How do you Really Know Someone
Life is a fickle thing, especially when it comes to love. There are many people, much like I am, sititng in front of their computer, and chatting with someone.
Mine: he's 23, from Australia, and he is coming out. The first simple question is: Why me?
To sidetrack for a bit, my friend Katie answered this question for me. " You are the perfect starter boyfriend."
What the fuck does that mean?
Simply put, again, I am a good starter model. I am that car that the 16 year old buys when he worked all summer to get wheels. That 16 year old will eventually trade up, and that pour starter car will be sold to someone else, or scrapped. Bleak, huh? With these thoughts firmly in place, she asked me to date her ex boyfriend that jsut came out of the closet.
Fuck.
I live in a moderately medium city in Canada, and the community there is small. The gay community that is. Everyone has known everyone else, in the biblical sense, and there is no room for growth. So, in a deparate break from all of this, I started IMing. That in itself is a daring thing to do, knowing the sheer amount of people that are out there, and all types. So, enter David.
David was my first love, and we lived together for 2 years. 11 months of that 2 years was spent on ICQ and in mIRC. I really thought I was in total love, wow, birds singing, cupid in his diapers shooting me with arrows. The only problem, was that he didn't want to come out. How do you explain two men living in a one bedroom townhouse?
Things went downhill, mainly thanks to friends. Long story, gory details cut out, we broke up. Did I learn not to be careful of the internet? Nope. Instead, I decided that the mistakes that I made in the past weren't going to be repeated.
Enter Shawn.
Shawn lived back east, and I met him through a friend that programmed with him. Shawn had just broke up with his ex, and my other friend, being straight, didn't feel comfortable offering advice. So, he asked if I would talk to him. This time, I was doing everything right. I approached it as a friend, offered advice, not looking. One night he called drunk and said that he loved me. Bingo, that was enough.
He was still living with his ex and his ex's mother, so he wanted to move out west. If I had only seen it coming.
Since I was hooked on the " I love you", I didn't see what the other hand was doing. What he really wanted was to come back to my city, where he had lived as a child. Surprisingly, it took 15 hours for us to break up, but he didn't have any place to live sincehe was there. So he lived at my house for two weeks....
He fucked my best friend the day after we broke up, and that hurt a little too....
Enter Jeremy. He was over at the infamous party that my recent ex screwed my best friend, and we met. He had just gotten out of a three year relationship, and professed love, and we stayed in touch via the internet. Of course, he came to my birthday and told me we could never be....I spent the remainder of the night in my room, crying. We still talk though, which I guess is a bonus.
There are others, and most of them were off the net. Each and every time I meet someone, I try to stay impartial. I met people everyday, mostly people that notice 'gay' in my user profiles. Not that is bad, but I wonder...
You hear about people that fall in love over the net all the time, get married, live happily ever after. Why is it so difficult for me? I'm not a bad person, says me of course, but it jsut seems like it's all a bunch of crap.
Is it that it is just harder for a gay man to hook up? No, I don't think about it.
So, I haven't dated in awhile. Eventually I will date again, but at least I had learned from this. Like the subheading says: How do you really know someone, that you meet on the net?
I have been a firm beleiver that, to really know someone, you need to live with them. It's hard enough with all of our personal barriers and baggage to get to know someone in real life, never mind off the net. There will probably be people to reply and tell me exactly the opposite, and that is cool. It worked for them, not for me. Online is a dangerous place in this example, because online you have the ability to be whoever. Most people are themselves, but tweaked. They have a freedom. On the net, you rarely see bad moods, tantrums, and the bad side of people. When you meet them, you have a picture of them. What if they don't match that picture? Waht if you are disappointed? There are hundreds of questions that could be answered. Especially since we live in a disposable society, where even marriage doesn't last.
Of course, I will probably do it again, and again, because I am dumb. The human creature wants, needs, to be loved, and that is why it will happen again.