http://rubywildflower.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/absolutely-effing-petrified/
Ruby Wildflower´s last blog ..Pretend Husband

I can’t say I accepted her advice right away, and I certainly haven’t followed it in practice, but that’s what I believe: as long as both (or all) parties are in agreement, a purely physical relationship, encounter or one-night-stand is perfectly acceptable. It doesn’t make you a bad person, and it can be a positive experience for everyone involved.

Thanks for writing about this its nice to know I’m not alone, oh wait I mean, I’m not the only one alone.
Betty´s last blog ..Climategate?

http://mormonshadesofgay.blogspot.com

But…would he be any happier outside of the church? Happiness isn’t necessarily related to truth, only to comfort.

I read your haunting post last night, and have thought about it quite a lot.

You write: “I do everything by myself. Almost literally everything. I sleep by myself, shop by myself, go to movies by myself, go out to eat by myself, watch TV by myself, crack jokes by myself (some of which make it on Twitter/Facebook, but not all), cook by myself, etc., etc.”

In his book, _Can We Be Good Without God_, Greg Epstein writes:

“People need community. Not just out of some whiny desire to be hugged or avoid loneliness–we need community because we succeed best in life when we can count on reliable help from a wide range of individuals with a range of skills and talents, all of whom know us personally enough to treat us as their own when we are in need. You just don’t usually get that kind of feeling from working in the same office with people, or living in the same apartment building or even on the same rural street.” (Epstein, 24)

From reading John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick’s book, _Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection_, I know that different people have different needs when it comes to social connectedness. Some of us need others, while others are fearlessly independent and can thrive on their own. In the former case, when the environment doesn’t provide us with the social connections that we need, we not only wither, but sometimes much worse.

I think about my friend, Doug Stewart, who committed suicide. I can only partly guess at the reasons, but I think one was that he felt not only heartbroken in his inability to sustain a relationship with another male, but achingly, insolubly lonely. He refused to live on in a world that he found absurd, that thwarted his every hope and felt empty of anyone worth living *for*.

There is a Jewish aphorism that goes something like this: Happiness is having something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to.” Sigmund Freud and Bertrand Russell believed that happiness was to be found in love and work, and in the latter’s case, a passionate curiosity that drove him to try to understand the world.

While I know that I can’t generalize, I personally believe that without someone to love, all the rest wouldn’t count for very much. I sometimes wonder if even having someone amazing to love would be enough, or would happiness take a community, within which to play out a grand narrative–a “meaning” of life? And if so, among gay men, where is such a community to be found?

As one ages, perhaps the need for social connection increases. This is just a guess. I’ve wondered long and hard about what happens when a gay man reaches 40, then 50, then 60, and beyond–perhaps much farther beyond. If one lacks appreciable social status, there’s little reason for others to want to be around one. But even with such status, the hangers-on tend to be there because they want something: money, power, connections. Is there a simple, Tolstoyan, authentic love to be found, or is being passionately in love only a biological illusion comprised of oxytocin and vasopressin–as Hermann Hesse would say, a monkey’s trick?

I read through all of the comments to your post, and was struck by Rachel’s, where she says that there’s always room at the singles table. I wish that it were true. Is there room for an obese 50 year old at the singles table? Or someone with Down syndrome? To me, the singles table is really a way of referring to a social circle of dashing young strangers: socially desirable, fun, perhaps just a bit mischievous, strangers who want to find The One. It’s a metaphor for romance, restricted to the young and beautiful (regardless of the reality).

Maybe you’re incredibly resilient, Sean, and don’t need to be in a community of others to find meaning. What your roommate said to me last year at the ex-Mormon conference about his own situation with his family still bothers and shocks me.

While I’m an existentialist and I believe that we, by necessity, create our own meaning through the choices (both of commission and omission) that we make, I don’t see how it’s possible to live anything resembling what people colloquially refer to as “a life” completely independent of others. There’s an unbridgeable gulf between distance and nonexistence. People may need space, but I don’t think that humanity would be possible at all without a community. (How would we ever learn language?)

In _Loneliness_, there’s a diagram of a brain, whose caption reads: “Figure 2. The human brain reacting to social pain. The dark rectangular blotch near the top of the brain represents the activation of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in response to social rejection. The brain responds similarly to physical pain.” (Cacioppo and Patrick, 9)

Youth and beauty are socially desirable. We’re all born under the assumption of heterosexuality, and only over time–and in many cases, with great difficulty–to we begin to carve out a unique identity outside of the default ocean in which most of our peers swim. Unfortunately, defining oneself as a gay man carries with it a stigma, with very real consequences, and when the sheen of youth and beauty departs, the sharp lines demarcating the divide between the American cultural ideal of the superheroic Husband and Father, and the gay man, come into clear focus, pushing the latter further out into the periphery: out from the fold, into the cold. Sometimes to live. Sometimes to die. Rarely to thrive, and if they do manage it, they’re the exceptions.

This is a tragedy.

You write: “I guess I have trouble envisioning what it would mean. Especially since all of the relationships I’ve had since I came out have been frustrating, encroaching and ultimately unfulfilling failures. :-/”

Having met you, this seems completely unimaginable. You couldn’t be a nicer guy: you look great, you’re smart, you’re funny, and you come off as self-confident–comfortable in your own skin. However, having spent years talking with countless gay men (mostly on gay.com chat), I’ve heard the same frustration repeated over and over again. One of these men said that despite some rare, promising starts, “there is always some fatal flaw.”

Could any group be so terribly unlucky, am I making unwarranted inferences from a nonrandom sample from gay.com, or is something larger and more troubling going on?

I know that a great number of straights don’t like us. I also know that successful, long-term gay relationships are uncommon. But why? Is it a lack of good role models and well-established, nurturing traditions, such as heterosexist society has? Is it that too much freedom leads, paradoxically, to unrestricted hedonism and ends, inevitably, in suffering?

Never mind relationships. What about simply having friends? I’ve noticed that some gay men have a large number of straight female friends, but few, if any, close straight male friends. Others don’t have any close friends who aren’t gay. Still others don’t really have anyone at all.

I wonder what happens to the friends of a gay man as he gets older and older. Women have children to take care of and husbands to spend time with, not to mention peer heterosexual couples and their children. Straight male friends marry and have children and work and work and work to provide for their families. It just seems to me that over time, gay men are highly likely to become increasingly alienated from both family members (if they’re fortunate enough to have them) and straight friends, leaving only other gay people to turn to, but if we take a good look at older gay men and their friendships, how many do they have? Are they as happy as their heterosexual peers? Do they even live as long as their heterosexual peers? It seems to me that based on what scant evidence I’ve been able to find, the long-term prospects for a gay man involve growing loneliness, necessary self-reliance, increasingly restricted options, and rejection, leading to an anti-eudaemonia, a lack of happiness and a failure to flourish.

No matter how I turn all of these thoughts around in my head, I always wind up with the conclusion that living a meaningful life isn’t possible without others to share it with, because the very concept of meaning entails participating in a social narrative that gets interpreted and retold as a heroic and enchanting story. The reality rarely approaches the epic myth, but striving for that myth infuses life with purpose.

Sean, you write: “And if I don’t know how to have friends—if the decidedly less onerous responsibilities of sustaining and maintaining a friendship are completely lost on me—how on earth am I going to be able to sustain and maintain a more intimate relationship?”

I only have two thoughts about this. First, concentrate on developing your talents in order to flourish. Regardless of what’s going on around you, focus on, and be good to, yourself, with the hope that the right relationship will find you at some happy, unexpected point in the future. Second, don’t be so hard on yourself.

Imagine a metaphor. We’re mighty spiritual beings that (for incomprehensible reasons) have incarnated in human bodies, with various strengths and weaknesses, biological attributes, and life situations. Your situation happened to be much more difficult–socially, romantically–than that of others. Under the circumstances, you may be doing incredibly well, whereas someone even slightly less resilient–perhaps someone like Doug–might have given up.

Most of us are dealt unfair hands in life, in one way or another, and sometimes in multifarious and tragic ways. What does it mean to “win” the game of life that we’re playing? I’m not certain that anyone can actually win. There is only change. Sometimes things are better, and other times, worse.

I wish you happiness, joy, and adventure. You’re a beautiful fellow, Sean. Remember that, and use it to actively create a life of meaning and connectedness.

As Goethe said, “Life rewards bold action.”

Steve

It took me about 25 tries, but I finally found the one person I belong with. We are married, live together, drive together, work together, and yet, we each have our own space. Maybe it’s because we can completely be ourselves, which is rare, maybe it’s our age, or maybe, and I think more likely, after looking all of my life, I finally found the one person that I belong with. I would be lost without her, and she without me, so I can’t imagine not being married to her. But that is me. Most people can’t imagine spending as much time together as we do, but we could not imagine it any other way.

Humans love to judge each other, but the thing we forget is that it’s impossible to judge anything because you would truly have to be that person in order to come to any conclusions, which is impossible.

You are an awesome person Sean, and I love you just the way you are, as do many others…in my mind you have to be very strong to want to be on your own, but then, I don’t know because I am not on my own.

We like to be with each other more than anyone else because we sincerely respect the other’s need for time alone, space, quiet, etc. When we are together, people might think we don’t get along because we’re so quiet. We’re often doing things separately even if we share the same room. Our favorite time spent together is reading different books. We just have a deep mutual respect and need for doing things on our own. That’s okay for our relationship. We still communicate well, share the same values and goals, and love each other very much. We just have a quiet relationship.

I can’t imagine being with anyone else in part because I don’t think anyone else would allow me to just *be* the way Jeremy does, without obligations, expectations, resentments, or disappointments.

I also feel like a bad friend. Being with other people just exhausts me. I need a lot of time to recover from parties or meetings. I’m just barely getting over that trip to Utah. :) It’s not that I don’t love my friends, but it’s hard for me to actually *be* with other people. I communicate much better, and tirelessly, through writing. Unsurprisingly, I first met Jeremy online. That’s how we to know each other, through writing. If we’d met in person first, our relationship never would have gotten off the ground. And we’ve continued that relatively independent, individualistic quietude in our marriage. So I know there’s hope for you. Hey, you don’t have to worry about female fertility, so you really have all the time in the world. ;)