Archive for July, 2011
A younger man worries about the future with his older partner
Here’s another letter from someone asking for advice. Help me out.
Hello,
This site is a godsend.
I am currently 29 and my partner is about to turn 54. We have been together for about seven years in a committed loving relationship. However, as I write this I see I still have issues with the fact he is 25 year old my senior.
We were just traveling out of the country where I have been volunteering for several months, and several people asked if he was my father. He does look a little younger for his age but it is apparent there is a huge age difference. I have more or less been okay with it but sometimes get uneasy.
I often wonder what things will be like when I’m the gay 50ish years old and he is a senior citizen. I know I will still love him, but I wonder what our relationship will be like as time goes on as we age. I see myself together with him for good (we’ll probably get legally married at some point). It is already apparently he is starting to show signs of aging and physically it is becoming more apparent we are farther apart in age. Any thoughts on this?
We met when I was just 22. I guess somewhere deep down inside I am still not okay with the whole situation and don’t know how to get over this. I talk about it with my therapist. I had some issues of abuse by my father, and sometimes I wonder if that is part of the reason I am with someone who is old enough to be my father. I sometimes get embarrassed when i introduce him to friends which I know is my own issue but I am always afraid of being judged.
I love him and can’t imagine my life without him but all of this is really hard to deal with.
I am still “young” and just embarked upon medical education which is going to take me years and years to finish and he’ll probably be ready to retire by the time I’m fully established. Thanks for your help and any thoughts on any of this?
Loren’s response:
Since I’m now 68 and my partner is 54 I have some thoughts about this, but I’d first like to hear from some other readers.
My Girl Friend Wants to Marry but I think I might be gay
This young man is asking for advice from men who have struggled with a decision to marry a woman they love. He is confused about what to do because of his unexplored, same-sex attraction. If you’ve been through this, help him out.
Dr. Olson,
In a bold departure from my restrictive ways, I recently read Finally Out: Letting Go of Living Straight. I think your community of readers might be able to help me with my struggles.
I am an unmarried 29-year old man. I’ve spent the last seven years in a committed, monogamous, heterosexual relationship with a wonderful woman who has been incredibly loving and supportive of me. I’ve been unable to tell her — nor anyone except a mental health professional — that I have struggled with feelings of same sex attraction.
Unlike many MSM [men who have sex with men] or individuals who have questioned in their adolescent or adult years, my experience in this area is minimal. It felt wrong and dishonest to pursue these feelings within the confines of the relationship. I feel like I have reached a critical juncture in my personal development – one that may have an unbelievable impact on all events that follow.
My girlfriend is looking to get engaged in the near future. I know taking that step would be an unwise decision, one that would further stifle my personal development and self understanding. However, I am at a loss for how to put an end to a relationship that has worked on so many other levels. I’m not willing to share with her (or anyone else for that matter) that I have had these thoughts or feelings.
I think I need some time and space to think before reaching a more definitive conclusion. Sharing this undeveloped idea leaves me utterly exposed and vulnerable in a way that I find frightening. Unable to give my legitimate reason for taking some time apart (or separating all together), I’m left with vague statements offering her little comfort or justification for my unwillingness to move forward.
My position of not asking myself difficult questions has left me completely unprepared for the next step in the event we separate. Who would I reach out to for support? How do I begin to explore these thoughts and feelings? How does one begin to pry open the door that has been sealed for so long?
I know many of these questions are unanswerable – especially without knowing me or my background. I hope (and pray) that those of you with similar experiences will weigh in with their thoughts, advice, support, insight, (or criticism). This is, to date, the boldest step I’ve ever taken in self exploration, so please BE KIND!
Loren’s response:
I have sent my thoughts to the writer in a personal correspondence. He’s read my book so knows my thoughts. I think he needs to hear from other readers of MagneticFire.
Choosing to Be or Behave Gay
During a July 10, 2011, appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, host David Gregory asked Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty about the origins of homosexuality. Politifact did some fact checking. I have edited their response, but here is a portion of their discussion:
Scientists don’t doubt that it’s possible for someone who’s gay to choose, through sheer willpower, to ignore their impulses and abstain from homosexual activity. Both gay and straight people have been going celibate by choice since time immemorial. But scientists add that for such people, sexual impulses don’t go away.
So, scientists argue, even if sexual behavior is a choice, sexual orientation — the state of being gay, and the impulses one feels — is not a choice.
“We only choose to act, and our actions are influenced by desires,” said Michael Bailey, a Northwestern University psychologist who specializes in the origins of homosexuality. “So I think that in an ordinary understanding of ‘choice,’ sexual orientation — i.e., increased sexual desire for one type of person — is not chosen, but sexual behavior is.”
Interestingly, we found less division than we’d expected between gay-rights advocates and social conservatives.
Michael Cole-Schwartz — a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, a leading gay advocacy group — said that “there is significant agreement that one does not choose one’s sexual orientation.”
Meanwhile, Peter Sprigg, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council — a leading think tank for social conservatives — agreed with the distinction between orientation and behavior.
“Part of the problem is that the term ‘sexual orientation’ is somewhat ambiguous,” Sprigg said. He suggests that it is sometimes used to cover three separate elements — attractions, behaviors and self-identification. “What I generally say is that I don‘t believe that same-sex attractions are a choice, but behaviors and self-identification are,” he said.
He even pointed to an American Psychological Association statement that “although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation – heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bisexuality — is determined by any particular factor or factors.”
The scientists we spoke to freely acknowledged that much is unknown about what determines sexual orientation. But what scientists do know pretty much rules out the idea that homosexuality is simply a choice.
So where does this leave us?
Pawlenty said that scientists are “in dispute” about whether being gay is a choice or not. We think most people would interpret that to mean sexual orientation — that is, attractions and impulses — rather than sexual behavior. And on that question, it seems that the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the Human Rights Campaign and even the Family Research Council are in agreement. So we rate Pawlenty’s statement False.
To read a transcript of the Meet the Press interview, click Meet the Press
To read the entire commentary, click Politifact
Long Distance Gay Relationships
I received this correspondence from a young man in India, and he has agreed to allow me to post it along with my response:
Hi Dr. Olson,
I’m a 22 year old gay closeted male who has been in a relationship for a couple of years with an older man. He is from the U. S., and I am from India. We met on-line and chatted. He was working in Mumbai at the time.
We have met numerous amounts of times. In order to be closer to him, I just spent the last year in Florida. doing graduate study at UF. This is my first relationship, and I sincerely hope it continues. When I was in the U. S. we hardly had any problems. In fact, it was probably the best time of my life.
At this point, we have no specific plan for the future. We just want to be together in the end. It was extremely emotional for both of us when I left. He is a wonderful man and, he has my heart!
Now, we are having a long distance relationship. Needless to say, it’s extremely difficult to be back in India. There are many little things that I disregarded that are bothering me now that I’m back home. I don’t know if it’s just me, or if I should be genuinely worried.
When I was in the U. S., I discovered that he had a social media network account with primarily Asian “friends.” I also found that he had many contacts from India on Skype. I got upset with him and eventually asked him to show them to me. All of the contacts were blocked so I think he was telling the truth. He insists that he never chats to them and that he loves me.
I want to believe him. I get extremely upset now that I’m back home. I feel that I cannot trust him when I think of these things. Is it me? Am I just some crazy, obsessive and jealous boyfriend? Or are my worries warranted?
Kind regards,
(Name withheld by request)
Loren’s response:Your note brings up several interesting issues, and they are much more common than you may realize.
My first comment is that love and risk are inseparable. You cannot hand someone your heart without taking the risk that it may be broken. Now that you have risked letting someone know you both physically and emotionally in an intimate way, you become vulnerable to being hurt.
Most of us take that risk because the alternative is to remain isolated and alone. It is possible to numb emotion so that we never get hurt, but we cannot numb our emotions selectively. If you shut down your capacity for emotional intimacy, you also suppress emotions like joy, excitement, and pleasure.
Long distance relationships are difficult. It is possible to use the Internet to maintain your relationship. Many people use Skype, MSN and Yahoo to maintain their connectedness. Although it is two dimensional, it allows for you to maintain some degree of emotional and physical intimacy, but ultimately you sleep alone. This lack of physical touch opens the door to infidelity.
One of the other dangers is that your mind can create problems where none exist. Without him there with you, you can make assumptions and then other assumptions based on those assumptions. This can take you far afield from the realities of what is actually happening. Stay with the facts. What do you know to be true?
When you’re having difficulty with trust, asking questions often isn’t very helpful. For one thing, it will cause him to become defensive. For another, it rarely increases your trust. In whatever manner he responds to your questions, you will simply think of more and more questions. Your difficulty with trust will likely not change by asking him questions.
I have written several times about older/younger relationships. Although it may be difficult to explain your interest to others, these relationships can be quite successful, but they require work, just as any relationship does.
Relationships that are exclusively Internet are largely based on fantasy. Rarely are people completely honest with each other. Your relationship has had the benefit of some time together. You know him as a real person, not just an Internet profile. Your relationship has been validated by your time together.
All relationships have rules. The two of you must decide for yourselves what is allowable in the relationship. For example, you might agree that it is acceptable to maintain Internet contact with others but not to meet any of the contacts unless the meeting is discussed with the other. Honesty is essential to maintaining a level of trust. The two of you must not agree to rules unless you are truly committed to them. Your rules may be different from others’ rules.
One final thought: When someone is feeling insecure about their relationship, it is often because they feel insecure about themselves. It is important to ask yourself if you feel worthy of being loved. Is it possible that some of your insecurity is because of some insecurity about yourself?
Thanks for your note.
Loren Olson
The Confusing Realities of Labels
I recently wrote a post for Psychology Today’s web site that caused quite a stir. The essay was called, “The Messy Realities of Bisexuality.”
One who left a comment referred me to a report by the San Francisco Human Rights Commision called “Bisexual Invisibility: Impacts and Recommendations.”
Many men who have sex with men are comfortable labeling themselves as bisexual. Others say bisexuality doesn’t exist but is just a parking place as one is transitioning to a gay identity. A lot of people just don’t care very much about the politics of various labels.
Because there are a lot of people who do care about labels – and there are good reasons why precise definitions are important — I am going to reprint a small portion of the report here:
Bisexual Invisibility: Impacts and Recommendations
San Francisco Human Rights Commission
A Note on Language
The term bisexual is imperfect at best.
It can imply a duality of genders that many people feel erases transgender and gender-variant people.1 For others, it connotes a requirement of an exact balance between someone’s attractions for women and men, or attractions only to women and men who identify with the genders they were assigned at birth.
While pansexual and omnisexual are finding more acceptance, some people feel the terms reinforce a stereotype of promiscuity. Ambisexual and more recently fluid have appeared as ways to describe those attracted to more than one gender, but they are not yet widely used or understood.
There are also people who chafe at any label at all.
More broadly, queer is attractive as an umbrella term for non-heterosexuals, but many people still hear it as a pejorative, while others use it as a way to avoid naming or acknowledging those outside monosexual identities. Some who would otherwise self-identify as queer―to indicate their solidarity with the broader community―instead choose to call themselves bisexual specifically to avoid such erasure, even when they are uneasy with the term’s implications around gender.
The good news is that more and more people are comfortable navigating the complexities of human sexuality and gender as they are actually lived. The bad news is that the English language has not yet caught up in expressing that complexity.
At this time, there is no clear “best practice” for terminology that fully honors gender diversity while not reinscribing invisibility for nonmonosexuals. At this moment in the movement for full equality and dignity for people of all sexual orientations and gender identities, bisexual is the term that is most widely understood as describing those whose attractions fall outside an either/or paradigm. It is also (along with MSMW [Men who have sex with men and women] and WSMW [women who have sex with men and women]) the term most often used in research.
As people become increasingly fluent in the dynamics of gender and sexuality, the language will evolve as well. For now, and with full awareness of its limitations, bisexual is the word used in this report.
To see the entireSan Francisco Human Rights Commission report, click here.
ABC’s Good Morning America Discusses Coming out in Midlife
My interview with ABC’s Good Morning America reporter Susan Davidson James.
Growing up in the Iowa farm belt, Dr. Loren Olson always thought of himself as “heterosexual, with a little quirk.”
He wondered why he had to work so hard at masculinity and attributed his feelings of being a “man-imposter” to the death of his father in a tractor accident when he was 3.
Olson went on to have a satisfying 18-year marriage and two daughters but, inside, he always knew something wasn’t quite right. He describes “always editing my behavior and thoughts.” But long after many men acknowledge their sexual orientation, he came out after the age of 40.
In his new book, “Finally Out: Letting Go of Living Straight,” Olson, now 68 and semi-retired psychiatrist, examines the lives of closeted gay men, many of whom have sex with other men but deny they are homosexual.”These men lead hidden lives and that’s a very lonely place to be,” he said. “They feel like they are one secret away from losing everything they love.” Olson describes it as “a kind of sexual purgatory,” and many turn to drugs and alcohol for solace.
To read the rest of the interview, click here.
Bisexuality: A Parking Place Until Coming Out as Gay?
The following article is one I originally published on the Psychology Today web site. To read the entire article, click on the link below:
The Messy Realities of Bisexuality
Published on July 5, 2011 by Loren A. Olson, M.D. in Finally Out
When I searched Twitter for “bisexuality” I found this: “Bisexuality is the ability to reach down someone’s pants and be satisfied with whatever you find.” I once defined it (less colorfully) on my blog, MagneticFire. I wrote, “Bisexuality is being sexually attracted equally to both men and women.”
The response was swift and furious. “Am I defined accurately as bisexual only if I have one ejaculation with a woman for every ejaculation I have with a man?” I was accused of being a poor scientist and unfamiliar with the literature on bisexuality. My definition was considered far too restrictive. One bisexual man wrote that a bisexual could be any of the following:
• Straight-identified married men who have surreptitious sex with other men.
• Single men with steady girlfriends
• Divorced men who partner with another man but remain attracted to women
• Transgender persons and their transgender partners
• Men in polyamorous relationships.
That is a very large umbrella! I could cop out and say that labels are useless and this discussion is meaningless, but labels are essential for research and important for the development of a sense of belonging. Within the LGBT community, not only are the L, the G, the B and the T distinct from one another, but each can be divided into multiple sub-populations.
The term “bisexuality” lacks clarity about the differences between attraction, behavior or self-identity. Many scientists prefer a definition based exclusively on attraction because behavior and identity are more fluid. For some behavior and self-definitions may evolve over time. Lisa Diamond in Sexual Fluidity has suggested that a shifting of sexual intimacy is more common in women than in men; that is consistent with my clinical experience. As I described in, Finally Out: Letting Go of Living Straight, I began life believing I was a heterosexual man, went through a brief period of believing I might be bisexual, and now am completely confident that I am a gay man. Once I aligned my sexual attraction, sexual behavior and my self-identity, the dissonance I had felt for much of my life disappeared.
To read the rest of the post, click here.
Expert Debunks Far Right’s Disapproval of Gays
Why Conservatives Should Favor Gay Marriage
When Jonathan Dudley was earning his Master’s degree in divinity at Yale, he never thought that years later, he’d be cheering the legalization of gay marriage in the state of New York. Still, while he was at Yale, he began to see an interesting pattern in some of the biblical passages he was analyzing.
“Many conservatives use the Bible as a definitive source for why gays shouldn’t be afforded the right to marry,” said Dudley, who currently attends medical school at Johns Hopkins. “The problem is that there is very little in the Bible about same-sex pairings, and what’s there can easily be interpreted in multiple ways.”
Dudley’s point is that the biblical prop that politicians use to condemn gays is an illusion, as are other elements of their arguments, according to Dudley, the author of Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics. He claims that his arguments, backed by his research, undermine the basis for the far right’s objection to gays in America.
“If the goal is legislation that both preserves marriage and reflects the Bible’s teaching, it is far easier to argue that divorce should be illegal than it is to condemn gay marriage,” Dudley said. “Although the New Testament only contains one uncontested reference to same-sex pairings, divorce is condemned throughout the New Testament, both by Jesus and the Apostle Paul. What’s more, the growing prevalence of divorce poses a far more credible threat to the culture of marriage in America than does the prospect of gay people marrying each other. In today’s America, the divorce rate for new married couples is 50 percent. As gay marriage is still outlawed by the Defense of Marriage Act, we can’t blame the divorce rate on gay marriage. That figure is due to the dissolution of heterosexual marriages.”
Dudley notes that a growing number of theologians and young evangelicals are have realized the Bible doesn’t require Christians to condemn gay rights. In fact, there is a growing movement that supports the idea that some of the translations and interpretations of passages in contemporary Bibles are errant, and also that the Bible even provides fodder for supporting gay marriage.
“The community of evangelical biblical scholars, almost exclusively white heterosexual men, has a history of producing interpretations of the Bible that reflects its own interests and disadvantages those without power,” he added. “The same leaders that insist on the most rigorous, stringent reading possible on homosexuality have come up with all sorts of nuances and complicating considerations to justify leniency for themselves when it comes to more obvious biblical condemnations of divorce. So, why is it that same-sex relationships don’t get the same treatment?”
The reason, according to Dudley, is because it doesn’t serve anyone involved with interpreting the Bible for the purposes of creating modern religious canon.
“The same community that insists on ‘the traditional reading’ of the Bible on homosexual relationships has embraced tendentious, historically recent interpretations claiming the Bible says life begins at conception,” he said. “And the same intellectual habits and social structures that led yesterday’s white evangelical community to ignore the civil rights movement, oppose the feminist movement, and drag its feet for far too long in the face of environmental destruction are still in place today —and they shape how evangelical leaders are thinking about homosexuality. In reality, the older generation’s opposition to gay marriage tells us more about their allegiance to social conservatism than it does about their allegiance to the Bible.”
About Jonathan Dudley: Jonathan Dudley is a graduate of Calvin College (B.S., Biology) and Yale Divinity School (M.A. Ethics, summa cum laude), and is currently an M.D. student at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics began as a column series in the Yale Daily News and is his first book.