06-05-2020, 11:59 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-17-2020, 02:33 PM by gayprojectforum.)
Hi Project,
I read a lot of posts in your forum, there are really good stories and I really appreciate that you have no preconceptions about gay love, you are not propagandizing the monogamous gay couple as the only possible model of true love and you give sex an important meaning but don't identify it with gay love.
My story is very similar to many others that I have read in the forum, and this has helped me a lot because I feel less alone and less strange. I fell in love so many years ago for the first time with a guy who has been somehow the living center of my life for the past 10 years.
We don’t live together, we meet in person rather rarely, we have two completely or almost completely separate circles of friends, each of us lives his own life and his own stories and nevertheless we never lost sight of each other. The years have passed and we are no longer young, but now we are a point of reference the one for the other.
There is affection between us, not really the passion of two lovers, but the loving of two true friends, there is also a little sex, at long intervals, especially when things go wrong for me or for him, it's a way of telling each other that we are there and that at least our relationship will not fade out. There is no mutual jealousy, when he finds another guy, I’m happy with it and, strange as it may seem, I say it seriously, but until now he has never found a guy who is truly capable of understanding him.
He is often in crisis, tends to devalue himself and nevertheless I have never known a guy better than him, I don’t say from my personal point of view but objectively. He is serious, non-invasive, non-vindictive, with me he’s very patient and understands what I think without words, he claims to be neurotic, aggressive, prevaricating, but these things are the exact opposite of his way of being and I don't get to understand why he thinks such things. He says that he exploits me and that he seeks me only because there has always been a very strong sexual attraction between us. If it’s true that there has always been a very strong mutual sexual feeling, it’s also true that this didn’t prevent him or me from having other stories that seemed more attractive than our, but in the end they were not at all.
We thought several times that our relationship was somehow wrong, that it was conditioning for many other things and we tried two or three times to interrupt it but then we ended up finding ourselves together and we understood that this bond, which seems so weak, basically has its internal consistency. I know that he doesn't judge me and that he cares a lot about what I think of him, and such things on the other hand are mutual. He’s always afraid that people will judge him badly, will think him cynical, indifferent, provocative, capable of doing very bad things, but he has his friends and they are stable friends and, from what he tells me, they trust him.
What upsets me most about him is his way of making love. I too have had my experiences and not really very few but I have never found a guy like him. Many times sex was something that could be done and therefore had to be done even if neither partner was really interested in it, it was never like that with him, sex was never a banality, both for him and for me it was basically a way of feeling accepted, of knowing and proving that at least there is someone who wants you as you are, who doesn’t want to lead you to some particular choice, who doesn’t judge you and who loves you. It’s another way of experiencing affectivity and sex.
As for me, would I live with him? I think so, but I never came out with my parents and therefore in concrete it cannot happen and all in all, if it happened we would both lose our freedom and eventually our relationship would become a very standard thing as it happens in many couples. We love each other even if or maybe exactly because we are not a couple. When I haven't heard from him for a long time I miss him but I avoid calling him. Today, after we met, he said to me in greeting me, "Call me!" and this touched me a lot because it means that when I don't call him he feels that he's missing something.
I don't know what our relationship means but I'm glad he's there, he understands me, he respects me, he loves me and when I think of him a smile of tenderness comes to my lips. He says that the others don't understand him, that they tell him that he is strange, that he has no grit, no self-esteem, that he is always on the verge of giving up, that he doesn’t strive to get what he wants, but it seems to me the exact opposite. Either he behaves in a way with me and in a completely different way with others, but frankly I don't believe it, or there are people who are not in the least able to understand what they are despising.
He has never been miser in human relationships he has never made the account of giving and having, how can one not love a man like this? I believe that meeting him was a fundamental event in my life, I met many guys but I never managed to build a deep bond with any of them, not even when we used to meet every day. There were always a thousand misunderstandings, a thousand equivocations. It has never been like this with him, sometimes I’m sorry to see that he doesn’t understand how important he is (but perhaps he understands it!) and how much weight he gives to judgments made by people who don't know him at all. Today we talked a lot about his last guy: he had no real dialogue with that guy, that guy didn't listen to him, that's why he felt hurt and very deeply uncomfortable.
My fear is sometimes that my presence may condition him and prevent him from living his true life, that’s why sometimes I try to keep him at a distance and to thin out our meetings, but he doesn't allow me it because he knows me deeply, and knows what I really want. When our story began, I didn't believe at all that I would have accepted to be with him in a relationship like the one that then came out. I wanted a guy of my own, because I was unable to imagine a way of loving outside of a bond more or less like a marriage: monogamy, absolute loyalty, coexistence, declaring oneself in front of parents to make a big family all together, at that time this was my way of reasoning.
But my coming out with the parents "fortunately" remained in the limbo of good intentions, because I understood that they would have taken it very badly anyway, and so the first pillar of my dream castle collapsed, then gradually the others too collapsed, without those pillars, according to my thought at the time, love would never have existed, but instead slowly I realized that my love story (because I consider it so) contradicted all the criteria that I initially had taken for granted, first of all it was born from a story of sex, that is, from a situation in which I would never have thought that something good could come out, even if it is true that between us there has never been only sex, there has never been mutual exploitation, we were afraid of feelings, we both considered them as traps and therefore we put everything openly in sexual terms.
We continued to love each other without any constraint and without any imposition, even when we lived our external stories, this is also something that I never would have thought possible before and instead it was just like that. Practically, one after the other, all those rules that had seemed to me essential to found a love story collapsed, but the more pillars collapsed the more I realized that the vault was not collapsing at all and that it had the strength to support itself, I practically discovered unconditional love. It took me time to understand that it was really love, because we never use this word between us, just to not get caged in words.
Our relationship has grown over the years, it has not been an a priori choice or a bet on the future, it has strengthened coming out unscathed from many difficulties and becoming and more and more deep-rooted. One thing, if I think about it, has always struck me: we have never quarreled, there have been sometimes mildly aggressive manifestations but in no case did we ended up putting our relationship into crisis.
I don't know what will happen to us in the future. Slowly we are becoming aware that sex is more a pretext than the substance of our relationship. I often hear many guys who speak badly of those who have relationships like our, who consider them depraved, who speak of open couple as of something that allows you to do very freely whatever you want with sex while pretending to be with someone at the same time, but these are completely false models, we love each other, of this I have no doubts, he’s not a superficial guy who doesn't understand what he he’s doing, I trust him, he’s not at all a fool or a naive and then there is another thing that has always happened spontaneously between us: there are no secrets between us. It is something more unique than rare, we mutually recognize each other's maximum freedom but we know all about each other and nothing ever vaguely similar has happened to me in other stories where the unspoken was a very common thing.
He knows that we are somehow together but not because we have deluded each other, but because we have chosen each other as we are, including our small and large flaws and weaknesses. I often wonder why people don't believe in this kind of love, why they need rules, that they then end up transgressing anyway. We don’t have rules, however, we love each other, from the outside it all seems pathological, I realize it, but we really love each other and we don’t need rules and models of behavior. I don't know what I’m, he is an intelligent and honest man. We wait for the future without asking too many questions but now our present is beautiful for us because we have our certainties. When we embrace I feel that he’s there and I see that when he’s with me he’s serene, that the ghosts he carries inside himself go away and that he feels loved. Before, this expression seemed too much pretentious to me, but now I think it’s simply the truth, because I feel loved too.