I told my girlfriend
Submitted by F.O.D. on April 13 2002 23:12:56
In reply to For Better of For Worse submitted by Ben on April 13 2002 08:34:52
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Hi Ben, I'm sorry to hear you had to come to such a severe conclusion with your girlfriend. I commend you for taking the courage to do that. It can be hard in a church environment where everyone's cheering you one and encouraging you to marry, to admit that you feel you can't continue to keep up the relationship. On a slightly brighter note, people (even ordinary straight people) break up with their girlfriends all the time for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes they even end up getting back together again. So don't feel like you're a freak or you've done something that puts an end to the rest of your life. I'm in the middle of similar tensions. I've been seeing a girl for a couple of months now. I realised I was coming up to a wall in the development of our relationship, because my feelings to other boys wasn't going away, but I hadn't told her about it. So the other day, I finally found the opportunity to tell her how there's this part of me that likes boys. She took it pretty hard, cause she had been building up this ideal impression of me as this wonderful perfect guy who could do no wrong. When I told her I also like "boys", I meant guys in general, that is I was telling her I'm "part gay", without going into specific details about the lower end of the age range of the guys I like. She's spoken to my YF and she knows he means a hell of a lot to me, but I didn't feel we needed quite so much honesty as for me to say he's the one I'm actually in love with. (Although he's now 16...an advantage of being a teen-boylover is that it starts moving into the realm of "gay-respectibility", so you can talk about it simply in terms of "gay" without having to worry about pedo-hysteria). What I did tell her about was the time when I was 15, and an age-mate seemed to want to do something sexually with me, but I turned him down cause I thought it'd be wrong. I told her turning him down was one of the things in life I regret doing (even though I still think objectively it was the right thing to do). That was the context I gave her for saying I like boys as well as girls (and maybe boys a little more). So I don't know quite where that leaves us. My whole idea in starting to date her was that she's a decent girl, and with time we could learn to love each other. I compare with my relationship with my YF, where we became best friends over the course of years, and I guessed I could learn to love a girl likewise, given enough time (years, not months or weeks). My model is the concept of arranged marriage, or Luther's marriage to the former nun, where the marriage is made on the basis of agreeing to learn to love one another, rather than on the basis of some pre-existing passion. But my girlfriend appears to adhere to the modern school that you must be filled with ardent passion before you have a relationship. So that bodes poorly for our future. In hindsight, I guess it must have been wiser to tell her I also like boys before we started dating, while still in the "friendship" stage. Then we could have grown in the affection of friends, with [almost] full knowledge of what was going on in my head, and she'd know what she was getting into before we started dating. So as I told my YF, when telling him about her, we'll wait and see. But I fear I'll no longer have to wait much longer... ;/ Ben, I think you're being too hard on yourself when you say you've "reaped what you sowed". You've had this conviction that it's wrong to maintain same-sex attractions and that it's right to marry a girl, so you acted on your conviction and tried your best to develop a healthy relationship with a girl. Ben, that's a commendable action, not one to throw blame over yourself about. Like I said before, guys break up with their girlfriends all the time for all sorts of reasons, and you don't have to blame yourself in this way for being a normal guy. Heck, you've got far more strain to endure in building a good relationship than most guys do, you should be encouraged that at least you tried, and got as far as you did. Remember, none of us "chose" to have the feelings we do for boys. Blame the broken world if you will, blame the Original Sin and the Fall, but don't blame yourself. You're already handling it as best you're can, you're enriching boys' lives without introducing potential pain and uncertainty to them by expressing your affection in a way that could upset them. You've tried to make a real relationship with a real woman, and you've had the honesty great enough to tell her when you believe you can't maintain the relationship towards marriage. Your "choices" appear to me to have led you to make honourable actions, not ones you should be ashamed about. Tell us how your girlfriend handled the news when you broke up with her. And take a hug from me and my YF (oops, he'll kill me if I tell him I sent you a hug in his name! ;) ) God's with you, Fod |
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