I'm writing this partially to organize my own thoughts and also to seek out advice and help on my own terms, to try and be comfortable with myself enough to do so. This is a follow-up to a thread a friend of mine posted for to try to seek advice for me that hits everything pretty well (minus all the self-congratulatory bits). I sort-of completely ignored all of the advice indirectly given to me in that thread in that since I've been home, I've spent at least 50% (if not more) of my total time (including sleeping) with J, which is something I must admit both of us have sought out. Regardless of what he's doing on a given day (nonwithstanding his first day of work), he's found a way to fit seeing me into his schedule, and has blown off or cut short other engagements to see me. However, things are strange in that we have yet to address any of the issues that would probably be healthy for us to address, and I don't know what to do. Some days I "know" that I was wrong from the start, and other days I "know" I should trust my intuition. He's done a lot of confusing things since I've been home that I've found difficult to parse through in any coherent way. Some of them: * There were some weird things going on related to his self-concept for relationships. He had been talking about this girl in a class a year before him (so two before mine), and I queried as to whether they were an item when he mentioned they were going to her senior prom together. He said "no, not at all" ... and then said something to the effect of, "I would be a bad boyfriend anyway." I asked why he would say something like that, and he started a very emotional monologue. He said that he is too "elusive" and went on to delineate the spheres of friends and relationships in a very odd way, wherein it seemed to me as though he thought he could never like someone as a person and have them be a "significant other" at the same time (which seems contradictory to me, "significant" seems really superficial in that context). He couched his past relationships with women in terms of duty and obligation, especially when it came to spending time with them, and said they just made him feel "guilty" and that he wasn't good enough or ready enough to be in a relationship (???). At the time, I felt like we were talking in some sort of weird code. I told him that while he certainly doesn't have to be in a relationship, that he should take the time to find someone who he felt genuinely happy being around and liked, so such a thing would not be a burden but rather a joy. I started holding back tears because it was so sad to me, and then he turned and looked at me for a few moments and started tearing up himself, then looked away and started acting as though (Relatedly, he's been taking great pains to inform me without provocation from me that he's only going on this date because he felt bad for the high school friend because she did not have one, and that he isn't really looking forward to the event at all.) * There's been this surprising ramp-up in his emotional revelations with me, surprising at least relative to his own behavior. It's made me very cognizant of a fact that I tried to explain away but now can't, that he speaks so differently to me than he does to almost anyone else, about personal histories and hopes for his future and such. His hypermasculinity drops only when we're alone, but it's striking, and makes me think it's fake. Sexual jokes shift from "boobies" to whether or not two male characters in an anime have a homosexual master/slave relationship. A minor thing that sticks in my mind was when we watched "American Pie" one night before going to sleep, and while he didn't comment at all about any of the female characters (including the naked foreign exchange student scene), he went on about how he hadn't noticed how "ripped and buff" the main male character was. This reminds me of another moment: I have a muscular base frame, and have started to lift weights to try to feel better about myself. I had a weight out when he came down into my basement one time, and he immediately ID'ed it as being abnormal to the room and went off on a schpeal about how he could "imagine me sitting down and doing curls" and getting muscular, all with a big dopey grin on his face. Uhhh??? * A few days ago we went on a picnic by the waterfront that a mutual female friend found out about and sort-of interjected upon external to the plan. He randomly started rough-housing and wrestling with me and popped open one of my shirts (which made the female friend very suspicious), and later on in the night linked arms with me until our mutual female friend walked up behind us. This led to a weird conversation with this female friend, who asked me in private (knowing I had come out recently, but not about my whole situation) if there was anything going on romantically between J and I. This friend has a unique perspective because she and J had kissed before; her and J have a strange hook-up relationship in this regard that J seems to engage in whenever his masculinity is challenged (imo). When I told her no and what the situation actually was, she had a response I wasn't expecting: she said that she thought we might be having a secret relationship for a bit and that she had thought he was bisexual for six months. She thought we might be in a relationship because, as she put it, when they're hanging out, "[J] talks about you almost constantly with really adoring language" and once ignored her when they were at dinner for 20 minutes to exchange text messages with me... in addition to observations about our closeness, and how J once told her that I was the only person he was close to when she pressed hard once. It was strange to think that even before what happened between us, someone else was reading the situation in a way that was way too close to the mark for my comfort. * (very minor) I for some reason referred to the both of us as a single entity and then, embarrassed, corrected myself. J shakes his head and smiles and corrects me, saying that it was okay. “Everyone else would say the [same about us].” Then an expression that I can’t quote and can instead paraphrase to: “It’s practically true.” I’m glad we’re apparently one in the same in your mind, J. * Last night a mild cold I had enflamed and I got kinda ill and he took care of me all night and into the morning. It was really sweet and he acted as though he was really worried. * This morning he said that he was going to speak to a relative who works for Amtrak so we can take a scenic ride down to Florida to vacation, just the two of us. Some friends of mine think he's just "socially retarded" but in our private conversations he's shared with me surprising insight about people and their situations, which makes this harder to reconcile. That is to say, it seems implausible to me that it's just "J being J" and fucking up an emotional situation. It makes me feel like there's a message of some sort being sent, but I just can't find it, which I know is a really, really dangerous thought process for me to have right now. I guess I just don't know where to go from here. I have a foundation where I know J loves me in some way or another, but I don't really understand our relationship, either on a personal level or on a level where I could place it in any cultural tropes or anything. What exactly are we? My ability to be content in our intense but uncertain relationship is compromised further by the soul-rendingly awful things that happened to J during his childhood (sexual & physical abuse from his father, terrible drug-addict mother). Those things lead me to believe that "anything goes" in relation to what's going on deep down in his heart. He likes to think that nobody needs to care about him and he's still uncomfortable with the idea of people caring about him (this breaks my heart). Past opposite-gender relationships (all of which have ended poorly ) have usually been lacking in emotional depth and have been mostly a social status/mild physical contact thing. They had a certain superficiality that I wonder if he found comfortable given his intimacy issues. In the end, should I bring up what happened? If so, how should I frame it, what should I try and talk about? I don't want to scare him away, whatever the real situation is, because I really do care about him a lot-- so, what're a few baby steps to take to lead into an eventual discussion? (One such baby step I was thinking of was maybe trying to talk to him about my coming out experience with my Dad that happened?) Or should I keep it in and let him bring it up? How can I handle this? What can I tell myself to get through the day? (Sorry for the long message, I just really need to get this out of my head a little.)
The main thing you should tell yourself to get through the day is that YOUR happiness should be of paramount importance to you. Not his, yours. You say how much you care for this guy, but the implication is that you want this to "resolve". I'm assuming you want him to break through his baggage and enter a physical relationship with you. You can read these tea leaves any way you'd like. Yes, there's a decent chance there's some attraction to you. But the real question is whether or not you can somehow tunnel through all the barriers in order to reach him and make it actually happen. And that seems like a Herculean task at this point. You've made yourself available to him, but he's not going to accept that without some major reorganization of what's inside. And honestly, kind words and a real good heart probably aren't going to be sufficient. I don't think you have the tools necessary to help him resort his brain. First off, he's going to have to WANT to break through. And secondly, you two will probably need some bigger guns than what you've got in your arsenal - in short, he's gonna have to get himself into therapy and start working on getting all of this realigned. It's barely possible that he can somehow get his ducks in a row, admit what he won't admit, and then you two can move forward. But right now, I find that very unlikely. Lex
