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GAY RELATIONSHIPS AND COHABITATION - Printable Version

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GAY RELATIONSHIPS AND COHABITATION - gayprojectforum - 09-20-2021

In this last period I have often met gay guys in chat who have a partner but who have found themselves having to deal with at least partial disappointments, so I will try to outline and summarize the nodes of the problem.
 
First of all, the expression "having a partner" is extremely generic, ranging from stable cohabitation for several years now to the relationship that is still in its infancy and is still to be verified, up to the long-distance relationship in which there is no real contact except absolutely episodic and brief. Obviously in such a variety of situations the concept of “mythization” takes on very varied and scarcely homogeneous connotations.
 
The myth, in itself, embodies an archetype of behavior that is either received from the outside or created autonomously. The mythization of real people is the typical example of the self-constructed myth, identifying the person with the role he fills or one would like him to fill and projecting our personal archetypes of that role onto that person. Attributing even only hypothetically a role to a person is equivalent to recognize that person qualities and attributes that are often taken for granted, because the projective mechanisms lead us to see above all, if not exclusively, what we want to see.
 
A few decades ago, when there were no means of distance communication, people's knowledge was numerically much more limited but also much more direct than what is achieved today through social media. Today social networks don’t allow us to see and evaluate the behavior of others but only to know the image they intend to give us of themselves, that is, to know their self-representation. Obviously, the representations of oneself vary according to the aims one intends to pursue. In the search for the so-called soul mate, often, the self-image that we tend to provide our partner is built on the moment, exploiting the information we already know about him.
 
The fundamental information is photography, with which we instinctively assess whether the other is or is not an object of interest to us. If it is not, that is, if the photo doesn’t correspond to our archetypes, the tone of the conversation is low, the appreciations are limited, we don’t try to deepen the relationship but to make it slide towards banality and towards a short-term dissolution. If, on the other hand, the photo interests us, the tone of the language changes and we try to express a concrete interest, the discourse heats up, we immediately enter very personal arguments, we are careful to give a positive image of ourselves according to the interlocutor's yardstick. The first thing you appreciate is beauty, which is the objectively most impactful element at the first eye contact. Listening becomes extremely attentive, space is given to the interlocutor, trying to collect through his words useful elements to build a representation of ourselves as seductive as possible, even at the expense of truthfulness and completeness. All the similarities and analogies with the interlocutor are underlined and all possible points of divergence or distance are largely overlooked. An image of oneself is built and transmitted by specularity-complementarity (the two hands are not only similar but specular and complementary and are perfectly suited to work together).
 
Then comes the time of the retrospective image of oneself, of one's own history, and in particular of one's own affective history, and here too often the mechanisms of selection-omission of contents operate at an unconscious level, through which, in the archive of individual memory, some episodes are chosen as emblematic of one's own being and acting and others are omitted that would be in dissonance with the former. The language slips very easily towards expressions that indicate strong involvement and appreciation (the drift of love language). The whole process just outlined can be summed up in the word seduction. To seduce means to "take aside", "attract to oneself" a person.
 
If the relationship is born symmetrical, that is, the first impact evaluations are very similar on the two sides, one gets the impression of being in front of a beautiful love story or at least its onset and the projective mechanisms come into operation by building a progressive mythization of the partner on the basis of what we know of him, in the presumption that the image that the other has given us is authentic. But the mechanisms of selection of contents, which often operate unconsciously, invariably provide at least partial, if not distorted, representations of reality. In other words, verbal contact or even that in audio-video doesn’t show the reactions of the other in real situations but only what the other, in a more or less conscious way, wants us to see, or simply makes us see.
 
Obviously, the encounter in person, if episodic and brief, still maintains this same pattern and if anything tends to confirm the mythical vision of the other. Only a real coexistence in ordinary and long-lasting situations makes it possible to understand and evaluate the personality of the other with a breadth and depth of a certain thickness.
 
It should be emphasized that if the one who speaks about himself to a person in whom he is interested in any case provides a sweetened representation of himself, that is, he makes a selection of the contents to be presented, even the listener, in a more or less conscious way, makes a selection among the contents that are presented to him, attributing value to those that go in the direction he wants and neglecting or minimizing those that go in the opposite direction, in this way the image of the interlocutor undergoes a second deformation induced by the listener on the basis of his own archetypes and his own projections.
 
At the end of a period, however short, of meetings in chat alternated with short meetings in person, one gets the impression of having built a stable relationship and of knowing each other in depth, but in reality the mutual knowledge is minimal and the image of the other is heavily deformed. Myth makes up for reality, integrates it and strengthens it, as long as contact with reality doesn’t intervene to correct the situation.
 
The old saying: "marriage is the tomb of love" means that cohabitation actually makes many couple relationships collapse because they were built only on projections and myths far removed from reality.
 
The demythization that follows real coexistence can be of a very different type and degree. The higher the level of mythization in the pre-coexistence phase, the greater the level of disillusionment that follows from coexistence. The person who gives the best possible image of himself (self-mythization) is also the one who has the greatest a priori probability of generating profound disillusionment. The person who, on the other hand, doesn’t avoid speaking clearly about his own problematic aspects, is less likely to be successful in the seduction phase, but, in the long run, is much less exposed to the risk of creating disillusionment in the partner.
 
In the gay world, today, stable cohabitations are more the exception than the rule, civil unions are rare, partly because they involve a coming out that in some cases would create problems that are difficult if not impossible to solve, but above all because a coexistence of long term requires basic choices oriented towards stability and the ability to act over a long period in a manner consistent with those choices. Short stories and in any case without formal constraints can be born very easily and just as easily they can end, they are already born under the banner of the relative, the revisable, the non-definitive and essentially the disengaged, and are often based on fragile mythologies destined to shatter when one face a real coexistence. However, it must be said that the tendency towards disengaged or, as it is commonly said, free relationships, has its underlying reason in the difficulty of creating a deep interpersonal relationship, which would require the presence of forms of compatibility between the partners that are decidedly uncommon. In general, the first experiences of gay guys have as their goal the creation of a stable couple, but since in many cases this goal remains in fact unattainable or in any case unfulfilled, one ends up choosing the other choice, the more disengaged one, which is certainly more fragile but represents an objectively achievable goal even in conditions that are not ideal in themselves.
 
It should be emphasized that a disillusionment, however heavy it may be, doesn’t necessarily lead to the rupture of the relationship, because, if only for reasons of inertia, the possibly cracked relationship can be mended or better strengthened, even more than once, but obviously that relationship, marked by disillusionment, which is often reciprocal, risks being gradually emptied from within, if other mechanisms don’t intervene to consolidate it.
 
The idea that disillusionment is not in itself destructive of the couple's relationship is often accepted only as a fallback solution, but should rather be seen, sometimes at least, as a healthy return to reality, because disillusionment is such in relationship to the previous illusion, but seen from the perspective of the future, it can lead to a re-evaluation of the relationship which is not necessarily its degradation. In other words, it is a matter of taking note of the reality of the other, or at least of a less mythical and distorted image of him, which can profoundly and not always negatively modify the internal balance of the couple. Overcoming the couple crises, which often derive from disappointments, can even consolidate the relationship. In long-distance relationships, involvement is largely linked to the myth of the partner, the relationship is based on words and easily controllable situations. In cohabitation, the possibility of more or less deep misunderstandings with the partner is very concrete, one realizes that even sexual compatibility is conditioned by the fact that different individuals have different visions of sexuality and of being gay. Behaviors that are desirable for one of the two may not be desirable at all for the other, the example of coming out is enough here, but many other topics could be quoted here that are argument of frequent misunderstandings within the couple. In gay coexistence it is very easy to make mistakes even when the conditions for building a lasting couple exist. The relationships of stable coexistence without disappointments and without cracks don’t exist, a certain amount of conflict is physiological for the very existence of the couple. To realize a coexistence it is essential that the partners understand at the outset that there will be mistakes on both sides and that rigid positions risk destabilizing even the couple relationships that had all the theoretical presuppositions of solidity at their origin.
 
Disillusions, as mentioned, are often reciprocal, but it is not certain that they are obvious, or that they are on both sides. Disillusionment is often kept to oneself while waiting for it to be disproved and vanish and this indicates that the myth is in crisis but has not completely collapsed. In these cases, those who hide their disappointment tend to assume a characteristic claiming attitude, staying in the couple assumes for them the sense of waiting for the decisive proof, until the measure is filled and the account is presented to the partner by listing or better by reproaching him all together his shortcomings or presumed such, it is the moment of the so-called showdown, in these cases the answer can be cold (the worst answer), frustrated or even claiming, in the latter case, the partner to whom the bill has been presented presents the bill to the counterparty in turn, to put on the scales the expectations and faults of the two parties. Even in these cases, however, it is by no means certain that the couple's life goes irremediably to pieces, the situation turns to the worst when the two separate without having either resolved or lightened the conflict situation, that is, when the attitude is rigid.
 
Obviously cohabitations are unstable equilibria in which, especially in a very early phase, small corrective thrusts are sufficient to maintain the balance. It should be added that cohabitation, if on the one hand it can lead to the demythization of the partner, on the other hand it can make one partner discover the qualities of the other partner that are less evident at first sight. One of the qualities of a partner that emerge in long cohabitation is non-destructiveness, that is the ability to manage the destructive tendencies of the other, to cool tones and conflicts, to minimize the negative and to enhance the positive of a relationship.
 
Ultimately, the myth of the partner born in the seductive phase fully collides with reality only when it comes to a long-term coexistence. In this phase, the demythization of the partner takes place, which leads to a re-evaluation of the elements on which the couple is based. The outcome of this new evaluation is not destructive in itself, but can lead to a re-foundation of the couple's life on less projective and more realistic assumptions.
 
The "unconditional compliance" that is the tendency to always say yes to one's partner in order to save the relationship, deserves a separate consideration. The very concept of dynamic equilibrium implies that the thrusts must be balanced and that, if to the pressures exerted by one of the two always corresponds to a yielding of the other, the equilibrium cannot be maintained, the requests for adaptation will progressively extend to all areas of shared life and beyond, and that equality that represents the essential core of the gay couple will eventually be wiped out. In this way not only will life as a couple not be preserved but it will be reduced to a series of obligations or a series of psychological addictions.
Here are some excerpts from the e-mails to illustrate what has been said.
 
SEDUCTION
 
“He calls me on video and immediately tells me: You are beautiful! But he is beautiful! He looks like an actor and he has a hot, sexy voice. When he saw my photos for the first time he was speechless and didn't believe it was me! He told me that he has never seen a handsome guy like me, that I have taste, that I dress well, that I know how to choose the haircut, that I listen to the right music, the same one he listens to, that we have the same tastes. He is a sunny guy but he has no friends. When we talk he tells me beautiful things, I tell him that I’m not as he sees me, that I have a lot of defects and that he is mythologizing me and he replies that he can't wait to meet me in person."
 
SEXUAL LANGUAGE
 
“There are some things I can't stand in his way of doing, first of all the language. We have sex with each other, but when he talks about it he uses certain vulgar terms that really get on my nerves, I wonder where he learned to speak like that. He tells me that I'm a hypocrite and that I want to save my face of good guy , and he can't stand that I want to save my privacy. He tells me that if I do sexual things I have to call them by their name, but I don't see those things as he sees them, assuming he really sees things differently, but when he talks about sexual things with me he uses his own language, so vulgar that I can't stand it at all, then, when he gets angry with me, my God, he speaks with a language worthy of the worst porn and when he does that I would throttle him."
 
FORCING
 
"One thing I can't stand about my boyfriend is the fact that he wants to force me to do things (sexual things) that I don't want to do and that he obviously did or perhaps still does with others. On some things I can also give in but on others I should really impose it on myself with violence and I just don't want to do so. When I say no to him in a very decisive way, at first he insists and even too much, and then he seems to go beyond, as if nothing had happened, but when we happen to quarrel he pulls these things all out and reproaches me them, he tells me: "You must always do as you say!" (which, by the way, is absolutely not true), then he tells me that I don't really love him because I don't always do what he wants, but I say: if we are together, I give in on one thing and you on another! Why he doesn't he realize that sometimes he just asks me absurd things, that I really can't stand?"
 
RECOVERY MANEUVERS
 
"The other day we had a fight over a very stupid issue, or rather the bickering started from there: to wear socks or not when we have sex, he only wears those socks for the foot, I wear normal short socks, but he wanted me to take them off and I didn't understand why, since he wore them, a string of complaints about my behavior started from such a stupid thing, basically he told me that I never said yes to him and that I had to argue about everything and then, once he started in fourth gear, he went on and never stopped, at a certain point he dressed as if he wanted to go away and I said to myself: What is he doing? Is he really leaving for such a thing? But he's out of his mind! So I told him I felt like a complete fool for looking for him and it would never happen again, then he changed his tone, undressed again and got back on the bed and then he said to me: Come here! I asked him if he would still say the stupid things he had just said to me and he replied that he had said too few and that he says such things for my own good, even if I don't understand it. Anyway, at least he has the dignity to go back!"