Hello and Welcome to the blog!

So… what is this all about? Basically I have a lot of thoughts knocking round my head and I wanted to put them out to the world and see if there is anyone out there who can relate.

So me…. I am 41 year old gay man and two years ago I lost the love of my life. He was only 41 at the time and seemingly out of nowhere (literally we had just spent a week at Eurovision), he had a stroke and lets just say never woke up. In a future post I might delve further into the emotions that came over me that particular week and the things that came up after the death. However, this post I would like to concentrate on me and the today, I know it’s indulgent but bare with I think it might be relatable for us all.

I had been in the relationship for 18 years when he died. The first few months there was a lot of numbness as I tried to continue. Then after three months, I joined the modern LGBTQ+ community and headed out onto Grindr and various dating apps. At first I said I was looking for friends. I liked the idea of possibly finding strength within the community and maybe forming some new long term friends. I’m sure you can guess what happened…. Yes… I got sent dick and bumhole pics (some worth seeing some not so much). After a few months I thought fuck it! Sex it is… like most of us I craved some kind of physical warmth from another person. And probably the same as every gay man out there I can tell you some wild stories, but for the most part what I was led towards was mostly (definitely some exceptions) disappointingly quick interactions that mostly left me unsatisfied. Then I met a guy, he seemed decent, he was younger gorgeous and presented himself as the perfect person… cut to two weeks ago and I’m 98% certain I was dating a lying cheating scumbag suffering from narcissist personality disorder (it’s a real thing I’ve learnt a lot in the last month). So now I find myself back out in the real world… and I can’t help wonder what do I actually want?

The problem with an 18 year old relationship with your best friend is that your identity becomes attached to that person. We grew up together and a large part of my identity was settled into this space reserved exclusively for couples. The majority of friends were/are straight couples, our families are made up by straight people. We lived a largely heteronormative life. We worked, we bought a house, we did the house up, we went on holidays we got a dog… we essentially became straight people who just happened to be gay.

So now there’s just me (yes the dog passed away last year), the final one left at the party. In most eyes I am still reasonably young (unless your on dating apps) and I’m fortunate enough to have maintained a reasonable figure and I look alright in fairness (I’m probably somewhere between a 5 and a 7). Yet now I’m plonked into a world I can’t understand. I have literally one gay friend in my whole life. I have wonderful friends and family (including my former partners), but they have their own lives and responsibilities and we’d spent nearly twenty years all developing our lives away from former versions of ourselves. These people are there for me but they can never fully understand what I’ve been through or what I’m going through.

I just met my mum (it’s mothers day) and we were talking she was asking how I was dealing with the break up (she doesn’t know full details of the narcissism and abuse from this particular dalliance) and she summed up our conversation and said “I’m sure you’ll meet someone.” And I couldn’t help but ask, “Do I need to meet someone? Why do I want to meet someone?” Why is the immediate assumption that I require a player 2 to continue? Why was I so desperate for a player 2 I was almost prepared to continue in a relationship with someone who really didn’t add a lot to my life other than good sex and a handsome face?

That’s it… in many ways I’m a catch I have a career, my own home, I’m secure, I’m caring, funny, loyal, educated, I have friends, I can travel alone, I’m self sufficient, I’m fun to be around, and to my knowledge I have no major red flag (but I’m sure everyone with red flags would say that)… I’m not going to get into bodily attributes (this isn’t Grindr) but lets say I’ve had no complaints. Yet through a desire to attempt my former heteronormative life I was prepared to commit and stay with a person who wasn’t right for me. (I may well break down the narcissist relationship in a future post).

So what do I want? And how do I find it? Hookups … can be lovely can be soul destroying, spending hours on apps to have a person appear at your doorway only to look nothing like their pictures for a fifteen minute role around before a quick grunt of “thanks for that” and then they are out the door. Or to get invited to a ford fiesta to in a Tesco carpark for a “straight” man to prematurley ejaculate at the slightest touch of his penis whilst his wife finishes the weekly shop, these experiences just don’t do it for me. I miss the intimacy, I miss the learning each others bodies, I miss building up the mental catalogue of understanding what turns your lover on and using these to achieve amazing sex.

Dates? What happened to dating? No one dates. Lots claim they want dates, they talk, they indicate interest, they say they’d be up for the date and then the minute you move to suggest a drink, walk, meal, they are suddenly busy. Send them a dick pic and suddenly they are free and can come over RN but ask someone for a drink and you’ll be left with the answer “maybe next week?” followed by the silence of the person never looking back.

Then relationships. Would I like another relationship? Maybe. Yet I need to build that connection, I need to build that trust that security, I need to fall in love with someone. I need to understand what this other person is going to bring to my life that no one else can, what is it about you that should make me love you? Yet literally I got a message from a driven thirty two year old the other week “I’m only looking for a relationship!” Ok…. “You don’t even know my name, so I’m not even sure how this would work?” Can we really just say lets have a relationship and run with it without the foundation that goes to create the partnership.

So what do I do? What do we as a community do? Where do we find likeminded people who just want to hang out and see what the future may hold for us. Told you, I’m forty one and I live in Norfolk. There are few LGBTQ+ venues available and the majority there are, are aimed at the party scene. So at my age I don’t want to be waking up hungover to find that I’m next to a Slovakian student who doesn’t speak English with a blackout. I don’t want to hang around bars listening to music that I don’t fully appreciate trying to make eyes at twenty year olds who only respond if they are desperate for cash or a drink. I don’t want to spend my existence doom scrolling dating apps only to get “tapped” or messaged at eleven pm by the guy two hundred and two metres away whose been ignoring me all day.

So where do we go? What do we do? How as a community do we begin support each other and form meaningful relationships with each other! Pride is wonderful but what’s the point of coming out once a year to celebrate ourselves if we spend the rest of the year isolating each other. I genuinely would love to hear some comments from people. The circumstances that brought me here might be unique yet I get the impression from the conversations I have online. I’m not the only one!