MAYBE I AM GAY BUT I LOVE MY FORMER GIRLFRIEND

Pratoditurno

Dear Project, I am 30 years old and I just discovered that I’m gay … I almost always masturbated thinking of guys, even though having always had women and having been satisfied by them I lived it as a kind of private transgression and so I never realized that I was homosexual … I had a long story with a girl and I loved her deeply, I masturbated thinking about her or our intercourses … it excited me a lot and I wanted to have sex with her. I was thinking only of her, although often when I was alone I also masturbated with gay porn. I must say that my gay masturbation has always been and is now of a contemplative kind, in the sense that I don’t ever feel in my fantasy the desire for sex with a guy but only the desire for images of naked guys. When my ex left me, to my great regret because I was still in love, I began to feel an increasingly strong attraction towards a friend of mine, with attached crush: I quoted him without a real reason, I followed him secretly, I was jealous … but at the time I couldn’t understand what was happening to me, so I kept going for a couple of years … until I decided to try an experience with a guy. I made friends with this guy and we started to try a gay sexual experience. The excitement was very strong at the beginning, I never experienced such a thing with a woman, but then gradually it waned … and finally I realized that sex with girls is much more engaging for me, even if the body of girls doesn’t excite me as strongly as the one of guys. In short, I didn’t have many answers … rather I have to say that the male body also made me a little repulsion … and I didn’t like the penis in any way. But the strong instinct to go with a man is there and I cannot deny it. After a few months I met again my ex and we had sex in a very engaging way. The attraction was there and I even thought for a moment that I was in love with her again, but then the premises were not there to get back together and we said goodbye. After that time I had other meetings with some guys and at the end, apart from the initial excitement, as usual I came back to have doubts about the fact that I really liked guys. Until a few weeks ago … when another friend, who attracted me so much, got engaged with a girl … since then I realized that in practice only the guys attract me, even if women have something that strikes me … sometimes sexual attraction, but less than what I experience for the guys. So I realized I was fundamentally gay … maybe a flexible gay man, who can even make love with girls if he’s in love, but anyway gay. I realized that in the end I could very well fall in love with a guy and make a story together, even if I don’t like it … I don’t want to be gay but I feel very strong pushes toward guys when I’m close to nice guys. Then when I think back to the exciting moments with my ex I think I’m straight … but actually my overwhelming sexuality is gay, even if I refuse to live it. I had tried to hear some guys to attend them seriously but then I changed my mind … I mean I’m in a big confusion. I cannot think of anything else, I just came out a nervous breakdown. Please … advise me what to do … and tell me what you think of all this ..

 

Alyosha

I leave Project the honor of answering on the subject, he is a master in this kind of analysis. I immediately anticipate that for what you write I don’t think there is any clear homosexuality, it is quite clear that a person who feels for years an emotional and sexual drive toward girls certainly is not a gay. Instead, you belong to that gray area that is hard to define within categories that have lied to us for centuries: building a family relationship with a woman and having relationships with men were much more common and “natural” practices than what is believed, and are still now in many “masculine” contexts (of those of the “male as a male”). I don’t think right now you need to define yourself in some way to understand what you have to do, indeed probably closing the circle too quickly now and draw the sums also hurts, because now you discard something that sooner or later will return from the window, because women attract you at least as gays do if not even much. What to do? Well, in the meantime, live your homosexual moment! You’ll be a bit terrified on the side of prevention, but it will not hurt you, you started as a rocket and you may find yourself very unprepared to manage a homosexual relationship. I tell you it from experience, since I have a story very similar to yours. In the beginning, projecting hetero categories on the gay world is very simple but you risk remaining badly burned. The story with your ex is over, it’s over after years, you’ve seen each other again, you’ve had sex and all this goes completely into the background, while it seems rather like the triggering event. You should first ask yourself if it’s over for real since at the first useful opportunity you two make sparks when you meet each other again. If you decide it’s over, close this relationship definitely before starting new stories with other people. From this point of view if it is a men rather than a women, it only complicates matters, so you are even more obliged to close the relationship with your ex. Try to stay alone just a little bit, a story like that isn’t easy to digest right away. Only then I would return to the question of sexuality, otherwise the risk is that the motivation to leave your ex, pushes the accelerator on the issue of sexuality, not allowing you a clear evaluation. The drives and desires must be listened to, not incarcerated, and bisexuality is in many ways more disarming than homosexuality, because it conflicts with another dogma of western society, which is that of monogamy, dogma if possible more stringent than that according to which male and male cannot fit together. It is already difficult to manage the transition from heterosexual to homosexual life, you can imagine how difficult can be becoming aware of being bisexual. How do you manage it? How can you be labeled? You will be a hetero-curious for the straight people and a repressed gay  for gays, in short it is not exactly like having a walk! : lol :. Don’t worry, learn to understand what you are for yourself and later you will think about what you are for others. You will never be gay as gay people who have never had relationships with women, I can anticipate this, because it is the feeling that I live. I lived a hetero life for 30 years and this famous gay world, including the forum from which you read me, I always watch it a little surprised and a bit shy. There are many things I don’t understand at all, such as the obsessive tendency to reduce everything to the issue of sexuality. Which is a little what you’re doing too. It seems that all the problems of gays are in the fact of being gay. Hetero people are all happy, because they have the female and don’t have any couple problem, neither problems relating to the other sex or tensions between strong sexuality and desire of monogamy, and so on. etc.. So are you sure that if the guy you flirted with was a woman, would you not stay the same with the thorn in the side? Do you like more your ex or the new girl with whom you only have a sexual involvement? Don’t you think that setting the question in this way in the meantime you would solve the problem of understanding what you really feel for your ex? If you also like males you don’t have to decide how much you like them, but accept this fact and learn how to live with it in the right and healthiest way for you. Learn to know the gay world, taste it little by little, without getting burned or worse poisoned.

 

Project

First of all, I welcome you to the Forum and I hope it will be useful. I thank Aliosha for his speech, which seems to clarify the essential points of the matter and which I share. I limit myself to an analysis from a strictly gay point of view. You start with a statement: “I just discovered that I’m gay”, but conclude by saying “I’m in a big confusion .”  You bring some arguments that should confirm the idea of being gay: “I almost always masturbated thinking of guys”, where the “almost” means that even in the masturbation there is a hetero component. About the time you were with your girlfriend, you say, “when I was alone I also masturbated with gay porn .” You affirm that “the strong instinct to go with a man is there”. About gay affectivity, which is an essential component of being gay, you say: “I began to feel an increasingly strong attraction towards a friend of mine, with attached crush: I quoted him without a real reason, I followed him secretly, I was jealous” but you don’t talk of love with this guy. The homosexual falling in love for you is not a real experience but a possible hypothesis, after all unwanted: “I could very well fall in love with a guy and make a story together, even if I don’t like it … I don’t want to be gay but I feel very strong pushes toward guys when I’m near nice guys.” When you talk about guys you don’t talk about love but about friendship and sexual contact with a guy is seen in strictly subjective terms and not as a couple, as an experience that you can “try”: “I made friends with this guy and we started to try a gay sexual experience.” From here you get a partial and flexible idea of homosexuality: “So I realized I was fundamentally gay … maybe a flexible gay man, who can even make love with girls if he’s in love, but anyway gay.” “but actually my overwhelming sexuality is gay, even if I refuse to live it.” The element of which I feel the lack in your description of homosexuality is the affective one, it is the falling in love with a guy. I emphasize that a gay guy of your age generally has lived his experiences not only on a sexual level but especially on an emotional level, and often these experiences are not easy, because they involve the idea of going out of oneself and of “loving” a guy, a real guy, not the protagonist of a video, a true guy, with all his weaknesses and all his contradictions. The experience of gay falling in love is not only and not even primarily a sexual experience, it is the experience of a deep affective relationship in which, as a rule, almost nothing goes as planned and in the end the relationship holds only if there it is at the base a deep feeling, with all its sexual values, of course, but in no case reducible only to a sexual experience. For you, at 30, the idea of falling in love with a guy is just a hypothesis that has never happened. I often see young guys “madly” in love with their friend, maybe even straight, and totally transported by this feeling in which the idea of sexual experience is just the last of the thoughts. In the things you say the gay affective dimension is almost completely missing. You’ve experienced gay masturbation as a kind of “private transgression” but you’ve never experienced a gay falling in love and when you stop to reflect specifically on gay sexuality you say, “the male body also made me a little bit repulsive … and I did not like the penis in any way. “These expressions are definitely irreconcilable with the idea of only sexual homosexuality. But let’s get on the ethereal side. You say you have “always had women and having been satisfied by them” and shortly after: “I had a long story with a girl and I loved her deeply, I masturbated thinking about her or our relationships … it excited me a lot and I wanted to make continuous sex. I was thinking only of her. . . “Here you speak explicitly of love and the sexual element integrates perfectly not the affective one. Not only that, but a gay parenthesis did not remove you from heterosexuality: “When my ex left me, to my great regret because I was still in love. . . “; “After a bit ‘of months I resented my ex and we had sex, very nice. The attraction was there and I even thought for a moment that I was in love with her again. “And here again you talk about falling in love and not just about sex. And when you limit yourself to just the sexual aspect, write: “when I think back to the exciting moments with my ex I think I’m straight.” The picture is not that of a gay, or rather a 100% gay, who is not interested in girls and who “falls in love” with boys. The emotional dimension is essentially hetero. In such a situation, looking for a relationship of gay couple based only on sexual attraction means exposing yourself to the risk of big disappointments, because, beyond what people think, in the gay field (I speak of the vast majority of undeclared gays ) affectivity is absolutely fundamental. Among gays, as among ethereal, the couples who hold are those that have a deep emotional relationship. For a gay in the vast majority of cases, behind the sex there is a very strong emotional request. Among other things, if you have no experience of the gay reality it is good to go there very much with the feet of lead because the risk of sexually transmitted diseases and in particular of AIDS exists and so, therefore, always and in any case, maximum caution! We try to narrow the field: it is obvious that the categories have a very relative value, but if we have to use one, I would call bisexuality into question, but with not small reserves, because to speak properly of bisexuality we should find not only, also if in a different proportion, both gay and hetero masturbation, but also forms of falling in love both gay and hetero are substantially similar, that is, with similar affective involvements. I add one thing: the guys who, like you, have had a non-superficial and gratifying experience of heterosexual sexuality, tend to transpose their hetero sexual behaviors in an almost automatic way, which often creates misunderstandings and difficulties. Just an example: a boy used to heterosexual sexuality and comforted by the vision of gay porn, is led to think that anal penetration is the fundamental element of gay sexuality, something far from reality. I wonder, then, how can you understand the meaning of gay sexuality, which is the sexuality of the like and not that of the complementary, a boy who says: “the male body also made me a little repulsion … and I didn’t like the penis in any way.” I add something, it happens also to 100% true gays to have relationships with girls, in the nineteenth century it was common. I don’t believe that you are in this condition at all. Raffalovich in 1896 described with these expressions the relationships of true homosexuals with women: “a forcing, something essentially “non-sexual”, an effort of the will that is a true violence against the free will, in essence a form of onanism incapable of leaving memories.” It is clear that your point of view towards heterosexual sexuality is not the one typical of 100% gay guys. In essence I would go very cautious before “trying” a relationship with a guy (an expression that a true gay would never use). I add another thing: the problem of bisexual guys is not in accepting their gay side, but in the fact that a couple’s life, hetero or gay, requires a form of exclusivity. For a gay to form a stable gay couple can be deeply stabilizing and rewarding, for a bisexual it means giving up the other half of the sky and the desire of the other half of the sky manifests itself particularly strong when a couple relationship excludes it.

 

Pratoditurno

I thank you for your very deep analysis … You’re right about everything, labels are not needed but if you really need to use one I’ll be a predominantly straight bisexual. On the other hand, sexuality is a very complex thing consisting of several dimensions and we are not necessarily on the same position for each of these dimensions.

PROJECT: You really have a great gift. You understood exactly how I’m. In fact, when you say that my gay sexual experience was only “subjective” you tell the truth, because not only I see the male as a friend (and in fact my partners were first of all friends and then also partners) but the experience I build with them is unidirectional, in the sense that I like to get involved but never give pleasure to my partner. A bit as if the guy was just “a toy” and not a person … and in fact this fits perfectly with all your speech. It’s as if I wanted a kind of inflatable doll to use it as I want, ending up just masturbating only by looking at it. I say this because in all my gay experiences (if so we can call them), after an initial excitement, I immediately begin to feel bored and, in addition to a strong repulsion for what I have done, I cannot even ejaculate … I have to ejaculate endeavoring hard every time. Or I don’t ejaculate at all. On the other hand, I have always noticed that my partners manifested a strong interest in the penis and a great propensity to have an orgasm in the presence of another male. So I wondered if maybe I was having a problem or if I had to stop with the males … because masturbating or doing a fellatio to a man it’s something that not only I don’t like, but provokes in me a feeling of repulsion  … and having an anal intercourse, for me, is like masturbating alone … nothing as involving as with a woman. Among other things, if I get excited thinking about a woman and after a little think back to a man this one not only doesn’t attract me anymore, but also makes me feel a little repulsion. In short, considering these things I have just written and adding, as you point out, that I feel guys only as friends and I never fell in love with them (for 27 years I have not even felt the “weight” of this masturbation in a gay key, as if it was nothing at all) I think that it makes no sense to delude a gay guy proposing a date and then leave him after a while because it is not for me … Indeed, as Alyosha says, I will stay good alone for a while, trying to calm me down. My real problem is that it’s been a long time since I’ve been with a woman, although I’m in constant search (in 3 years I have heard dozens of women, but these days it’s really difficult to find one to go out with you … ). Let me know what you think of these last things. Thanks so much!!! I will always be grateful to you.

 

Alyosha

“My real problem is that it’s been a long time since I’ve been with a woman, although I’m in constant search (in 3 years I have heard dozens of women, but these days it’s really difficult to find one to go out with you … )”

Well you have to tell your gay friends  such tings! They are all convinced that the problem of finding a suitable partner is just theirs: lol: Ah how much would do well to compare their problems with those of hetero guys, they would find they have a lot more problems in common than they think …

 

Project

Well, frankly, I think your second post is so explicit that there’s no need for any explanation. But I would like to draw attention to the fact that in a couple relationship, be it hetero or gay, what really matters it is not having sex but loving each other, and they are two different levels. I recently followed the story of two guys, one with a job and the other unemployed, and this was an element of extreme stress for the unemployed guy. His partner was close to him from an operational point of view, the search for work they did it in two and among them, even if there were economic problems, because living in two with only one salary and in addition low was objectively difficult, but there are never been couple problems. Then the unemployed guy found a job but in conditions of great discomfort, he had a boss who exploited him and paid him if and when he wanted. The guy returned home humiliated and depressed and his companion encouraged him to resign and to try again. Finally another work came out, not exciting at the economic level but quiet and in the midst of quiet people. The couple life of these two guys was the safety valve that allowed them to overcome a crisis that was in danger of being truly destructive. The guy who was looking for work told me: “I felt calm, when I got home I knew that he was waiting for me and he loved me and that once the door was closed, all the bad things remained outside and inside we were only us. You don’t imagine the feeling of tenderness, in two on the sofa, closed in the blanket (at home there is a heating that doesn’t work at all) watching TV, I was really happy!” This story is the story of two guys but it could very well be the story of a straight couple. Among these guys there was also sex but there was not only sex and they tried to see themselves each one with the other’s eyes. I mean that sex is a component of the emotional life and it is not even the most important. The sex lived “with love” is a beautiful thing, lived without love is a form of selfishness that can never give a deep gratification.

 

Geographer

Pratoditurno wrote: “You’re right about everything, labels are not needed but if you really need to use one I’ll be a predominantly straight bisexual. On the other hand, sexuality is a very complex thing consisting of several dimensions and we are not necessarily on the same position for each of these dimensions.”

In this forum, many know how I think about bisexuality. Honestly, I don’t believe in bisexuality. I have often heard of bisexual guys, who in the end had a preponderant interest in the same sex and were hiding behind the fact that sometimes they attended a girl or the women’s body didn’t make them sick. I am a homosexual, yet women don’t disgust me, their body simply doesn’t excite me. In fact, I often think of a charming, beautiful woman, I contemplate her as well but, I mean, it stops there. And the same could very well be said for a straight guy towards another guy (although this is in a sense banned because of social taboos). Pratoditurno, if you had I been 20 years old maybe I would have been more understanding and less severe, on the other hand you would still have been a kid. But you’re 30, you’re a man now. You should have a clear idea of who you are. If you had been 60 years old, I would have avoided to point out the matter because probably you would have internalized some constructions of the past that absolutely forbid homosexuality, and every so often enter the forum men of a mature age who tell how they have experienced the thing badly. But in your case it’s different, you’re adult and vaccinated, young but not too much and I don’t think that at 30 you can be burden with the same homophobic ideologies that have afflicted a sixty year old or that you can have the same insecurity of a boy. I looked at the Project response, which I don’t agree with. And here the risk is that maybe you can stay serene behind the word “bisexual”, maybe in a sense deluding yourself that you can safely spend the rest of your life with a woman. Let me be clear that I have no hatred towards bisexuals, and I’m the first to think that it is really sad to have to hide behind labels that should, in a sense, regulate our lives according to certain criteria. But you yourself tell how your sexual fantasies are predominantly homo, I think that once said this, everything is said. It is obvious that then, when we speak of real meetings (clearly homosexual), we detach ourselves from fantasies / abstractions, and we must clash with reality. So in that case the erection is less, maybe there is even a little less excitement or anything else simply because when you masturbate you are alone and you have complete knowledge of your body, with which you have confidence. The moment you have sex with another person, it means that two people have to relate to each other, and you understand that it is not easy. We are detached from that abstract sexuality and relate to one that is concrete and with which we don’t have the same confidence as with masturbation, it is obvious that as a result the erection cannot last or partners are less close-knit. Mutual harmony is something that is acquired gradually, the same gradualness that you have conquered when you tell yourself that you can make love with your ex. Then, Pratoditurno, let me say one thing: referring back to what I told you at the beginning, being homosexual doesn’t mean that you cannot recognize a beautiful woman. A homosexual is not an impotent man with women, he can really make love with a woman. He simply doesn’t like it because making love with a woman doesn’t fit to his nature. Then maybe you will be in love with your ex-girlfriend, I don’t doubt this, but I would say that it is a love born according to the canons that society has built for you and to which you have adapted. When I was a child (I think I was 14), I fell in love with little girls too, then I gradually became aware and now I wouldn’t be able to fall in love with a girl. The best thing for me would be to go out with a guy, without the meeting having any sexual end, simply for a knowledge. Unfortunately I know it’s difficult because in the mud of these applications and chats (which I find really squalid, I wonder when they will make some cleaner applications) is full of people absolutely not recommendable, you need to do a great skimming and then maybe you could find someone, but this is possible only if you live in big cities. But from what you write you don’t have such problem, since you say that you have had several opportunities to meet young people, so I assume that you don’t live in a village outside the world. You yourself tell me that your prevalent sexuality is gay, I think you answered yourself. And do you know what I tell you? That a homosexual person can safely live a peaceful life, with friends, with job ambitions and so on. The fact that you are homosexual doesn’t mean that you have to live a life different from that of a straight man. There are no “gay lives” and “hetero lives” because it seems to me that this is your fear. A gay man is simply a man who falls in love emotionally and sexually with other men, stop.

In any case, in my opinion, you can only do well a happy life as homosexual in cities that are not too small, absolutely out of the family, because if you still live at home with mom and dad then it is impossible (I still speak for me,

I will never tell my parents about my homosexuality, then maybe there are more open parents but in short, it is not so frequent). But I think that here you are running too much, you still seem little accepted and I am already talking about this, but the essence of my speech is that having this fear of being homosexual nowadays is just anachronistic, especially if you are thirty and independent. Live your life without paranoia, and remember that the life is only one.

 

Pratoditurno

My dear Geographer, I thank you for your opinion, that I respect, but I don’t agree with. I don’t agree certainly not because I want to be heterosexual at all costs when it’s clear that I’m not, but because, as you could read, I’m not even gay. If you deny the existence of bisexuality, with all its nuances, you deny decades of studies and progress on human sexuality, which is an extremely complex subject. Many gays, who shared your opinion, made me your own speech, but if you think about it, these are just speculations. You say that heterosexual love was suggested only by external conditioning and that I did sex just because I’m a man and therefore I’m not impotent. But how many of these gays, including you, have experienced a deep love for a woman? How many, for years, only wanted her, thought only of her and every day of their life at all hours had it hard thinking of making love with her? How many have dreamed every day to marry her? How many have masturbated thinking about her or sex with her? To how many of them continually surfaced images of her naked during masturbation? And then: how many of these have only contemplative fantasies about males, but then, in practice, they don’t like sex between men? Here, as you see, those of many gays are just words but are not justified by practice. If these gays had tried these and many other things they would not think so. I’m not saying that it is impossible that one day, after many attempts, I will find a gay love, nobody can tell it. Nobody! But I don’t think that being as rigid as you are, when everyone knows that bisexuality exists, it’s good for something, and even less to reassure me. I’m not a homosexual like you, just as you you’re not like another gay, etc. etc., it is all subjective.

A greeting.

__________

If you like, you can join the discussion on this post on Gay Project Forum: http://gayprojectforum.altervista.org/T-maybe-i-am-gay-but-i-love-my-former-girlfriend