Welcome to Love, Us, a column for telling queer love stories in all their glory. (And by glory, we mean all the big, beautiful moments and otherworldly little details that make making and falling in queer love so, so fun.) Read more from the series here.
Two things happened when I met Ryan. First, my stomach did that thing where it suddenly moves from the place you know it is in your body to maybe being in your throat and also simultaneously threatening to fall directly, forcefully out of your butt. The feeling wasn’t butterflies. It was more like a kind of violent and erratic gymnastics routine performed by someone who has never tumbled before in their life but is nevertheless dead set on qualifying for the Olympics.
Second, I mourned then and there the relationship I knew Ryan and I would never have. Which is to say, after I fell head first and drowned in his stupid, sweet brown eyes, staring up from below the surface, I knew we’d never be more than friends. Not for any reason other than that, at 18, I’d only ever allowed myself to like boys from the decidedly safe (or, depending on how you look at it, wildly dangerous) realm of my own brain. I was grossly under-practiced in telling anyone I was interested in them, and I’d long since decided I would just die alone.
From below the surface, I could gaze upward and do with my non-relationship with Ryan what I had done with all the non-relationships I’d had before him. With Alex, and with Hunter, and the other Alex, and the other other Alex, and also Damon. I would pine after them, daydream about them, yearn for them. Or, rather, gay yearn for them.
Which is just like regular yearning, only gay. It’s more potent, more powerful. Gay. You get it. However, unlike most gay things, which are traditionally better than non-gay things just by virtue of being gay (it’s science), gay yearning is more powerful than regular yearning because, well, we practice it. We practice it a lot.
The ubiquity of gay yearning lies in the fact that so many homos and butches and femmes and fairies and the like spend the majority of our formative years unable to do much more. Closeted in an unaccepting world, queers are left only with the ability to turn inward and yearn for their would-be lovers. And as such, many of the gay and queer people I know have the most wonderfully romantic internal lives.
Without the ability, safety, or freedom to pursue outward emotional experiences, my younger internal romantic life was wonderful, dramatic, lush. In high school, everyone thought I was a gossip because, well, I was — but also because knowing about all my friends’ crushes and first loves was almost like having my own, too. You see, the safety of yearning is in the imagined. You get to experience emotion without consequence. There is no heartbreak in yearning, or no accidental heartbreak, anyway. Only the self-inflicted kind. Gay yearning meant that I was safe from a two-fold rejection. To want without doing, I was safe from rejection from a world that wasn’t going to accept or understand my desire, sure, but also safe from potential rejection from the person I was yearning for.
“Then I met Anna, and Anna made it impossible to shove those thoughts and feelings away anymore,” wrote Kaya, a 23-year-old bisexual, in a submission to the Love, Us inbox. “She doesn’t know it, but I’m in love with her. I’m so fucking in love with her. Like, I get lost in her eyes when she laughs, and I think I could spend all of eternity lying next to her trying to make her smile. She feels too good to be true. You know? Which is just, I don’t know. It’s so fucking embarrassing.”
When I read this excerpt, which was part of a longer letter about coming to understand your sexuality through uncommunicated attraction, I wanted to physically jump through the computer screen and grab Kayla by the shoulders. I wanted to scream directly into her face: It’s not embarrassing, Kayla! It’s beautiful! It’s beautiful, and you should say it! Say it right into Anna’s mouth! Kayla, I was afraid, was falling into the same cycle of gay yearning I had been seduced into for so long.
It’s easy to get drunk on the fantasy of spending eternity lying next to someone, especially when they can’t rebuff your attraction. Having spent my younger years experiencing relationships by proxy, by the time I was out and able to communicate my desire, it still felt safer not to. And once I was yearning for a flesh and blood person before me, rather than putting myself in some fictional story in my mind or on a screen or a page, I was able to trick myself into thinking I was actually participating in a romantic life, even if I was the only one who knew about it.
But curiosity, as they say, killed the cat. And after a certain point, when it came to love and romance, I realized I was finally ready to be a dead, dead cat. It wasn’t some epiphanic moment that sucked me out of the void of gay yearning, but rather a slow realization that years of it had stranded me in much of the same place.
And so, in my very early twenties, I decided I’d had enough. His name was Zach (it’s always a Zach, isn’t it). It was New Year’s Eve, and a bit before midnight, I pulled him away from the party and into my car, parked half a block away. “Hey,” I said. “Hey,” he said back, laughing. I don’t remember much more, except that his ears, which stick out a little bit from his head, were red from drinking and the streetlights behind him. Well, that, and also that after holding on to the feelings I’d been feeling for him for the better part of a year, finally setting them free felt like releasing a hundred balloons in a windstorm. And just as doing that would be an embarrassing thing to do in public, namely for the environmental implications, he then leaned over, kissed me on the cheek, and told me he loved me but did! not! reciprocate! my feelings! Or at least, not in the same way.
Twenty minutes later, as blue ringlets of smoke curled away from my cigarette and then disappeared into the air around me, so did a little bit of the embarrassment that had accompanied Zach’s incredibly polite rejection. It didn’t kill me in the way I’d thought romantic rejection might for the entirety of my life up until that point, and Zach and I are still friends. Knowing him for this long now, it’s a blessing to us both that he rejected me. (No offense to Zach. Or me.) And while my confession may not have led to the New Year’s Eve kiss and subsequent relationship I was hoping for that night, it did break a cycle of gay yearning I’d been stuck in for over two decades.
Since then, I have had quite a bit of practice not-yearning. Not too long ago, I exchanged I-love-yous with a lover, and we promptly broke up 39 days later (but who’s counting!). In those moments, I do sometimes think perhaps it would be better to just stick to yearning. If I had done that, I wouldn’t have found myself heartbroken. But also, I wouldn’t have climbed a mountain (literal, not metaphorical) or biked off into so many sunsets (half metaphorical, half literal). I wouldn’t have fallen asleep as the little spoon so many times. And no offense to yearning, but being the little spoon sure beats the hell out of wide-eyed what-ifing any day of the week.
At 31 (which is still so young! I scream barefoot into the night sky every two weeks), I still love the concept of gay yearning. I might even love the act of it, the wistfulness of longing, of imagining what could be if only you did. But the “if you did” part is really where the sweet spot is at. The moment you wake up from a nap with your head in someone's lap while the sun shines in through the window, all because you were brave enough to say the thing you felt, it clicks. Or maybe it’s the moment you meet your partner’s other partner, and find yourself in a relationship you never expected to be in and the world starts to look different because you finally took a chance. Or maybe it’s just having a good morning text to wake up to, or any of those and anything in between. That’s what makes it worth it.
A few years ago, and many years after I’d first decided to yearn and do nothing, Ryan was visiting the city I lived in, and we met up at a bar. When I saw him as I walked in, my stomach performed that same somersault routine it did back when we first met. We had a drink and caught up. On that night, I didn’t manifest what I’d yearned for so many years ago. No relationship, no love story, no eternity spent trying to make him smile. Instead, I manifested an extremely average hookup. And I was ecstatic.
Gay yearning is wonderful, to be sure. It provides a space for so many of us to dream dreams that society often won’t let us. But imaginary worlds, which are necessary, can only sustain us for so long. There is a life to be lived outside of yearning, wanting, dreaming. There is going, saying, doing. And even if the end result is an absolutely average hookup, I think it is time for a little less gay yearning and a little more gay doing.
“Love, Us” is looking for readers to reach out about your queer love stories. Have a love letter to share or a story you’d like to tell? Send a note to loveussubmissions@gmail.com with all the details, and we might just be in touch.
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