It’s hard to get over someone when you’re not even sure why you’re still not over them. I don’t even know if it’s really about him. It’s not. It’s more about not feeling ready for another relationship. Or feeling scared? I talked to my friend today about how I feel emotionally unavailable. And let me tell you, I have never once thought I was emotionally unavailable in my life. Maybe I became emotionally unavailable in adulthood without realizing it.
I wasn’t in my youth. I had a girlfriend in high school, and I opened up all of my emotions to her, save for the one I kept hidden from myself. Eventually that came out, as I did, and what could have been a relationship built on utter honesty, became one of distant memory because how close can you remain with your high school girlfriend when you’ve begun your life as a young gay man? Our lives began to differ across too many variables, and that was not conducive to a lasting, frequent friendship.
Then came the couple years after, as I was growing a part from my past “straight” relationships. I met my first boyfriend—we’ll call him Isaac—at a Christmas party at the Queer Resource Center on my college campus in the winter of my junior year. He was friends with my newly acquired mentor and friend, Huang, who introduced me to him while Isaac was setting up the Nintendo Switch he’d brought for everyone to play in the rec room of the center. He didn’t really register me as he was plugging in cords and powering up controllers, but I registered him. He was tall, lanky, white, and had short, cropped brown hair with brown eyes. He was dressed in a red flannel and skinny jeans. I was instantly attracted.
We ended up finding ourselves sitting together at a choral performance later that night. They were singing Christmas carols, and Isaac and I had followed our respective group of friends to go and watch since Isaac and Huang were in the choir together. They weren’t singing that night, I can’t remember what group was—could’ve been one of the many acapella groups on campus—but I do remember there wasn’t enough room for all of us to fit on one of the benches lining the auditorium, so I told Isaac he could sit on my lap, to which he gave me an odd expression. I realized I’d put my cards too out there, my way of flirting, and somehow in my naivety, I was not deterred but enlivened that he now knew I was interested.
Cut to a few hours later, we had all been drinking at various dorm rooms of the group throughout the night, and the afterhours crew, myself, Huang, Isaac, and a couple other friends, found ourselves in Isaac’s dorm room. We were sprawled over the small futon-couch and his twin-XL dorm bed taking turns playing Super Smash Bros. and taking a drink whenever we got killed. We did this for probably another hour or so before it dawned on us that it was getting very late and the few who felt ready for bed decided to leave. Huang was the last to go, and though I considered going with him back up to North Campus where my dorm was, I didn’t dare. It felt like I had one shot to have something, anything happen with Isaac that night and I was going to take it. Huang left giving me a conspiratorial smile and then it was just Isaac and I, alone, in his room.
I had never done anything with a boy. Not a kiss, not foreplay, maybe not even a proper hug. I’d been a dutifully closeted boy who never even noticed when other similarly closeted boys might’ve been trying to get to know me when I was in middle and high school. So, I was nervous. Because I didn’t know how to flirt with boys. I barely knew how to flirt with girls, and they were far less intimidating to me since I wasn’t really interested in them.
“What should we do now?” I asked him. The silence of us just staring at the title screen of Super Smash Bros. had gotten to me.
“I can think of a few things,” he said, smirking at me. I was surprised to see his prior expression of ambiguity was gone and now he was looking at me with intent. Perhaps lust?
I smiled at him. I had seen enough TV shows to know what that meant, and I was game. I had been waiting for this moment for my entire life.
We started to kiss. My first kiss with a boy. Then we started to undress. My first time undressing with a boy. And then we started to do other things. I was ravenous to know what it was like to be with a boy, in all senses of the phrase, and so I jumped quickly to every thing I could think of doing or had imagined doing in the few months I was actively out. All of it, in one night. Some might say that was foolish, but I was satisfied with throwing myself into gay sex, in all senses of the word.
Afterward, I stayed over. My first time cuddling with a boy. And I made my way back to my dorm the following morning. It would take a couple weeks of me awkwardly asking for us to meet and spend time together—as Isaac was one of those aloof, independent, loner types—but by the time we left for winter break, Isaac and I were something. When we returned from winter break, we became more than something, and within a couple months I was calling him my boyfriend and holding his hand around campus which also helped me to avoid having multiple coming out conversations with classmates.
I always come back to this scene whenever I think about myself in terms of love. When we first come out as burgeoning gay men, we are so incredibly open. Open to all the exciting, new experiences. Being able to wear colorful shirts and tight pants, because now you’re no longer afraid to be called a “fag.” Finding LGBT books and movies and historical accounts you had never been told because suddenly you were now on the lookout for them, and there was so much more out there than you ever imagined. Fantasizing about what it’ll be like to have your first boyfriend, to fall in love, to maybe someday get gay married (even though at the time, it was still illegal in California). You’re scared but not in the sense that you fear what might happen to you, but because you’re scared so much will happen to you and it’ll all be so new and you’ll have to go through so much change in becoming someone different. Good different, not bad different.
I’ll never get that back. That time, before I even considered myself a “gay man.” Before I had considered what it was to fall in love, truly fall in love, because I had never wanted someone of a different sex as much as I would want Isaac. He became my first love. To this day, I don’t know if I’ve ever been as open and courageous about falling in love than I was with him. I certainly haven’t felt as free with it, and there’s a reason for it.
Isaac and I’s relationship wasn’t what you’d call picture-perfect. We fit together like glue, that was true. I seemed to understand him on a level that I hadn’t understood anyone, though I probably got close to knowing my high school girlfriend that way. Being able to read them, not just what they’re saying, but what they’re thinking, feeling, experiencing just based on their body language or the look in their eyes or the tone of their speech. I felt that way with Isaac. I could read him from across the room and because he was so quiet and so reserved with all of his friends (not many of them to begin with), I felt like I had somehow received a secret key to know his secret world, and that made me and us feel special. And, though I never stopped to consider it fully, I’m sure Isaac knew me just as well. He was the one who seemed to know that I needed him to be my boyfriend, that I wanted to be as close to him as I could be since the moment we met. In spite of not even believing in traditional relationships or the need for love, he let me. I would never understand why until much later because we never talked about any of these feelings. They all lived within our heads.
It was only when we were drunk that we would have any sort of conversation about what we were, what we wanted, how we felt about each other. And even then it was stilted, like two children just beginning to learn what romance even was. We didn’t have the luxury of our straight peers having worked out the kinks of these feelings and actions early in our lives. Isaac had never had a relationship, and I had only had one with someone I now knew I did not yearn for the same way I yearned for a boy. And so, we muddled our way through it, becoming co-dependent with each other but never really being able to express why that was or what might become of it later.
But let me tell you, I was on top of the world. I was so happy. Because I had found someone just as odd, just as smart, just as nerdy as me, and it was a boy, a boy I found incredibly attractive and incredibly out of my league, and that boy was interested in me. And because it was college, I could see him any time I wanted. Isaac practically lived with me in my dorm during that spring semester because my roommate had gone to study abroad so I had a two-room double to myself. We turned the front room into a living room and strapped together the two twin-XL beds in the other room with belts so that we had a plus-size king bed all to ourselves. We would wrestle and try to fling each other off that expansive bed. And when we had sex, we had to push the two halves towards each other or else chance falling through the inevitable crack that would form from our rocking. It was a blast. We ate every meal together, hung out with our friends in the quad and at parties and in common rooms. We studied together and talked about our futures and even made my earliest trips to West Hollywood where we would go to 18+ events until Isaac finally turned 21 a year after we started dating and we could go to the actual clubs and bars. Huang would drive us, being our forever designated driver.
I talk about all this knowing there’s a certain rose-color filter over all of it. Could it really have been that good? While I don’t remember ever doubting that Isaac wanted me and needed me, at times, I did often wonder if he loved me. Because Isaac had told me he didn’t believe in “love,” at least not in the sense of romance novels and movies. He wasn’t interested in getting married or spending his life with just one person. Monogamy had become a negative term for him, a bourgeois creation meant to saddle the masses. He convinced me to take Queer Theory so that I, too, could learn the art of rebellion, and I was fascinated by the ideas around gender, sexuality, polyamory, and identity. It helped me better understand him, but it also threw me further and further into the closet with just how much I had come to love him. We never spoke of it. And I think, in the end, that had an effect on me.
I say that because after we broke up—and it was a hard breakup—and I moved to LA after college, I never felt as free with my love as I had been. In fact, every relationship since, I’ve had to chip and chip away at whatever ice-block wall I put up whenever I meet someone new who might enter my life in a way that could become real. My most recent ex was able to crack through that, partially because I let him, partially because he quickly became my most secure relationship. I felt safe with him, like I could be my true self and not worry about how I came across. But in the end, even that relationship ended up making me feel judged and othered, as though there were parts of myself worth hiding from someone I hoped to build a life with. I don’t know if I felt that way with Isaac. Not because of him, but because of who I was at the time I was dating him. I hadn’t formed any bad habits. I had only broken one person’s heart, and deep down, I knew it wasn’t entirely my fault. And I didn’t see myself as damaged. In fact, I saw myself as wildly a catch. Maybe not the most attractive (that would come later), but I at least was confident in my intelligence, my ability to love, my kindness, and my loyalty.
That’s interesting to say: my ability to love. I think that’s what is lacking right now. A confidence that I feel an ability to love. Because if I’m being honest, I thought I did, but recent dating has told me, I currently don’t. Loving someone requires opening up to them. Being vulnerable with them. Honestly, I don’t really know what it means. But I do know that my ability to love is sort of off right now, because I don’t feel so open. I feel closed. I feel guarded. I feel like I’m still figuring out what it is that I want out of love.
Some, like Taylor Swift, would say that you don’t need to have it all figured out in order to start dating again. That you don’t need to have gotten over your ex or had closure. That you can work those things out while still being in a new relationship. But I don’t know if that’s true. In fact, in my experience, while you certainly can do it, it might not work out in your favor. And it could make things more confusing.
So, I’m not really sure what to do with that right now. I guess all I can do is work on it.