I’ve been trying to understand my unwillingness to keep up a friendship with the gender-expansive gay guy with whom I had hooked up unless he also takes concrete steps to initiate our meetings/plans. Why am I drawing such a hard line with him that I don’t necessarily draw with other friends? After all, isn’t friendship — aren’t all relationships — about meeting people where they’re at and compromising?
But friendship — as all relationships — isn’t a one-way street: it takes both parties, all people involved, to take steps towards the other(s), to take steps to meet each other where we’re at.
With my closest climbing buddy, I have been the one reaching out to initiate/make plans for months now. With one of my good running friends, I’m often the one initiating our plans together. With some of my older friends who don’t live in Colorado, I’m often the one reaching out for a chat on the phone. On the flip side, there have been many moments in my life when I was “in a funk” and my close friends reached out to me and made suggestions or initiated things over and over for a while. But there are some important differences between the dynamics with these friends and the gender-expansive gay guy with whom I had hooked up.
Firstly, in the case of my good friends, I often initiate but I don’t always have to: they also reach out and make suggestions; whereas with the gender-expansive gay guy it was always me reaching out and making suggestions.
Secondly, my meetings or chats or activities with my close friends leave me feeling extremely nourished and loved and cared for: even when I’m the one initiating or making suggestions, I feel that the other person(s) involved are brining a lot to the table, and it feels good.
Thirdly, there have been and still are times when I go incommunicado or when I’m more in need and don’t reach out as (pro)actively: and when that happens, my friends show up and reach out and check in on me.
Last but not least, there’s the polyamory aspect. I am blessed with many good friends and have several friends in each “relational area” that is important for me: with all my friends there is a deep emotional and intellectual understanding as a base; on top of that, we have different types of connection and/or intimacy: climbing/adventure partners; running buddies; queer friends; friends from grad school and/or other important phases of my life before Colorado. But one “relational area” that is important to me is still uncovered: a more sexual physical intimacy, i.e. “friendship with benefits”.
I am polyamorous and I do platonic polyamory within the close friendships I have. The poly part is very important for me: it is key to keeping those relationships healthy. If things had gone the way I wished with the gender-expansive gay guy with whom I had hooked up, we’d be friends with benefits. But at the moment, he’d be my only friend with benefits, which for me could be a little tricky: i.e. I would feel more comfortable either if I had two or three friends with benefits or, at least, if the effort/responsibility of reaching out & initiating were shared equally, to balance things out. Each person is unique and I value each of my friends individually, of course, and time with each of them is uniquely precious in ways that aren’t interchangeable; but having several people who can meet similar relational needs “lightens or spreads out the burden”. If all my needs for sexual physical intimacy can be met only by one person who leaves it up to me to reach out & initiate all the time, this is an extremely unbalanced situation which would lead to a potentially very unhealthy relationship.
And there’s an additional factor, in my specific case now, that would make this unbalanced in a potentially unhealthy way: the urgency I’m feeling for sexual physical intimacy with this body that I have now. It’s not only that I’m haunted by the idea of soon not being physically attractive anymore, of having only this small window of time in which I can be physically attractive. It’s also a sort of curse that I feel needs to be redeemed or reversed for me: I got so much sexual attention and even so much sex when I wasn’t really myself, when I was forced to live in a body & within a whole identity that wasn’t fully me, that now I feel a desperate urgengy to balance that out and to make up for that “wasted time” or “thwarted, twisted intimacy”.
I feel a desperate urgency to be liked physically & sexually as the aro-ace nonbinary trans gay boy/man that I am. And it is this desperate urgency of mine that puts me in an extremely vulnerable, and potentially dangerous or unhealthy, position if I were to pursue a friendship with benefits with anyone who’s not going to make an equal, balanced effort towards me, reaching out and initiating.
This is the reason for my drawing that hard line with the gender-expansive gay guy with whom I had hooked up. This reason is vital for my well-being and I need to stand by my clear line, even if sometimes it can feel painfully hard.
The Little Prince and the Fox 