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DOUBTS OF A GAY 40-YEAR-OLD
#1
Hello Project, I feel a bit strange to write you some things but I don’t know what to do and I would like to have the ideas a little clearer. I am 40 years old, I am gay and I have always been gay but only in the sense that my sexual fantasies have always been about guys. In practice with the female universe I don’t have and never had any relationship not even of superficial significance. Nothing against women, for heaven's sake, but they are not my thing. But my being gay never, and I repeat never, went beyond individual fantasy. I spent periods during adolescence when I repressed myself heavily, a little conditioned by the family, a bit by religion and a bit by complexes of various kinds, I basically removed the idea of having a true relationship (I don’t even tell sexual) with another guy. Already from the time of school it was all a flee and put the idea aside. Maybe it was also good. 

My first falling in love, if I had declared it, would surely have put me in great difficulty. My last year of school I fell in love with a new guy who arrived in my class and getting rid of him cost me dear, now this guy is married and has two children and I’m happy to have kept my feelings for me.
 
The university was a succession of love affairs blossomed and then finished before beginning. My faculty was predominantly attended by guys and for me that period could, in theory, be wonderful, but it was not. Of course there were gay guys but it was impossible to find them, when I thought I understood that a guy was gay, the obvious proof of the contrary came to me. In practice I focused on the study, I graduated very well and I immediately found work, among other things a job that I like, well paid even if very demanding. My work environment is predominantly made of guys, they are all young engineers, mostly under 30, I belong to the seniors.
 
My colleagues at work only talk about work, here professionalism is mandatory and letting yourself go to personal speeches is considered a dangerous weakness for the career. When we do our business dinners it’s a real liturgy, there are the great bosses and my colleagues are all present with a wives or a girls in a long dress. So here what is worthy of consideration is just the image and to make a career you have to be formal and that's it, there is no room for friendship at any level but only for the competition. Among other things, my colleagues, even those who are objectively handsome, seem to me well programmed puppets, among other things with a critical spirit only at the technical level and aimed only at the career and otherwise stereotyped up to the incredible. So let's say that for me the working environment is completely neutral, and now I come to the central question.
 
This year I was, like every year, at the beach with my parents. If I told my colleagues something like that I would disqualify because it's just a piece of beach, nothing extraordinary. My parents have a little house near the sea, you just leave the house and in practice you're on the beach. There are few people on weekdays but on Sundays there are groups with cars and there are a lot of people. One Sunday I stood there under the umbrella reading some papers looking for some clever ideas to spend at work, when a group of young people, 20/21 years, arrives, they take off their shirts and start playing volleyball a few meters from me, so far there is little to say, it often happens.
 
One of these guys immediately strikes me: tall, blond, smiling, I remain to observe him because he exerts a powerful attraction on me. I tell myself: what a beautiful guy! Lucky him! Apart from my 40 years, I don’t have and I have never had anything to be considered a beautiful guy or even an average one. I could not stare at that guy for too long because I didn’t want him to notice it, but he enchanted me, even the voice seemed beautiful to me. I went back to reading my papers but my ear was fixed on the voices of those guys. At one point I got a ball in the head that made my book fly.
 
That guy told me, some days after, that throw of the ball was not accidental. He approaches, apologizes by friendly as if we had known each other forever, and takes the ball. The match ends, his friends go to take a bath, he doesn’t go, as he doesn’t have an umbrella and asks if he can put himself under mine, I say "Sure!" He smiles at me, then asks me what I'm reading, in short at the end of that Sunday we exchanged the cell phones and the msn contacts. He was a guy so radically different from my colleagues that he left his mark, apart from the fact that he was very young and didn’t feel conditioned at all for this. I knew I would see him at most another time on the following Sunday, then I would have resumed work and it would all end there. I come back home at night, add his contact on msn, he's online and we talk for three hours. In practice for the first time in my life I talk to someone who listens to me for non-professional reasons. The conversation is serious, not intrusive, it also intrigues me from this point of view.
 
He's terribly direct, he says what it thinks even brutally and doesn’t forgive me any banality. I’m amazed at his intelligence and his ability to go all the way. He takes no more than a week to tell me that he's gay, but he doesn’t make me the usual speech, like: "Now if you want, I can disappear from your life!", no! Instead, he takes it for granted that I’m gay and tells me: "But I see that you threw it all on study and career". No need to tell him that I was gay, he had understood it perfectly and also several other things. We chatted for hours and hours all week, he didn’t come to the sea the following Sunday but he had told me it before.
 
Seeing the group of his friends without him made me feel a terrible melancholy and I also told him and, as usual, he was not surprised, he just replied: "Well, I had expected it, but if you want we can meet tomorrow afternoon." I told him that I leave work at 5.15 pm and then I go to a big supermarket outside the city to do some shopping. We went to the supermarket together. It was a beautiful afternoon, I was falling in love with that guy and he was not pulling back. The next week we went shopping again, but this time in the car he took my hand and for me it was something upsetting. He held my hand tight to make me feel that he was there and that he wanted to be there. Project, that's how I started going into crisis.
 
I took him home without saying a word. Before getting out of the car he asked me: "Are you angry?" I replied: "No, but I'm worried!" And he: "Well that's natural!" Then he pinched my cheek and went down. I was happy but a bit dazed, I would have never expected something like that.
 
In the following days he tells me about his impossible love stories and about the tremendous frustrations he had to endure and wants me to tell him about my impossible stories, then, as if it were obvious (maybe it was) he tells me he had masturbated thinking of me and he wants to know my reactions about this fact. I tell him I'm a little surprised, because I think he certainly has a lot of better fantasies to think about, but he asks me in a very direct way: "And you, did you masturbate thinking of me?" I try t digress but he says seemingly angry: "Answer me!" I tell him to yes, and he tells me he cannot stand my hypocritical attitudes. I feel a little uncomfortable but he doesn’t give me respite and tells me: "Do not pose as a victim! If you like it you like it!" I begin to be afraid that the relationship with this guy can be something that goes out of control. I tell him that he needs something else and that I don’t want to bind anyone, he gets angry, he tells me that I'm just a hypocrite and that he has thought about age, he's not in love with me but he loves me, but for him I'm also an important person on a sexual level. I try to run away, I start to be really afraid of not understanding where the story is going to end.
 
In the following days we meet several times, I tell him a thousand times that I'm perplexed, that I’m too old but little by little we also create a minimum of physical contact, which if on one side sends me into ecstasy, for the other upsets me. He told me it cannot end this way and wants to be with me and I think it's true. He told me and repeated that he had never been with anyone and wanted to know if it was the same for me, he concluded that there were no risks of any kind and that then in practice even a behavior at zero risk it would be enough for him. He tells me that when he is near me he feels very strong physical attraction.
 
Now we are at this point. What have I to do, Project? I cannot deny that I'm totally in love but the complications are many, he is very young, I don’t say it because I'm afraid that one day or the other he can go away, but because I don’t want to affect his life. I love him deeply because he is as I wanted to be and I have never been.
 
Project, I'm afraid of embarking on a business too big for me, which I think I cannot handle. If he were one of my peers, maybe in a slightly disengaged story I would have felt more at ease, but so, with a 20-year-old guy who is terribly smarter than I was at his age, I feel displaced. And if in two or three months I don’t feel like it? I cannot leave him half way. I really, now at least, I don’t feel the age difference too much as an obstacle, we have both reflected, then there is that speech of "I'm not in love with you but I love you" which means that I'm not really what he is looking for. Then that phrase he tried to dilute it, to devalue it, but he told me that he is not in love with me, but deep down I too don't feel in love with him overwhelmingly and the fact is that I love him above all.
 
That I can be infatuated with a handsome guy 20 years old is already quite strange, but perhaps it is something that can be understood, but what can he find in someone like me? He can find as many guys as he wants a hundred times better than me, when he  tried he got only refusals, but in the future he will know many guys. I wonder what he wants from me, that is exactly from me, because it seems to me that he cares a lot. Among other things, he has a dignity in his abrupt manner that so many of my colleagues would not even be able to conceive, they would call it naivety, because in our environment guys don’t even know what dignity is. But how does a 40-year-old take a crush like that for a 20-year-old guy? I feel really split in two but I know that I will have to decide. Project, but if I give in to him and also to myself, is not that I’m really doing something bad? I don’t say this on a moralistic level, but I have many doubts.
 
Alyosha answers: But what a very simple question! ... As if you could do anything else. He told you that you were an hypocrite, but he used the wrong adjective, he  would have had to say incoherent, because it's clear that your reasoning goes in one direction and your whole body and your spirit in the other and the more your spirit comes close to him the more your reasoning becomes evanescent. I could also waste time giving you a thousand good reasons why you should say yes, but I’m intimately persuaded that while you wonder whether it is right or not, the main decision has already been made. A good old friend of mine said that the owl of Minerva begins its flight on the twilight, meant that the reflection and awareness of the movements that happen comes only at the end, when in fact those movements have concluded their work in the underground and the things that incubated in his womb are about to sprout. In short, the blooming, although it is the beginning of something completely new, is only seen at the end. See, you've already answered a thousand times. You answered yes when you stared intensely at him without literally being able to take your eyes off him, you said yes when he asked you to get under your umbrella, yes when he asked if he could give you his number, yes when his hand has begun to tighten yours and you will continue to say yes all the other times, for the simple reason that there is not even an alternative for you. So that's why it's worth turning the question to the contrary ... Why not? So enjoy the moment, it couldn’t happen anything better. He has already colored your gray life full of mannequins with starched collars.
 
Nicomaco answers: I don’t think I’m the most suitable to give advice or make profound evaluations, because, despite having an age similar to yours, I have always lived among peers and I fell in love (when I fell in love) with peers or almost. .. (they are things that happen). Let me be clear: I’m not at all opposed to relationships of love between people so distant in age. Beautiful stories can be read in the Project. It seems to me, however, that some greater difficulties such relationships can create at the level of social acceptance (even in this forum, sometimes they have been mentioned). But I believe that the only way to overcome these difficulties depends on the awareness, the serenity and the determination with which a relationship of this kind is lived and the difficulties are faced together. And here is an element that struck me in your story. It seems to me that there is not much symmetry between feelings, emotions, desires and projects between you. On the other hand, symmetry seems essential to building a relationship of love. You are faced with an unexpected and disturbing situation, also because your life is very "structured". You're not in love with him, but you say you still loves him. He seems a lot smarter, less problematic, he told you that he is not in love with you, but that he loves you and that he is attracted physically. I can easily believe it because at 20 (if I think of my life) the "physical" (and hormonal) element has a considerable weight (as it should be). You wonder how he feels attracted to you but I would say that the question is a bit naive. There is no model of physical beauty that has in itself the magnet of attraction. Personally in the past I was struck (even from the point of view, so to say, "erotic") by guys who you could consider nice, clever, whatever you want, but who weren't beautiful according to widespread models. My impression is that if you really care about that guy, you and he still have to work on it for a while. And then I think a lot depends on what you want to do with this relationship. It may be that the situation become rebalanced and allows you to build a deep love relationship. But I think it takes time and you need a lot of patience. Or it may be that the balance could not achieved and then I would say that maybe you should be making a decision for him too.
 
pavloss answers: I will be short. If you, in the grip of your doubts and in order to return to your tasteless and odorless world, will say to that guy: "no, go away!", You will spend the rest of your days repenting. When love knocks on our door, it can also be that we are not ready. But if we wait to be ready before it knocks, it will never knock. 
 
ignis answers: Given that he is "terribly smart", I think he would not have exposed himself if he hadn't well evaluated all the situation. To encourage him to look for someone else seems to me the worst conclusion.
 
Yin-Yang replies: Hello! I read your post several times to understand all the mechanisms that haunt you, first of all the fear of falling and hurting you badly when the story will come to an end. Don’t forget, however, that it may even go differently and that the story could last longer than you hope or fear. At 40 you have a more mature vision of life but certainly more pessimistic because being gay at that age and not having a steady partner is equivalent to being alone forever ... However you were lucky and you met someone who saw inside you better than you've ever done before. I don’t have much to say about it but my motto has always been “carpe diem” for this I dedicate to you this poem by Pablo Neruda:
 
“Die slowly

He who becomes the slave of habit,
who follows the same routes every day,
who never changes pace,
who does not risk and change the color of his clothes,
who does not speak and does not experience,
dies slowly.

He or she who shuns passion,
who prefers black on white,
dotting ones "it’s" rather than a bundle of emotions, the kind that make your eyes glimmer,
that turn a yawn into a smile,
that make the heart pound in the face of mistakes and feelings,
dies slowly.

He or she who does not turn things topsy-turvy,
who is unhappy at work,
who does not risk certainty for uncertainty,
to thus follow a dream,
those who do not forego sound advice at least once in their lives,
die slowly.

He who does not travel, who does not read,
who does not listen to music,
who does not find grace in himself,
she who does not find grace in herself,
dies slowly.

He who slowly destroys his own self-esteem,
who does not allow himself to be helped,
who spends days on end complaining about his own bad luck, about the rain that never stops,
dies slowly.

He or she who abandon a project before starting it, who fail to ask questions on subjects he doesn't know, 
he or she who don't reply when they are asked something they do know,
die slowly.

Let's try and avoid death in small doses,
reminding oneself that being alive requires an effort far greater than the simple fact of breathing.

Only a burning patience will lead
to the attainment of a splendid happiness.”

Good luck!!
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