A Future Alone?

Man i've had a lot of those same type of thoughts. I'm still quite young and i've lost several family members and friends already. I don't think anyone wants to end up totally alone but the fact is many people who marry and have kids still end up alone with no one visiting them in some nursing home or something. I don't think there are any guarantees in life unfortunately. As far as kids go i know very well there are so many kids in this country stuck in the system with no real chance at any kind of a family. I think any adoption is a good thing. Remember you can't choose your relatives but you can choose who your family is and they're the people who love you. I don't know if you are a person of any faith or not but that helps too for me.

 

Hi there Lewnatic!

Let's just face it! The probability of your having kids with a woman is nil. The possibilty of having your own biological children with another man is nil to some crazy exponential number!

Therefore, since you like kids, just go into some field that benefits kids where you'll be always surrounded by the little people that you love. Fields like teaching, day-care, social work, child psychology, or coaching athletics, come to mind most immediately.

You can always be surrounded by family, if you select good friends from the LGBT community. That's especially, if you can find the best matches to suit your personality and politics. There's nothing better than having LGBT friends who don't rub you the wrong way, for whom you have mutual respect.

I once had friends like that. However, I've managed to outlive them all..

 

I wouldn't recommend you go and get a wife and have kids. You will be miserable and unhappy. You can still have children with a guy you love and it will be just as much of a family as any heterosexual relationship. There are definitely options like adoption or surrogacy. I think life would be so much more fulfilling for you if you shared all this with a man and not a woman like you think you want.

Not all gay men are promiscuous and unfaithful. There are tons of us out there who want the same thing as you. Just a simple committed relationship and to grow old together with a loving partner. We aren't all that different from the heterosexual people/couples out there. Both sides share many of the same basic struggles in life. Straight people can lead a lonely life as well. You don't have to though. Life is whatever you make it to be.

 

I fell similarly. I want children and even though I am almost never attracted to men, I want them with a husband. I think maybe it's because a heterosexual marriage is still such an intrinsic part of that comfortable, growing old together, family picture. Maybe for future generations it will be different. Maybe a hundred years from now people just like us will picture having children and growing old in a same-sex marriage and it will feel normal and comfortable. Maybe too they won't have the difficulty of having to fight for gay marriage and having to explain to everyone and having to find a way to have children (that probably costs a lot).

 

Single examples or even lots of them still don't determine how the majority functions. When dealing with stereotypes concerning gay people, we often try to either confirm them or prove them wrong... and it's pointless. Gay people are just that - people. And people are the same everywhere. How many divorced couples do you know? How many times have you heard about cheating in a seemingly happy heterosexual relationship? What about heterosexual open relationships? They do exist, don't they?

Besides, it's easy to forget that being openly gay wasn't possible not so long ago. If our grandmothers were gay, we probably would never know. Or there wouldn't be 'us' and they would live in a gay relationship without anyone knowing. Young people nowadays have different options and I bet fifty years from now there will be lots of gay elderly people. Just you wait!

So please, don't judge your future husband because of some old, unfaithful guy hitting on you! If you can want true love and family, then what makes you think there aren't thousands of gay guys wanting the same thing?

 

Two issues to discuss. First, I want you think about something for a second about that scene you set up in your post.

The people surrounding your grandmother in her last hours - why were they there? Was it because it was in the parent-child contract? "I agree to raise you for the next 18 years, as long as you don't let me die alone"? Many children aren't there when their parents die, and in most cases, it's because they didn't have a good relationship with their parents. They didn't feel a close-enough connection with their parents to feel the need/obligation to be there in their parents' last days.

I know a couple people (both gay and straight) who have children via adoption. And it's early in the game yet, but they appear to have fantastic bonds with their kids. I'm finding it exceptionally doubtful that these kids will grow up to be the sort of people to draw away from their (adoptive) parents later in life because "it's not like they're REALLY my parents". Family is as family does. Those are the people that brought them up for a couple decades, who took care of them and nurtured them and helped shape them into the adults they eventually became. That's where the bond is. That's the connection that would make them fly home to be with their parents. Not some sort of magical DNA encoding.

Secondly, it sounds like you have a rather skewed look towards relationships. If I could distill things way down, it sounds like "straight relationships = together forever" whereas "male gay relationships = lying cheaters". And so you're saying "I have to get a wife, because you need two people to raise a child, and a guy is just going to leave to cheat on me, anyway."

A bunch to say here. Yes, people cheat. But that's not confined to gays. And it's not like there aren't gays who aren't interested in committed relationships. And things change as people age. Younger people, of both genders and all sexualities, are more likely to want to play the field, but they tend to settle down as they get older. Closing the door on your sexuality because "guys cheat, and I need a wife to take care of me" is a recipe for disaster - one might say it's a recipe for you to go cheat on your wife (since you're 90% gay and all), in which case, good look holding on to that wife.

Put it his way. You want children. That's great. But make sure you want them for the right reason. Please don't have children because you're looking for a caretaker in your final years. If that's really the only concern, throw the money you would've spent on a child into a bank account to hire a caretaker in sixty years. But if there's more to it than that, yes, you totally can have a child. Even as a single gay man. I know a gay guy who is raising a child all by himself. He still dates, but his life is centered around his daughter.

And I'll throw this out there as a bonus. Don't live your life for your final moments. You've got millions of moments to fill with life. If those are full, your final moments will be kept warm by those memories.

Lex