Hi Project,
I saw that on your forum there are some posts about so-called gay intergenerational relationships, I have read them and I can say that, at least in part, they also reflect my experience, because I’m the oldest partner of something similar to a gay couple, if I can say so, I’m now almost 60 years old, my partner is 30. My experience of gay stories has been always very small, but my life has changed dramatically a year ago. I met a man who is almost half my age, as I told before, and it happened to me what had never happened to me before. As you can well understand his freedom is an absolute value for me. Although he was much younger than me, he had a very concrete and varied experience of gay environments and behaviors.
We met in a very curious way, our cars have collided at an intersection but with minimal damage, both his and mine. It happened through my fault or rather because of one of my my too frequent inattentions, anyway he got out of the car furious, but more because of the loss of time and the bureaucracy problems he was going to face out of necessity than because he was angry with me, I was also a little scared at first, because he has a very solid physical constitution. He addressed me kindly and politely, I think because of my age, he saw me willing to take on my responsibilities with the blue form, and treated me with respect. He looked at his car and said to me: “Okay, it’s a minimal damage, you can go away quietly, let’s say nothing happened … ok?” I didn’t trust him and I was afraid of being tricked or blackmailed later. I insisted that the blue form had to be filled in anyway, so he eventually agreed and we filled in the form, one copy of it for me and the other for him. According to the insurance rules it was up to him to send the form within three days to his insurance, because since the accident had happened out of my fault and I had admitted it, it was up to his insurance company to pay him back within 30 days.
At a certain point he told me that my damage was greater that his and that if he had send the form I would have lost a not negligible amount of money and I would have lost my previous insurance category to be inserted into another much more expensive. At this point I was about to think he would ask me to pay the damage immediately in cash and in the end I would have done it, and I said: “If you prefer, I can pay you back in cash now …” He replied: “The damage is minimal and my car is old, let’s just leave things like that!” I told him: “Don’t worry about me, you now have the blue form with my signature, just send it to your insurance. Ok?” He said to me: “Ok, ok, I’ll think about it.” He greeted me very quietly and we left. Five days later I received this email:
“Dear Mr. James,I’m Andrew G, the one with whom you signed the blue form for the friendly accident report. I wanted to inform you that I preferred not to send the blue form to my insurance company, because you would have suffered financial damage and I would have received negligible compensation. I had the pleasure of meeting in you a serious person who didn’t hesitate to take on his responsibilities. I greet you with true respect. ”
After a long meditation, I answered him like this:
“Dear Mr. Andrew,certainly it’s not so common to meet people like you, I can say that your gesture surprised me, even if in a sense I expected it. If it weren’t too inconvenient for you, I’d like you to accept at least one invitation from me to dinner, not as compensation but out of sympathy. I greet you with esteem.”
He replied after a few seconds:
“Dear Mr. James, I accept your invitation with great pleasure.”
We agreed for the following Monday evening, at the time there was still no talk of Covid. On Monday evening he arrives right on time, he is dressed in a simple but very nice way. He has a brown beard, hair trimmed, he’s a really handsome man, I know from the documents he’s 30 years old. We shake hands, he is perfectly at ease. I chose a very quiet, open-air restaurant, because it’s the height of summer and it’s still hot. There are few people because the space is huge and the restaurant is almost empty on Mondays. I insist that he order the dinner before me, and here he already amazes me, because he is a vegetarian, he doesn’t take pride in it but follows his rule. I adapt immediately, he tells me I can take whatever I like better and I tell him that if he has decided to be a vegetarian there must be a good reason, he just smiles.
Slowly we come to talk about work but on those things he is very reserved, I avoid insisting and he notices and appreciates it, I talk to him very succinctly about me and above all I tell him that I would like to be already retired but I still have to work to many years. We don’t talk about family or private life. Then we move on to politics and on that level we get along very well. Our first meeting ends with the realization that it was a really good evening and the final handshake is much warmer than the initial one. He unexpectedly adds: “We have to meet again …” and I tell him: “Very, very gladly!”
A sympathy was certainly born between us but Andrew could have been my son and I just felt a great melancholy because I was not thirty but almost 60, and everything stopped there. Returning home I seriously thought I would never see him again, but after a few minutes he writes to me:
“Dear James, I returned home. Thank you! It was truly a very enjoyable evening. I think you will hear again from me. Thanks again for everything.”
In fact, since then I’ve heard Andrew at least once a week, but not in the sense that we talked on the phone once a week, no! On the contrary it became an habit for us to go out together in the evenings at least once a week to go around the city and we were happy of it, there was a very special atmosphere. Tis way we slowly trusted each other more and more.
With the changing of the season and with the arrival of the cold our walks were more and more problematic and either he came to my house or I went to his house, and it was really a new phase, in the sense that, before he came for the first time at my house, I made all the gay books I have in the library disappear, because I thought he might be straight and that seeing certain books would make him uncomfortable. It’s a stupid thought, I know, but anyhow I hid all the gay books. My home had become an absolutely neutral environment.
He came to me the first time and we talked for hours, he was melancholy, I didn’t know what to do and the embarrassment was palpable. He said to me: “Don’t pay attention to my melancholy, I’m like this.” His house, when I went there, seemed even more neutral than mine, everything was simple, banal, ordinary, too simple, too banal and too ordinary to be true. This fact, combined with everything that had happened, led me to think that Andrew was gay. Everything was anonymous and there was no trace of emotional life. Little by little he talked to me about his family, his distant and essentially indifferent parents, his older sister who lives in Austria and also about his work in a very important research Institute.
He didn’t ask me questions but slowly allowed me to enter his world. I listened to him for hours, fascinated, then he also told me, almost as if it were an irrelevant detail that “he had lost his head for a guy”, at which point it would not have been dignified not to tell him clearly about me. I told him: “I think you understand that I’m gay too …” And he said to me: “Well, that’s why I’m here …” Once we had clarified this point, we had taken a step forward, but I didn’t understand why he had chosen me as his confidant, because he had had some guys and still had at least one, but evidently he couldn’t have those kinds of conversations with those guys.
I must confess, Project, that for me there was nothing easy: doubts, anxieties, scruples have upset my life, because objectively I would never have believed that anything like this could happen to me. I had found a gay friend much younger than me who had taken me seriously, because then our relationship was at that level and at that level, all in all, I could manage it, but slowly I began to understand that Andrew was really sexually attracted from me, something that I would have considered absolutely unthinkable if it hadn’t happened to me firsthand. The fact is that Andrew had at least one other boyfriend, so to say, not a stable boyfriend but, let’s say, a friend of reference. I didn’t understand what Andrew could find in me. I loved him, his image was always present in my mind I was thinking of him a thousand times a day, especially because I wanted to see him smile, but his smile was an absolute rarity.
If you add the fact that Andrew was really a handsome man and wasn’t indifferent to me at all, you can understand that I was on hot coals, on the one hand I wanted him and on the other I thought I had to get away from him as soon as possible. However, he didn’t allow me to escape, he remained close to me, I don’t want to say that he remained close to me in a nagging way but he didn’t leave me the opportunity to break away and cool down the relationship.
When he started looking for a minimum of physical contact I was really scared, all my contradictions were exploding and I didn’t know how to behave with him, then, in the end, I realized that it was what he wanted and what I wanted even though I was trying to avoid it and so we had our first sexual intercourse one night. I like sex even though, before meeting him, it was almost always more fantasy than reality. I had been with a couple of guys many years ago but it was a completely different thing. I certainly don’t have much experience of love affairs with men but I had never seen someone who lived sex like Andrew, who was totally involved. But somehow he was perplexed because he saw me very hesitant, certainly not disinterested but, let’s say, less deeply involved and he didn’t understand that for me that level of involvement was the highest level possible, sometimes he thought that in sex I acted to make him happy, but it wasn’t like that at all, sex used to make me tired because I’m 30 years older than him.
Don’t believe that it was easy to be with him, sometimes he treated me in a brusque way, especially when I tried to procrastinate and didn’t give him clear answers, this irritated him and sometimes he went away without giving explanations. When it happened the first time, I was very upset because I thought our relationship was over, but then, the next week, he was looking for me again as if nothing had happened. I wonder if a 30-year-old can truly understand how a 60-year-old can live certain moments and the uncertainty that a 60-year-old feels in a situation like ours.
He sees the immediate but I think that in not many years I will become a ball and chain for him that he will have to get rid of. If you are with a peer, you get older with him and the differences are always limited, but if you are with someone who is 30 years younger than you, you almost wish it would all end as soon as possible, because you understand that even if there is love, the differences are enormous and in any case everything is precarious. At present I don’t know what sense I can have in his life, I can’t understand it, I know he has a boyfriend and he even told me about him, but obviously his boyfriend doesn’t absorb him completely. I’m only afraid that in the end he may take our whole story badly, that he may take it as a crush gone wrong, a personal failure, almost a kind of self-punishing personal degradation. This fear haunted me especially at the beginning, but now it it’s somewhat attenuated. I never look for him, and maybe I do wrong.
A year has passed now. With the complications of the lockdown we had met much less, but in the summer we started again. He’s periodically tested with swabs at the Institute where he works and I never leave the house except to do the shopping. I think a lot about him, he’s a good man who feels frail and knows he lacks something to be happy, he looks for that something in sex and doesn’t even find it there and oscillates between sexual frenzy and depression, of course everything within the limits and with common sense but the fact remains that he is not happy. I told him that he’s really charming but he says that his belly is too prominent, which is absolutely not true, and he takes my compliments as a reason to be ironic about himself.
Why does a young man in his thirties and seemingly fulfilled like him, want to maintain a relationship with someone like me? Can I be something similar to the father he didn’t have? Frankly, I don’t think so. He’s in love not with me but with his special friend with whom, however, he doesn’t lack frustrations. I love him, we have some sexual intercourse but frankly, for me, having sex with him it is not only not the essential but it is a concern, a bit for health, even if we are very cautious, but above all because I don’t want him to think I’m taking advantage of his weakness.
There is a huge age difference between us, but he is a grown man who knows what he is doing and these fears I should really put them aside and instead they accompany me constantly. I feel very unbalanced, it is true that it is an important thing, I don’t question it, but it is something that has put in crisis the routine to which, for better or worse, I was used to, and has led me to rhythms and problems that are no longer for my age. I ask myself several times if it’s possible or at least if it would be advisable, for him, as well as for me, if I got out of this story, and sometimes I think it would be good for both of us, but then I wonder how I can get out and I don’t find any plausible way.
I can’t make arguments of this kind with him, because he would consider them a betrayal, a bad gesture towards him, for him it’s obvious that we must go on like this, for me it’s not at all. I want to say that when we pass the night together, while it lasts, the two of us are fine, he is fine and I’m fine too, but later, when we are done, the melancholy begins for him and for me the doubts begin. I have never seen him go away happy after a sex meeting with me, he is not unhappy, but he is sad and this scares me, but we don’t talk about it, it’s a taboo subject. I go to bed with him but I don’t have access to his melancholies, sometimes I think he doesn’t even know why he gets those melancholies.
I’m so afraid that in the long run I may be considered a negative presence, I have no arguments to say it but it is a feeling that I have had several times. Sometimes I happened to tell him something my melancholy to him, but he silenced me, he told me that I always try to talk about negative things and that he “when he comes to me” he doesn’t want to hear those things, it’s a sign perhaps that he must hear such things too many times in other situations. I wondered if I’m not by chance, for him, just a sexual diversion, but such a thing would make no sense, if only he wanted to, he could very well find a much more interesting company than me, and he did so before. I don’t want to be the sackcloth he has chosen to wear or self-inflict for some reason I can’t understand. In short, I feel really tossed from one extreme to the other.
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http://gayprojectforum.altervista.org/T-problems-of-an-intergenerational-gay-relationship
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