Dating is Miserable but it’ll get you laid

AvidRobert’s: Gay Dating Is Miserable Too

Day 1: Arthur Kade, the "Bad Boy" who doesn't understand women.
Day 2: Kyle, the "Nice Guy" who has accepted it.
Day 3: Keane, the "Good Guy" who doesn't date
Day 4: Peter DeWolf, the "Writer Guy" who has women all figured out
Today: AvidRobert, the "Gay Nice Guy"

I've known AvidRobert forever. In fact, I don't even know him as Robert. I know him as Bob, my bffoml (best friend forever of my life). We've been through everything together: him coming out, moving, family, make ups, and break ups. He's probably one of the few people on the planet who gets my brand of crazy.

Why I Chose Robert:
I value Bob's opinion in the highest regard. He's incredibly intelligent, funny, big hearted, and loving.  Bob, like me, tends to get the shaft (pun slightly intended) when it comes to love. We were talking on True Blood night about how he's been meaning to write a gay version of Dating is Miserable and I immediately saw the genius in him writing it here this week  as most of his plight comes from being the "Nice Guy".

I’m a long time friend of Amanda’s and when she asked me guest write a blog about the “nice guy” I jumped at the chance simply because I think it would be fun to let everyone know what it is like from a gay guy’s perspective.

First off I’m going to let you in on a little secret: gay dating is miserable too. Let me qualify that by saying it is miserable if you are a gay man who is interested in a monogamous relationship with someone who shares similar interests and long-term goals.

Lets first look at the hurdles gay nice daters have to face

1. Delayed adolescence: We’ve all heard of SF Men’s Peter Pan syndrome, right? Well imagine little Peter on steroids in the gay world. Mix disposable income, a lifetime of repression, and a culture sopping with drugs and alcohol and you have a recipe for men well into their 50’s and 60’s sporting Abercrombie tank tops and fake tans with relationships being the last thing on their minds.
2. Sex: Straight folks have equipment that is designed to fit together. We gay boys don’t have that luxury. Tops and bottoms, oral only vs. anal, to a variety of other very very specialized fetishes cuts your dating pool even more. I also have HIV at the forefront on my mind with any new sex partner and have met guys who seem really great but whom are HIV positive which raises a whole new set of moral dilemmas that I am not going to elaborate on here.
3. 10%: There are simply less gay people than straight people. Even in a town like San Francisco where you can’t toss a handbag without hitting a homo we still are a significant minority compared to the straight populace.
4. Cliques/Types: Leather daddies, twinks, bears (and their friends the wolves and otters), mean girls, hipster fags, drag queens and their followers, muscle divas, party boys, and radical fairies! These are just a small cross-section of different subcultures within the gay “rainbow” and you need a glittery lexicon to even begin to understand the nuances of each type. These groups oftentimes self-segregate and break into even smaller cliques that tend to date one another. Considering we are already only 10% of the population imagine how hard it is to find someone who is your “type” (I think most of this is bullshit but its really how a large population of the gay community self-identifies as a type based on my experience).
5. Monogamy or just sex?: I could get laid every single day multiple times a day if I wanted to. Sadly, isn’t because I’m an Adonis, it’s because there are literally dozens of venues designed to facilitate sex for gay men. I can think of 5 gay sex clubs within a 50-mile radius. The internet makes this even easier. Let me showcase a small selection of popular gay websites (NSFW) manhunt.com, adam4adam.com, gay.com, craigslists MFM (with hundreds and hundreds of random sex requests every day), and bigmuscle.com. As I said, that is just a small sample of the platter of gay sex website offerings. If this isn’t enough and you still wanted to have sex you could always be all web 1.0 and head to your local gay bar and wait til last call to pick up whatevers left at the end of the night or simply head to the Powerhouse in the SOMA, it has a backroom just for sex! I think I’ve made my point that sex is insanely easy to obtain. So it raises the question, why would anyone want to be monogamous? It seems that most relationships I’ve encountered that have started in San Francisco (this is a big caveat as most gay couples who met before they moved here seem to be monogamous ) are open which means that the couples “play” together or separately. Call me old fashioned but I’m a one man kind of man and finding someone who wants something similar in the veritable smorgasbord of gay sex in San Francisco is quite difficult.

So now that I’ve ranted about the unique challenges that gay men face when trying to find long-term partners in San Francisco lets finally lead into the discussion of the “Gay nice guy”. I used to describe myself as a nice guy: someone who is caring, thoughtful, willing to compromise, attentive, and engaged. I still consider myself those things but what I did not realize that I was also a total doormat. With seemingly so few options for finding lasting love if I met someone who provided even a glimmer of long term potential I would pretty much drop my entire life in order for them to find me desirable.

Does he want to go out? Sure thing! Let me just cancel my plans with my friends.

Does he have a worldview that opposes mine? No big deal! I’m sure we can compromise (which turned into me compromising).

Doesn’t have a job? No problem! I can pay for dinner, the bills, whatever.

Don’t trust me? Great! Let me tell you where I am every moment of the day, restrict my Internet presence completely, and answer your irrational same questions every day.

That’s being nice right? Making yourself totally available and moldable into the person that your man wants you to be right? Pushing down your own feelings until they explode and you apologize for said explosion for months is nice right? I realized after a long relationship that being nice is not a synonym being a total pushover and letting someone else decide your happiness. In my act of being the “nice guy” I seemingly adopted some of the characteristics that both genders dole out and deal with: jealousy, low-self worth, inability to assert my own desires, feeling nagged, feeling codependent, and feeling smothered. I broke up with this person and had a moment of clarity about how I would conduct my future search for a mate. Out of this moment came….

Robert’s Rules for Gay Dating:

1. Let someone win you over too: Someone has to do some work to impress me just as I work to impress them. Dating is a two way street, not a blind alley.
2. Communication, seriously: Communication is by far the most critical thing in a relationship. Our minds create so much static and unease when we like someone that if you are not able to feel comfortable communicating with them it is likely there is no long term potential there.
3. Slow down: Take things at a natural pace and let things come as they may. The more you try to force things the worse they fit. If you take things slow you lessen the chances of committing to a bad relationship.
4. Flakes are for cereal boxes: If a dude breaks a date more than twice he is pretty much written off unless he makes a huge effort to explain why and sets up the next date.
5. Don’t expect someone to change: Do you ever meet someone and think wow they would be great if I could tweak this or they did this differently? If you go into a relationship expecting someone to change you are setting yourself up for unhappiness.
6. Treat it like an internship: In college I worked at the career center and we used to say having an internship you don’t like is just as useful as a great one, because it helps you figure out what you don’t want. If I treat dating the same way it certainly takes a lot of frustration away and I you treat like it a big learning process that will hopefully lead to you finding something that clicks.

Phew, I just wrote a novel! So in summary here are my findings about gay dating and being a “nice guy”.

• Rejoice straight people! Gays are just as miserable dating as you are (but we have a lot more sex)
• Being nice does not mean being a pushover
• Treat dating like an internship, the bad ones are just as useful as the good ones

-AvidRobert