my favorite queen guest posts!
(for the prologue, click here)
So, yeah. Apparently what I wrote hit home. Several times. I’d make a baseball analogy here, but then the little pink mafia would take away my rhinestone-encrusted tiara, and as we all know, a queen without a tiara is just a bitchy straight man. And that would be very bad.
I’m not advocating a ban on relationships, period. Nor am I encouraging people to stay single and content with their platonic friendships, because lets be honest here…no one’s actually really content with the idea of being single forever. There may certainly be acceptance of the possibility, as I’ve found in my own case, but sticking with the case study of Sin, I know that I’d happily prefer to die having been in a meaningful relationship with someone rather than without. But really…does it have to be an all-or-nothing game?
This is not game theory in Advanced Economics 101 people. It’s really much simpler than everyone thinks, and perhaps I can say that smugly from on top of my high horse (how high? It took a step-ladder to get up there!) because I’m not currently going through the ennui, but who says that you have to choose between friends and lovers? And more importantly, why can’t friends be lovers (and vice versa)? I’ve never believed that you can love someone without first being friends with them, and that view is one of the few in my life that hasn’t undergone a radical metamorphosis in the last decade or so.
Conversely though, it’s not necessary that a friend become a significant other. I think the biggest problem that gay men face in their lives is that even though we never want to admit it, we’re all secretly scuttled by the “Newer! Bigger! Better! Shinier!” plague. Who and what we have is perfect while it’s present, but we never seem to stop prowling and being on the lookout for something more, something that we’re convinced is lacking in our current straits, even though it may not be. And part of that, I’m convinced at the risk of generalising indiscriminately and carelessly, is because our own self-esteems are riddled with more holes than a particularly large hunk of Swiss cheese. I can count the number of gay men I know who had healthy, self-affirming childhoods on one hand, and I think that there are certain emotional and intellectual scars that never fade, no matter how much they may scab over. Scar tissue is still ugly, even though it may cover gaping wounds. Most of us remain convinced that there’s something wrong with us, something terribly, drastically, horribly unheimlich, and that no matter how good our lives become, we’ll always be the outcasts, the children who were different, the people who didn’t make sense or seem quite right. And convinced of our own fallibility, we project a combination of ideals and our own insecurities onto those people whom we adore, maybe subconsciously, but mostly with a sense of guilt that comes from deep inside, those dark corners of our minds and souls that we don’t like to acknowledge. Friends, lovers, family…we hope that they’re not perfect, because we’re certainly not. We hold them up to impossible standards that we don’t want to admit are impossible, or at best highly improbable, and in some ways they turn out to be dark mirrors of who we are. All of our failings, our dirty little habits, imperfections, secrets and lies, we pre-emptively start to accuse the other people in our lives of them because it’s easier to denigrate shortcomings when people other than ourselves display them.
This is turning into one of those “I’ve not slept for three days and am roaringly drunk during my college days, so come on, we’ll have an intellectual conversation at two a.m.” passages, isn’t it?
But I think it’s true. I don’t think any of us like to think of it that way, but come on…isn’t there always that tiny part of you screaming “It’s never going to work out!” each time someone new (especially in the romantic context) enters your life? Sure, it’s easier with friends: the demands and obligations, not to mention expectations aren’t quite as intense or as omnipresent as they are with boy/girlfriends, but who hasn’t had a knock-down, drag-out, hair-pulling fight with the people they’re closest to at least once? And the forgiveness is always a bit easier, because the whole thing humanises friendships, turning them into comfortable zones where you know that the other person will never have the ability to walk away from you unless you do something truly unforgivable. Because hey! They’re not infallible and ergo, can’t expect you to be either!
There are, of course, the lucky few who do manage to live happily ever after. But we all hate them, don’t we? Or at least we envy their ability to wade through the maelstrom and come out standing, in one piece and largely undamaged.
But mostly, we (and by “we”, I mean “I”) hate them. In a loving, tender way, of course.
(courtesy of the sexiest, smartest, wittiest blogger on earth)
