, precisely because it is impossible to get to an explicit dialogue on the subject of sexuality, the possibilities of misunderstanding and false interpretations are enormous. Basically the two guys decode the sexual gestures and behaviors in a completely different way, but the situation is much more complicated than that which is created between a gay and a heterosexual because the guy with latent homosexuality shows a very wide emotional availability and somehow even a certain sexual availability that confuses the gay guy. These relationships, precisely because of the availability of the guy with latent homosexuality, are initially very inviting and rewarding for a gay guy who expects his friend to show a clearly gay sexuality in short terms, however very rarely the expectations of the gay guy have the evolution that the gay guy wants. For the above it is good to take into account the time factor, considering that many gay guys have waited for many years and needlessly for their friend to came out of latent homosexuality.

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HOMOSEXUALITY AND FEELINGS OF GUILT

Concept of feeling of guilt

This chapter is dedicated to a reflection on the relationship between homosexuality and feelings of guilt. When a person has profoundly assimilated a code of behavior and performs actions that according to that code of behavior are reprehensible, that person experiences feelings of guilt. The feelings of guilt are the sign of the irreconcilability of having to be (behavioral code) and of being (actual behavior).

Function of the sense of guilt

It must be emphasized that the sense of guilt has a very important function in the maintenance of individual morality because its fundamental function consists in reorienting behaviors, leading them towards the respect for the rules.

An example can help to understand the concrete meaning of these concepts.
A guy receives a secret from a friend, then, with extreme lightness, he talks with other guys violating his friend’s privacy, gossip follows. The guy realizes that he has failed in the duty of confidentiality towards a friend who trusted him, he feels guilty for this, ad also feels the need to tell his friend to have stupidly told what should not have been told. The friend, seeing the real repentance of the guy forgives him. The story seems to end here, but in reality the guy who had transgressed the rule of confidentiality has learned a lesson in morality and when he will find himself in similar situations he will behave correctly. This is concretely the “physiological” function of the sense of guilt and, as we can see, it deals with fundamental psychological mechanisms of self-correction of one own behaviors.

Codes of behavior and individual well-being

In the example we have just seen, a condition has been taken for granted, that is that the violated code of behavior is a deeply assimilated and consciously shared code of behavior on the part of the guy who violated it. It is precisely this condition that leads to “physiological” feeling of guilt, that is, functional not only to restore respect for the behavioral code but also to improve the individual well-being of those who have transgressed it.

Respect for the code of behavior and individual well-being are often things very difficult to be implemented jointly or even irreconcilable and this happens when the code of behavior is not really assimilated and shared by the one who should put it into practice.

Let’s consider another example.
A guy had been induced, not to say forced, to tell his parents what his brother is doing because his parents wanted to know with whom the brother was usually talking on the phone or chatting. That guy, the first times, had adapted to the demands of his parents but then he began not to tell anything about what his brother was doing and this way he also felt the pleasure of transgressing what had been ordered by his parents. In reality the sense of guilt, anyway very relative, consequent to the transgression, was amply compensated by the conscience of having fulfilled a duty of solidarity which was considered to be of a much higher moral level than blind obedience to the parents.

It is precisely on the basis of mechanisms of this kind that even authentic acts of heroism are justified and motivated by soldiers who disobey orders in the name of respect for fundamental moral rules.

There is therefore a hierarchy of codes of conduct for which the violation of lower-level code provisions generate feeling of guilt only if the lower-level rules are compatible with higher-level moral principles, otherwise the lower-level rules are understood as substantially immoral and therefore the transgression to those norms is lived not only without feelings of guilt but even with the gratification that results from the transgression of an unjust norm.

Moral freedom and feelings of guilt

To judge a behavioral standard assimilated from the outside it is necessary to have a criterion of judgment that resides in a moral principle of a higher level, that is, to judge a norm of behavior assimilated from outside, a true free individual moral conscience is needed.

The freedom of the individual moral conscience is conquered over time and following a sometimes tortuous and difficult path.

Let us now try to take particular account of what a lot of gay guys experience every day. From a very early age hetero-centric education presents to children a well defined code of behavior for which heterosexual sexuality is the norm and gay sexuality is a deviance, heterosexual sexuality is physiology and gay sexuality is pathology. The result of this constant and subliminal process is the assimilation by all boys of a code of sexual behavior substantially heterosexual, this code will be functional for guys who will actually develop a straight sexuality but will inevitably be dysfunctional for the guys who will develop a gay sexuality.

The code of heterosexual sexual behavior, deeply assimilated by gay boys, in a phase in which there is not yet a real moral autonomy, ends up creating feelings of guilt, since a gay boy can’t however adhere to a behavioral code that is born for other needs.

Here is shown the discrepancy between the hetero norm and the individual good of the gay boy, that is not compatible with that norm. I would add that at an age in which individual moral autonomy has not yet been consolidated the rules of the hetero code will prove to be totally incontestable for the gay boy and in substance will be the only parameter of his moral judgment. Obviously the feelings of guilt will be profound and the frustrations arising from the impossibility of conforming to a code of behavior considered indisputable will produce environmental misadaptation and anxiety.

Dysfunctional attempts to overcome feelings of guilt

The mechanism mentioned above is not an abstraction and is observed systematically in younger gay boys who grew up in very religious settings. The code of behavior that that is proposed to them is slowly perceived as incompatible with the development of individual sexuality.
This results in frustrating attempts to align oneself with a sexuality that is not one’s own and, at sometimes, in real attempts to put all sexuality aside, which in turn result in heavy feelings of guilt and discouragement. Classics are attempts by gay boys to avoid masturbation or to focus their sexual fantasies on girls.

The conquest of moral freedom

Over time, however, the individual moral conscience gradually gains strength and the guys come to question the rules received from the outside and begin to feel them in contrast with other principles and above all with the principle of freedom and with the idea that “evil” is what causes real suffering in other people and not a generic transgression to a moral code supposed indisputable.
As the individual moral sense matures, guys begin to feel no more guilt related to the transgression of norms that are not compatible with their own individual moral principles. The feelings of guilt continue to exist but only in the presence of transgressions with respect to the moral principles of the guy himself, in this way the sense of guilt return to assume its physiological function as a mechanism of self-correction of individual action, which guarantees observance of the principles of a free individual morality.

Self-degradation

We now come to consider an attitude that is not very common but neither uncommon among gay guys and that is self-degradation, the conviction of having big problems to solve and being unable to solve them, but I don’t intend here to refer to the problems arising from shyness or self-expression, I intend instead to refer to the self-degrading attitudes experienced by guys with rather free sexual behavior.
I am aware that what follows may cause perplexity and that someone will consider it an objective overturn of the most common way of thinking on the subject, but I think it is worth taking this risk.

Dangers of behavior patterns

Let’s start from a premise: we all tend to follow models of integration between affectivity and sexuality and models of couple relationships, these models can be points of reference but can also be the cause of a discomfort perceived by the guys in terms of impossibility or presumed impossibility to adapt to those models. It should be emphasized very clearly that the models of affection-sexuality integration, such as the models of couple life, represent precisely models which are often very difficult, if not impossible, to follow, i.e. models that are purely theoretical and substantially far from reality.

I try to present the concept through a concrete example. It is obvious that, at least in theory, the perfect integration of affectivity and sexuality is highly desirable, as is a couple’s life in which fidelity is absolute but, in fact, achieving full integration between affectivity and sexuality is very difficult as is maintaining an absolute couple fidelity, in particular when the couple’s life presents some tensions or when the choices at the base of the couple relationship have not been done completely freely and consciously or when the emotional exchange with one’s partner is not really deep. I mean that in order to achieve a perfect integration between affectivity and sexuality and a total mutual fidelity in a couple relationship, some preconditions must be verified, that often are not verified.

A relationship born with some original flaw will not realize the ideal models of couple life and this is not anyone’s fault but it is implicit in the premises. Often, however, gay guys are very negatively evaluated on the basis of the failure to achieve those goals and according to such evaluations they make a further logical leap, originally recognizing themselves inadequate.

Feelings of guilt induced by theoretical models

Even and especially for the most uninhibited guys, there is the idea of being somehow obsessed with sex and of being unable to live it in an affective dimension according to the commonly accepted theoretical models. Here it is necessary to define clear reference points. Sexuality is a fundamental interest for all guys, thinking about sex is a natural thing, not a pathological fixation. There are also addictions to sex but this category should be uses with great caution to avoid a too easy psychiatrization of behaviors that originally have nothing pathological but are experienced as pathological because of the fact that they are presented as such.

Homosexuality itself was considered pathological until a few decades ago and still today certain behaviors are often considered as pathological paraphilias. Exhibitionism and voyeurism have been considered pathological behaviors but, let’s understand each other well, a guy who is pleased with his own sex and shows it off online to another guy, perhaps in a sexually involving situation, has nothing to do with people who go around compulsively to show themselves in the nude to people completely unaware, and the same way a guy who spies on his friend (no matter if male or female) who takes a shower has nothing to do with pathological voyeurism.

Extrapolating these two examples, many behaviors in the field of sexuality, even if they don’t fall within the typical models of sexuality-affectivity integration and in the typical models of couple relationships, don’t however have anything pathological. I add an observation. We all grew up in a climate where the sexual dimension is clearly overestimated, both positively and negatively, there are sexual behaviors from which happiness is expected, but from which happiness doesn’t follow practically under any circumstances, and there are other behaviors to which we are brought to theoretically attribute a power destructive of the emotional life, even if such destructive power is not at all said to manifest actually.

Infidelity: the roots of betrayal

The spontaneous sexual fidelity is undoubtedly a symptom of the couple’s well-being. When a guy betrays, and even more when he repeatedly betrays, he is inclined to give about himself strongly negative judgments, to feel guilty for having gone to look for sex outside the couple. Rather than being dominated by feelings of guilt it would be useful for him to re-examine one’s couple life in search of what is wrong.

Betrayal very often does not result in a better psychological condition than the previous one, it doesn’t lead to building a new relationship but above all, if not only, manifests the intolerance towards the old one. And, I add, betrayal is not an unreasonable act or worse an act born of a pathological tendency to infidelity, but has roots, motivations in real life, which should be understood before thinking of being able to give any assessment of the betrayal in itself.

The real problem of the self-degradation of gay guys lies in hypothesizing their own original and somehow pathological inability to react according to the theoretical models commonly adopted and deemed indisputable, thus giving an ontological evaluation of themselves as incapable, unreliable, traitorous, etc. etc..

Frantic sexuality and emotional needs

Often the restless search for sexual contact has very little to do with sexuality in the technical sense and is the transposition on the sexual level of other needs of a largely affective type. The sexualization of affectivity on the part of a guy, especially in an environment where it is difficult if not impossible to find affective contacts, is a common reality and a guy who frequently seeks sexual contact is almost never dependent on sex but instead shows in that way his desire for affection and it is often a desire that has been frustrated for years.

The behavior of these guys appears to themselves as completely centered on sexuality but in reality, when the conditions for creating or maintaining sexual relations are not met, the emotional relationships that these guys have built up starting from sex, continue anyway, what would not happen if sexual interest were in fact the only drive to keep the relationship going. It often happens that a guy who has lived a difficult life is judged only on the basis of his formal behavior, completely neglecting all the facts that led him to those behaviors. In this way, seeing things exclusively from the outside, one can pronounce on that guy many judgements substantially unjust using abstract and moralistic categories completely inadequate to understand the substance of the problems underlying those behaviors.

Often, for a guy, the search for sexual contact is anything but a form of superficial recreation and instead has the meaning of getting involved altogether, asking the other for a real effort of understanding and participation, that is, asking the other to get out of the abstract categories of moralism.

What may appear to be a trivial sexual approach is sometimes a request for help, for understanding, a way to ask not to be classified with formal and superficial categories. A guy who, exasperatedly and I would say very emotionally and uneasily, looks for a sexual contact, certainly doesn’t want to be misjudged, he wants us to identify ourselves with his own point of view and to get to share something deeper with him.

Often, however, these guys get reactions of refusal or, worse, contemptuous judgments on the verge of immorality or even of mental illness. The discomfort in these cases can become very profound because it is experienced as a refusal of the person as a whole, generally follows a sense of inadequacy, ineptitude, inability to respect the rules that leads to self-degradation.

Internalization of the prejudice of others

A boy who feels his sexual behavior as not in line with the models of sexuality-affection integration and with the typical models of couple life, who lives a couple life in which the so-called betrayal is frequent and unsatisfactory, tends to react by blaming himself and feeling somehow unrecoverable, but the feelings of guilt are certainly not the best way to react.

One should ask oneself what is there upstream that does not satisfy, drawing the right conclusions. If the couple relationship is really lived as a value, it is possible to exit the chain of repeated betrayals, if on the contrary the couple relationship is radically unsatisfactory it is good to avoid carrying forward situations that generate more worries than gratifications. In a completely similar way a guy who tends to sexualise affectivity can feel deeply hurt by the judgment of others and can end up applying pathological categories to himself by introjecting the judgment of others, a judgment that in reality has nothing to do with the real motivations that guided that guy’s actions.

Having betrayed your boyfriend or seeking sexual contact as a substitute for emotional contact is not considered in itself a good thing, but such facts cannot and should not be considered superficially and above all cannot and must not permanently destroy, from within, the self-esteem of the guy who has betrayed (often inappropriate word) or who tends to sexualise affectivity.

Any situation can be changed profoundly if you really want it. Often, however, one gets the impression that the easiest choice is to abandon oneself to a basically passive and fatalistic position like: “I’m like that, I’m not trustworthy, I’m not worth anything!” Having betrayed your partner, even repeatedly, or having repeatedly sought sexual contact outside the couple doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t feel affection for that guy or that you don’t have a deep affective life, it could also be so, but it could also be exactly the opposite. One thing should never be forgotten: that for a guy, before sexuality there is the need to be loved in the family, to be respected and sought by friends and to find around him a dimension of understanding and constant attention.

Moralism and inability to understand the betrayal

People often show very biased and moralistic attitudes with regard to betrayal, but such attitudes are also very schematic and superficial and certainly don’t aim to understand what there can be behind betrayal.

These attitudes are generally deeply internalized by the guys who have betrayed the partner and thus produce self-condemnations without appeal, sometimes followed by depressive states that could be avoided by seeing betrayal as a sign of the couple’s discomfort and not as something that definitely brands the person who betrays with a kind of indelible stamp. Something very similar happens with the tendency to sexualize the affectivity that is too easily judged with completely inappropriate moralistic categories that are internalized and create profound suffering.

Self-esteem and feelings of guilt

Self-esteem is one of the pillars of individual well-being, but it is a pillar whose strength depends strongly on individual experience. One of the worst things that can be done is lower the self-esteem of a guy and paste on him a label of unreliable, sexual maniac or serial traitor. The reality is often completely different from how it is represented through these appellations.

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