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Recently in Salon Health & Body

Urge
Swooning over the messenger
She can't decide what makes the man: Brawn, brains or big brothers.
By Tracy Quan
[09/13/99]

Urge
Toy story
Oh, the adventures of a gal's first vibrator. Mr. Stubbies could charm the pants off anyone. Almost anyone.
By Jennifer Parello
[09/11/99]

Column
Historically significant tampons
The Museum of Menstruation sustains the flow of knowledge in a little-known field.
By Mary Roach
[09/10/99]

A true fish story
Fish breath may be the only side effect to the latest antidepressant.
By Michael Alvear
[09/09/99]

Urge
Missing women, mysterious men
Nancy wonders who her real friends are.
By Tracy Quan
[09/09/99]

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And then, my relationship of a dozen years was suddenly over, 12 years apparently being a benchmark figure, the double digits either amazing or appalling my friends. Those who wanted to be in a relationship were stunned that any two men could be together so long. Those who professed they had no use for long-term commitment waxed condescending about how two men could be together so long. Which is why, when I was finally, irrevocably single, I felt like an unmitigated failure: Why couldn't I make this work? What would people say -- especially my family, whom I had finally convinced that our relationship was as valid as the marriages of all the fucking nieces, nephews and cousins all around us?

In the end, there was nothing I could do; there I was, a single man again. So much of the validation I received from being part of a couple was now gone that I felt like demoted royalty, stripped of the "highness" title. It wasn't just a question of status, however -- it was also comfort. So much of my life had been lived in cave-like zones of connubial bliss that I never wanted to question what wasn't working. I was stoned on domestic partnership.

"Get over it, Nancy," was basically what my well-meaning friend Tom told me on my birthday a year ago, when denial was still very much part of my day-to-day existence. Wounded, I still had the wherewithal to respond to my friend, famous for cashing in his chips when the game got dicey, that he -- who'd never been in a relationship longer than two years -- had no right to question my mourning.

"Six years," said Marlane, my friend who had been through a painful divorce. "It takes six years to get over a 12-year marriage." To her, it was not simply a mathematical equation -- divide the number of years in half and that's your grief time -- but a question of the feelings involved. But for many of my gay male friends, such feelings did not enter into the equation. The fact that it took a heterosexual woman to validate my grief was not lost on me.

Of course, I have gay male friends who are capable of offering the same kind of comfort. But I've noticed that often gay men are the least equipped to empathize. Trained to not care, we place ourselves in a rigid existence of emotional self-denial. Outwardly, we might seem like the most extravagant of hedonists, denying ourselves nothing, neither drugs nor booze nor steroids nor sex. Inwardly, however, we lead lives of self-denial with a monastic stoicism.

Next page | Self-loathing disguised as high standards