12-21-2020, 02:46 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-21-2020, 02:46 AM by gayprojectforum.)
Hi Project,
every now and then I happen to enter Gay Project forum and look for new posts, especially those that talk about life as a couple. I like reading those things, it's somehow like a way to understand how others think and how they live their everyday life, but I only find stories that tell how a life as a couple began, or rarely how it ended, but I hardly find stories that involve everyday life, that is the more or less banal everyday life made of economic and family problems. I can understand that the idea of living together is a dream for many guys, but when you get there, in my opinion, you are still a long way from understanding what it really means to share your life with another man.
Real life is not a fairy tale and has to deal with many things that at the beginning are never taken into consideration or even imagined. If one thinks that life as a couple is a kind of sexual paradise that leads to the world of dreams, obviously he doesn't understand what couple life means. Often, in the stories I read about the lives of others, there is the moral of the story but there is not the story itself. I would like to try to tell you how my partner and I actually live our life as a couple, but I would like to do it according to the facts, avoiding judgments as much as possible. There is therefore no background, or rather there is, but I leave it out to make room for the facts. I will start directly from living together.
We (for privacy reasons the names have been changed):
1) Francis (me), 29 years old, agronomist.
2) Andrew 31 years old, owner, together with his father, of the family farm, a very well-managed farm.
The places
We live in Northern Italy, in a province with a specialized agricultural vocation.
The facts
Francis and Andrew met for work reasons. Francis organized the restructuring of a considerable part of Andrew's farm. The two are estimate very much each other professionally. Both Francis and Andrew, in their lives, have essentially thought about working and have not had stories of any weight with other guys. Their families knew about their homosexuality well before the guys met and never created any problems. Both communicated to their parents that they were going to live together, and parents accepted the idea without problems and even with some satisfaction. Francis is an only child, Andrew has a brother whom I will call Mark here, 24 years old, recently married and with a baby just a few months old. Both Andrew and Mark live in the big farm, in different apartments, obviously Mark lives with his wife and son in the largest apartment. A third apartment is occupied by the parents.
Mark initially had no problems with Francis, the fact that his brother was gay and was in a couple with Francis seemed not to concern him in the least. Then one day Andrew tells his parents that he wants to live with Francis in the farm apartment, Mark doesn’t raise problems of any kind. Then one day Andrew makes a speech on Civil Unions in front of his parents and brother and, perhaps naively, touches a sore point and says that the partner of the Civil Union has the same inheritance rights as the spouse. After that speech, Mark's position changes radically. Mark doesn’t want Andrew to live with Francis, and least of all that they share the apartment in the farm, he says that Francis is a stranger and that he mustn’t compromise the integrity of the farm. Andrew tells him that he is by no means a stranger to him and that he has a position quite similar to that of Mark's wife.
In reality, Mark doesn’t fear the coexistence of Francis and Andrew in itself, but the fact that the coexistence is a prelude to the Civil Union, because if Andrew and Francis were partners of a Civil Union, in the event of Andrew's death, Francis would inherite a half of the farm, while without any Civil Union, the whole farm would be inherited by Mark or by Mark's son. It is obvious that Mark is not angry with Francis for reasons of homophobia or something like that, but only because he sees him as a possible impediment to the fact that the whole farm ends up in his and his son's hands.
Francis and Andrew have an excellent understanding between them and Andrew is not the type willing to bear impositions. The parents swing a little on Andrews's side and a little on Mark's side, they try somehow to give a hammer blow to the iron circle and one to the barrel or, it would be better to say, to keep one foot in two shoes, and prevent sons from fighting for economic reasons when their parents are still alive and in full activity. Relations between Francis and Mark quickly become unmanageable. Francis is accused of being an opportunist and an exploiter, Mark would like it not to reach the Civil Union or to get there with a declaration of renunciation of the rights on the farm by Francis. Francis would be willing to give up but Andrew, as I have already said, cannot bear impositions and clearly says that he is free to do what he likes without being accountable to anyone and reminds his brother that if the farm is in good condition, the credit is largely attributable to Francis.
Andrew and Francis, to avoid fuss, go to live together in an apartment outside the farm, in a city 30 km away. Their former apartment in the farm is occupied "free of charge" by Mark's in-laws. Andrew prefers not to make a fuss and leave things as they are. However, since he works in the farm, he is forced to travel 30 km outward and 30 km back to go to work every day, and his work some days begins when it is still night and ends when it is already night.
Shortly after another dispute broke out between the brothers. Mark accuses his brother of "stealing the farm's money to spend it who knows how", implying that Andrew throws money away with men, which is objectively unthinkable, and asks the parents to do three equal parts og the farm's profits, one for the parents, one for Andrew and one for Mark, completely neglecting the fact that the farm is managed by Andrew and his father, who work there from morning to evening. The parents this time are not hesitant and defend Andrew who "for all the work he does, deserves much more than he earns."
Francis (that is, me) cannot bear the hierarchies within the couple, that is, in particular, he cannot bear that Andrew is the rich partner while the role of Francis is reduced to something secondary. Andrew never had attitudes of superiority, which he might have had, but Francis has always had a straw tail when it came to money or property. In essence, the difference in economic status between Francis and Andrew has always been experienced by Francis as a heavy conditioning. If on the one hand Francis was happy that Andrew defended him in front of Mark, on the other hand, if he had been able to renounce the rights on the farm he would have felt much less conditioned, but Andrew prevented him by telling him: "Don't throw away an opportunity that you don't need today but could help you tomorrow!“ In this Andrew was more provident than Francis and was able to see far.
Andrew wants to arrive at the Civil Union in tight deadlines, Francis wouldn’t want to feel forced, but in the end he accepts and so the time of the Civil Union arrives. Both Andrew and Francis' parents are there on the day of the ceremony, who already knew each other for some time and got along well, obviously Mark is not there. Andrew never takes a vacation, he often works even on Sundays, obviously for him and Francis there is nothing like a honeymoon, just a lunch in a reserved room of a restaurant with Francis, Andrew, the four witnesses and the four parents, 10 people in all, and with a moment of embarrassment when the manager of the restaurant says that to begin with, It’s necessary to wait for "the bride". When the manager realizes that it was a two men Civil Union he tries to make up for the gaffe but in a painful way. The embarrassment is considerable. After all, Francis and Andrew had booked for a separate room just to avoid perplexed glances and stupid comments.
Francis and Andrew really live together now. Francis is a freelancer but about a third of his income comes from Andrew's farm, to which Francis dedicates at least 80% of his work. Francis and Andrew and also Andrew's father share the idea of a transparent company based on two principles: "never take the step longer than the leg" and "always respect the law", even at the cost of having less profits.” The farm underwent both financial and social security checks namely on the position of the workers and always came out of it well. In recent times, Mark, who is still finishing his studies in sectors that have nothing to do with agriculture, has begun to express the idea of also taking care he too of the management of the farm, but according to him managing the farm doesn’t mean working on it physically from morning to evening but having pharaonic ideas far beyond the concrete economic possibilities.
Mark, who doesn't understand anything about the economic management of a farm, went to speak with the director of a local bank using his surname, which is well known in these parts, to explore the ground about the possibility of having a loan for a an astronomical sum compared to the size of Andrew’s farm, and Andrew has been notified of this by the bank manager himself who had already informed the father. Mark, now has his own idea about how to transform the farm, he bites the brake, he bought a car for 40,000 euros and Andrew and his father don’t even know where he gets the money from because he doesn’t officially work and his father certainly didn't give him 40,000 euros. Mark probably borrowed them from someone. Andrew is very often in a bad mood when he returns from the farm, he tries to talk to his brother to understand how things really are but his brother doesn't even want to see him.
The couple relationship between Francis and Andrew is very conditioned by Andrew's family problems. Francis tries to console his partner as best he can but the couple life ends up becoming a marginal appendage to the issues related to Andrews's brother. When Andrew returns home to the city, he is affectionate towards Francis, he cooks for Francis, he seeks physical contact with Francis, he wants to make it clear that he is there even though he has a thousand problems in his mind. Francis would like his partner to be serene but realizes that instead he is almost always pensive. Andrew's father, with the excuse of consulting Francis for problems related to the farm, often calls him and tries to stay close to him and tells him that he is very worried about Mark.
At the end Andrew's father has paid off the promissory notes signed by Mark for the car, but Mark continues to ask him for money to go on vacation with his family but his father is determined not to give him money to waste. Mark doesn’t work and occupies (between himself and the in-laws) two apartments in the farm and doesn’t really realize the value of money.
Recently a new quarrel broke out between Mark and his father. Beyond Andrew, Francis and Andrew's parents, three families of specialized farmers live permanently in the farm and have been working there for generations. The head of one of those three families died and under the terms of the contract, the family should have left the apartment, but Andrews's father, who knew this family very well, sought a different solution. Since the dead man had a 16-year-old son, Andrew's father hired him instead of his father, and so he left the apartment to the family, he pays the boy as an employee but the boy doesn’t actually work in the farm because he still studies (as an agricultural expert). When the father told Andrew that he had hired the boy, Andrew replied immediately: “Well done!! You sure did well!” And I saw that the father felt a moment of happiness. Mark, on the other hand, considered the fact a way of throwing money away and couldn't bear the fact that Andrew's father treated the sixteen year old boy almost as if he were a bit like a third son. Among other things, this guy knows about the story between Francis and Andrew and has never had problems of any kind with them.
Francis and Andrew love each other, first of all they esteem each other as men, they have a system of values in common, they know that they can count on each other, in theory they would have all the credentials to be able to live a quiet life as a couple but Andrew's family problems continually erupt into their life as a couple. Francis and Andrew, at the beginning, thought that the couple problems, between them, could be problems of fidelity, jealousy, sexual compatibility, and instead they never experienced problems of that kind. By now Francis and Andrew know very well that their life will be conditioned by Mark in a very heavy way but they also know that they will always be together to fell stronger and to face every difficulty.
I wrote this email to make it clear that, at least in our case, it is not homophobia that affects our life, but above all family problems related to money. I think these problems are not typically gay, but certainly Mark's homophobic moralism appeared out just when Mark realized that as a partner in a Civil Union, Francis would be a competitor for him to his father's legacy.
Take care!
Francis
(clearly, if you want, you are free to publish the email, the meaning reflects reality but I changed some circumstances so as not to compromise anyone's privacy.)