The Mandates (9 page)
19
AX THE WORD EX
Don't make the word
ex
the most important one in your vocabulary. Don't talk about more than two ex-lovers on any date, as in “Oh, my ex ate that way” or “My ex said the same damn thing about Barbra's new album.”
Let's be honest here. In describing past relationships to someone new, you are either going to make yourself sound like the hapless victim (again!) of a dastardly dysfunctional man (how rare!) or, my usual choice, you'll end up sounding like the gay version of Heathcliff from
Wuthering
Heightsâ
so noble, so loving, so pure.
How could all twenty-seven of those relationships have soured so, given your perfection? A family curse? A pox? Cruel fate? The plague? What Shakespeare called “ill conceit”? Just skip it, okay?
Playing the victim will get you the “pity look” and a nod of understanding and compassion that, believe me, will last as long as a snow cone in San Juan. You will never live up to the Heathcliff role, so step off the stage before your makeup runs in act 3.
As Shakespeare once said of romance gone wrong, “The course of true love never did run smooth.” But that doesn't mean this should be the obsessive theme during a first date. Thirty-year-old Brent from Delaware, a self-described “romantic fool burned to a toasty crisp by my past three relationships,” went to the movies and then dinner with good-natured Richard, also thirty. After mentioning for the tenth time that his “exes” treated him terribly, Brent came across like one of those lonesome losers on
Jerry Springer.
At dinner, Richard kept ordering margaritas in a futile attempt to literally drown all this pain, but Brent found an increasing number of ways to insinuate his dastardly exes into the conversation.
“Oh, yeah, my ex cheated on me, just like in that movie, but worse,” he said. Richard listened silently (as if he could get a word in edgewise!) to sad ex stories and to tales of dates subsequent to the last ex that mysteriously hadn't flourished.
Three hours of ex stories later, they parted, and Brent drove home thinking Richard was physically attractive, a great listener, and someone he wanted to see again.
Richard drove home thinking Brent was physically attractive, way too in love with his own drama, and obviously damaged beyond repair.
Unless your last boyfriend's name really was Damien, don't waste time demonizing him to a stranger. You could be spilling your pain to a stranger, I should add, who might know your ex and have his own opinions given the small concentric circles of “gaydom.”
You need to strike a balance of at least a little mystery and general acceptance of the past. Just indicate that it was bad timing, a great learning experience, irreconcilable differences, or that you have served your time for knocking him off and your parole officer says you don't have to discuss it anymore if you don't feel like it.
20
INTERGALACTIC INSTRUCTIONS ON CONQUERING CYBERSPACE
(Avoid the Darth Vaders Who Lurk in Chat Rooms and Find Your Own Luke Skywalker)
The term
lost in space
takes on a new meaning as thousands of men take to the Internet. Special gay Internet services like
Gay.com
and
PlanetOut.com
want to serve all of your gay needs, from travel to love to news. There are thousands of gay porn sites, and even
Business Week
acknowledged that the only two industries making any money on the Web are porn and ISPs. If you are in the mood to meet a man, AOL chat rooms offer rooms targeted to city and proclivity for every possible version of same-sex love. Chatting is a world of swapping GIFs and JPEGs, cyberpersonals, and endless possibilities. Conversation can range from numbingly banal to wrenchingly deep to wickedly naughty with each touch of the keyboard.
If straight people “surf” the Net, then gay men “cruise” the Net. The options for meeting, chatting, and hooking up with other gay people are tremendous, with entirely new avenues of possibility for those who live in less populated areas, plus closet cases, fetishists, and married men. But the traffic is certainly not limited to those once-isolated groups. Deep in the heart of the most exciting city in the world, New York, the city that never sleeps, you'll discover some of the hottest men in the world holed up in their apartments trolling AOL's NYC m4m chat room.
Actress Sharon Stone, secretly a gay man trapped in a woman's body, once said, “Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake whole relationships.”
So how do you weed out the fakers from the real ones? How do you determine who is worth the time it'll take you to think up a clever screen name like Hotstud4love and who gets logged out of your life?
Here are some surefire do-and-don't guidelines for picking the winners and weeding out the losers:
The most important advice for dating someone you meet in a chat room or from an on-line profile is this: no matter what his pictures look like, or what he's like in e-mails or on the phone, he'll probably be different in person, so keep your expectations in check. Internet introductions are the parallel universe of dating, completely contrary to what we're used to doing. Usually, if you meet a guy at a bar or a party, you act on whatever chemistry exists and later find out if you are compatible.
With on-line dating, you know all the details about his life and whether you share common interests and goals right away. You might even know intimate details because it's easy to reveal too much when you are creating a profile or a personal ad. Then you decide whether to meet him, at which point you find out if there's any chemistry.
Dating is all about compatibility and chemistry. With on-line dating, the order gets reversed. Your mind is a powerful tool and may wander off into dreamland quickly. Do everything you can to minimize your expectations. Hope for the best, be prepared for the worst, and set up the situation to your best advantage. Pick a meeting place where you're comfortable. Make light of the situation beforehand by letting him know that these things can be awkward and that you've found it's best to approach meeting as casually as possible.
21
RULE #1 FROM THE KENNEL APPLIES TO DATING: GIVE ROPE AND SPACE BUT NEVER LET THE DOG HAVE THE RUN OF THE YARD
Brad Davis. Profile: Hot-looking thirty-five-year-old. Decent, really tries to be a good man. Lawyer who made partner by thirty. Well-off. Nice family. Brad Davis. Single. Why?
Ask Brad Davis, a northern Californian now in his fourth year of therapy, why he's still single and he'll tell you. He's too independent. His relationships never last more than a few months. The defining breakup factor appears to be the same character traits his ex-boyfriends initially loved about Bradânamely, his independence and easygoing nature. After all, what's more attractive than a seemingly secure man who is comfortable within his own skin and undemanding?
Brad's mistake was not being independent and easygoing. His mistake was staying too easygoing after about three months of dating bliss.
After three months of a casual, laid-back approach to dating, decent, mellow Brad needed to access his inner hotheaded Latin lover and pitch a fit over something. A sideways glance from another man at his boyfriend. A bad day at work. The boyfriend's decision to spend an entire weekend with other friends. Most anything would have worked.
Of course, the immediate ramification will be a response like “What's wrong with you?” or “You are being unreasonable!” But this is when you have to remember that dating a gay man is not so different from raising a two-year-old. Gay men and two-year-olds test you. They want to know limits. Limits mean love. They want to know when they have been bad. They want to know that you are paying attention to them. They won't respect you if you always act whispery, levelheaded, and passive. In Brad's case, his boyfriends wound up doubting he cared because he was just too laid-back.
Of course the reason this approach will work for you, and not the hotheaded Latin lover, is this: you know when to quit.
Knowing when to quit will lead you to the best makeup sex you have ever had. But you can't wimp out and give in too soon. You have to know the fine line between maintaining an air of justified self-righteousness and holding on to a grudge. You have to know the difference between being assertive and requiring a restraining order. But, as Brad is now learning, if you master this fine line for calculated manipulation purposes only, you'll be able to control when and how you let go.
This isn't callous or cruel manipulation. This is being thoughtful and making your partner feel secure. Sometimes in the hope of establishing something long term with a boyfriend, guys mistakenly believe that being agreeable or malleable to all circumstances is attractive. It's not.