06-01-2021, 04:02 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-02-2021, 01:34 AM by gayprojectforum.)
Hi Project,
I read your email, you say things that are right but very difficult to put into practice, I'm trying it because I also think it's the only way: "understand my boyfriend's weaknesses". It is clear that he has a life of his own, he did not show up with a mask, he was honest with me and I - on this you are absolutely right - I used what he told me to devalue his image and not to try to understand him as I should have done. That is, he gave me weapons and I turned them against him. Honestly my behavior has been shabby. I didn't try to identify with him but I judged him in a very stupid and superficial way.
Anyway there is the risk that the attempt to understand is totally intellectualistic despite the good will, because basically these are things that I have never experienced and I can only understand from the outside. More than understanding, which perhaps isn't even possible, I would like to be there for him. You talk about his weaknesses, but his are fears more than weaknesses. In this I certainly made a big mistake, I thought that he could not be afraid of anything and instead he may have been overwhelmed by deep, visceral emotional reactions, in the face of things he didn’t know, which he faced with a kind of fatalism that from the outside looked somehow cynical.
In reality there was nothing cynical and I begin to understand what a disappointment it was for him to be somehow scolded by me, who basically I didn’t understand anything of what he was really going through. In this sense, yes, there are weaknesses, but on both sides.
Then I should also correct another attitude: I talk too much, let myself go to useless sermons that can be irritating and above all I put myself in an attitude of opposition. I try to juxtapose my attitude to his and to argue that mine is the right point of view. Basically I think that he has understood that I’m a little afraid of him, it’s a fear in the best possible sense, that is fear that my ways of doing, instead of creating a contact, can make him feel even more alone.
I know I'm not the most important person for him, but I see that he still looks for me, especially in the most difficult moments and it is precisely in those moments that I go into crisis. When you love a guy, you end up afraid of him and this has happened to me too. I talk about his neuroses and I don't see mine, but he sees them and when he points them out to me I stiffen in a defensive attitude. I have wondered a thousand times why he has never looked for a simple and tender couple relationship, I don't mean with me but with anyone. He tells me it's not true and that he looked for it but never found it. Perhaps it is difficult for me to understand the meaning of this statement because if he had sought an affectionate response from me I would have felt enthusiastic and I cannot understand how other guys could have not felt equally enthusiastic, evidently they didn’t love him enough.
Once he said to me, "Do you remember what I went through? Don’t you?" Such a sentence makes me think a lot, because I tend to homologate him, to consider him similar to me but he is a completely different person, with a completely different past. Yesterday we talked for a while, he told me that he currently has six partners with whom he has sex, but that they are also his friends, with whom he spends days even without sex, he says that everyone knows that he is like this, that he doesn’t want too close relationships with anyone, because he would feel asphyxiated and would have the feeling of losing his freedom, he tells me that I'm obsessed with the idea that he is missing something, that is that he is missing the couple life, but he doesn’t want the couple life and he is fine like that.
He told me about an ex-boyfriend of his, with whom he had a rather long affair, who has now a stable relationship with his new boyfriend. He is happy with this, but says that he is happy for his ex-boyfriend, who thus achieved what he wanted, but he would never want a life like that. He says these things but he also says he fell in love with one of those guys of his, who, however, didn’t like such kind of stories at all because he was afraid of losing his freedom and treated him very badly to shake him off, so he forced himself to pass over his falling in love and reduce contacts to just sex in order not to lose his partner. But all this suggests that at the beginning he tended to create relationships of an affective or nearly type, but that he then ended up adapting to the environment in one way or another, precisely in order not to be completely alone.
He says he needs to change guys or at least he needs to feel free from couple burdens, that basically he has emotional relationships with his guys but such relationships are not exclusive and that he is fine this way. You say: "try to understand your boyfriend's weaknesses!" Ok, but these are not weaknesses, they are just different, or at least apparently different ways of seeing life. Instinctively I think that he has adapted to that mentality, which was the mentality of the environment and that slowly he ended up assimilating it only because in fact he had no alternatives. I can understand that you can love at the same time more than a single guy but this basically means that you don't love anyone of them, that is, that in your life there is not a really important person you can count on.
He says that trusting in an emotional relationship means not being prepared for that blow that sooner or later they will give you anyway. That is, he takes it for granted that an emotional relationship must end in betrayal or abandonment and it must have happened to him in a very heavy way. How do you get vaccinated against treason? You have to putt it all on another level, erasing affectivity or detaching it from sexuality, as if all of this were ultimately an acceptable solution. When it comes to choices, it is one thing to choose a person or a behavior to carry out your own life plan, and a very different thing is to adapt, pretending to choose, in order not to be 100% out of the game.
He says he doesn’t believe in emotional relationships but in fact he fears them, he is afraid of that terrible blow that according to him is inevitable, because everyone answered him negatively and froze him. I think that the gay environment, or rather a certain gay environment, has been deeply conditioning and has induced defensive behaviors tending to spread affectivity on various relationships, none of which really important and all centered only or above all on sex.
At the end of the conversation he had to go to work and I told him that I would like to call him back in the evening, he replied that in the afternoon he had a birthday party and he would probably come home later, I didn't know what to say and in the end he told me: "But you try to call all the same ..." This is the maximum of affective dimension you can get from him. He doesn’t want addictions and obligations of any kind. You see, Project, it's not me complicating things, it's just that things are really complicated. Years go by and relationships remain on this level and I honestly don't think they will change over time.
Somehow what had happened between that friend of his who had replied negatively and him, is newly happening between him and me, practically I risk becoming addicted, and in the end I don't even know what it means because the boundary between loving and being dependent is very blurred. I have had instincts to escape many times because I think that in the long run a relationship or better a non-relationship of this kind can be destructive even for me and can lead me to some form of emotional freezing, but I can't really detach myself from him, sometimes when I succeed and we don't hear from each other for a while I say to myself: "This time I did it!" Then he calls me and all good intentions fade and we inevitably start all over again, I think that in fact, in some respects at least, we are very similar, we never make a choice, we adapt, we go on by inertia and we call that inertia love, or sex, two words that seem different but in the end the first word is worth the second.
I realize that I too risk becoming or at least sounding cynical, but I don't know what to do, I would like everything and the opposite of everything, I would like to be useful to him at least in something and at the same time I would like to detach myself definitively, or at least so it seems to me, that then the story we tell ourselves inside our heads is all a schematization and it can be largely falsified by interpretations or a priori refusals we are not even are aware of. We should simplify everything, bring everything back to an instinctive response that perhaps once existed, several years ago, but has now been buried under a mountain of pseudo-psychological ruminations. We become victims of our own being too much talkative.
I realize that I have a radically ambiguous attitude but I cannot get out of it, because certain things, even if you try to put them outside the door, are not finished anyway, they are too vivid memories, which need years and above all a radical change of life to be truly passed from the present to memory. He told me to try to call him in the evening anyway and I did, but the phone was off the hook and it sent me to the answering machine, maybe it was better this way, because basically I wouldn't have known what to say.
This stop like all those before will last for a while, then we will get in touch another time and the embarrassment will be very great again and I will end up adapting myself to accept the rule, that now seems to him his rule, the rule of low profile and disengagement, so that he may feel free and put aside the idea of permanently cut ties with me. History repeats itself! People change but the logic is always the same. Will this ever change? Thanks anyway for your email, I can see that you put your soul into it, but maybe you are too rational and don't understand that ambiguity can become a way of life. In any case, if you answer me it makes me happy.