Lifelong heterosexual romantically in love with a guy (apparently.) Ruining my life

Hi,

I'm 29 years old, and have been straight all my life. And I don't mean I've been acting straight; I've just been straight, period. One of the reasons I was so disoriented when I first started looking into this was because just about every coming out story had to do with knowing basically since one is in their early teens or even earlier that one is probably gay. I don't identify with that at all. I had powerful crushes on girls and only girls as early as Kindergarten, and my first memory of an erection/masturbating is to Larisa Oleynik on the Secret World of Alex Mack. In middle and high school I masturbated to a given girl from school just about every night, and ever since the smart phone/YouPorn-type sites became ubiquitous, I've masturbated usually multiple times per day to amateur vids. I've only had a handful of actual sexual partners, but that's generally been because of my lack of "game".

Several months ago, I made a new guy friend. I got the idea fairly quickly that he was gay -- he would often clam up when I started talking about girls, for example -- and a sort of don't ask/don't tell dynamic about the subject creeped in pretty quick.

One night, with some other friends, I was smoking weed (something I rarely do) with some other friends, and, as usually happens, once the high kicked in I retreated from the group out back to lie down and just be contemplative. As I was cycling through whatever thoughts I was thinking, I came upon him for one reason or another, and I just had this incredibly powerful feeling of love for him. Not like normal guy friend "he's my bro" love, but actual romantic love, like I wanted to lie in his arms naked and fall asleep.

Ever since then, my entire life has been turned upside down. Whenever I would go to masturbate to porn, there would be that voice in my head telling me that since I "love" (Jacob), I'm actually gay now. I would try to masturbate to gay porn, but generally it just either bores me (oral) or outright disgusts me (anal). Over and over and over the cycle would go....watch straight porn, get that nagging voice in my head telling me I'm gay, watch gay porn, be unable to get aroused by it, go back to straight porn, finish awkwardly. Around the 100th time this happened, and my dick shriveled helplessly as I watched gay porn, I had the realization "This must be what gay people who desperately try to be straight feel like." But even though I can't get off on thinking about men or even this man specifically, I still have romantic feelings for this guy, like residue from that night when I was high. I'm not really interested in having sex with him, but I can imagine myself watching movies with him, holding hands with him, or even kissing him. At least, I think I can. But being "in love" (apparently) with this guy has completely ruined my sex life. I can't get aroused by straight porn anymore either because of that nagging feeling in my head as soon as I turn it on. As far as erections go, I can only manage a very soft one, and that's only if I'm stimulating myself physically while I watch straight porn, and I have that nagging romantic feeling for (Joseph) the entire time I am masturbating. Trying to watch gay porn and mentally superimposing myself and (Joseph) as the participants (generally what I was always doing when I was watching straight porn -- mentally superimposing a girl from real life as the girl in the vid) does absolutely nothing. Gay porn just doesn't arouse me, at all.

There are two complicating factors here, as well.

1. I've been taking Paxil for about 8 years now. Paxil is notorious for sexual side effects, but in the past, I always experienced that as being unable to ejaculate. I could still get insanely horny. However, many, many people also experience their sex drive disappearing completely. Maybe that is also kicking in?

2. OCD. I know "H-OCD" is a last-ditch denial mechanism for many people on here, but I do, in fact, have an actual history of OCD in both overt -- getting all the way to the end of the residential street, turning around, driving all the way back to make sure the garage is really closed, up to 3 or 4 times, before finally driving away -- and "pure obsessional" manifestations -- having short intense desires that I wanted to strangle friends' pets or even infants to death. In adolescence, when I was still heavily religious, I once experienced a dread that I was destined to be the Antichrist. This sounds really incredibly silly in retrospect, but it was a very serious thing, and I ruminated about it for hours at night for a period of several months, at least.

In short, this apparent disjuncture between my heterosexuality and my romantic feelings for this one guy is effectively ruining my life. I am thinking about it all the time. Life was so much simpler when I would just lie down in bed, fantasize about a given girl, have a full erection within a minute or so, and then just masturbate to her for 20 minutes or so. And those what I will crudely call mega-erections (I trust guys, gay or straight, will know what I am talking about), where you go from completely soft to completely hard and insanely horny in about 5 seconds when something unexpectedly sexual happens, like a girl with an ample rack bending down in front of you and seeing way down her shirt (or, that old high school classic, catch a glimpse of her thong) are long gone. The instant I see a hot girl, that voice kicks in my head, "you're in love with (Joseph) though." I've basically found myself becoming jealous of the stories I read where the person is unequivocally gay basically for as long as they can remember. At least that way it's cut and dried.