Real love -- I'm, like, searchin' for that Queer Love -- LGBTQIA+ Love // A Thread for the Real Ones

oh hellso!

xp that sounds about right. i do enjoy like walking near the water.

I was a night person until I started working early mornings, which quickly turned me to a morning person, and now I am probably about a 0. I can count on one had the number of times I've stayed up past midnight in the past twelve months.

1230 to 830 is actually my typical sleep schedule, apart from Friday DJ nights when it’s 0300 to 0900 and a second sleep in the afternoon. My peak time has always been 4pm to 8pm.

I just don’t get beaches. They were fun when I was a child and playing with sand, but since then: eww no, the mess, the discomfort, the boredom!

i like swimming in the ocean or a lake or a river. i can make a day out of it if i have some shade, food and protection from bugs (more of an issue at lakes). generally prefer exploring a rocky coastline with tidepools and such over miles of sand, and anything crowded is a no-go for me. the last time i had a great day on a beach was at a sandbar next to a relatively calm stretch of the colorado, massive red rock cliffs above us, a boat floating by every once in a while, alternating between cold water and hot sun, etc.

I'm an absolute morning guy. Up at 5:20 a.m. even if I'm partying.

that's radical Alfred .... like what do you do at that hour
i mean what time do you go to bed

omg i used to have to be at work at that hour. it was absolute hell.

it was a menial job at a market research company. i'd just plow through the work and spent the rest of my life in a catatonic stupor. i mean way more than i do now. i never slept, ever, during the week.

i spent several nonconsecutive hours a day tossing and turning in bed, none of them asleep

I just pulled an all-nighter to write a paper!

i get up before 5 am most weekdays. gym time before work. i'm usually in bed by 8-8:30 pm. once i'm back at my thursday night dj gig that will all probably slip an hour or so later.

sw3n what was the paper for?

lol i'm glad i remembered to googleproof your name

lolol i was like

that's so interesting, so like what kind of exercises do you do at that hour
like are you like jumping around or is it more dumbbells

u know, it was a proposal for a family foundation. it really took me a hot minute to write but I think I did a decent job.

heavy stuff for the most part. wtg!

xxp irl lol

had to google what a family foundation is, look at you!

getting up at 5am to lift weights is like intimidatingly impressive

it's so scary lol

grrrrr

i should be writing proposals to family foundations instead - proposals to give me all their money!

I won my age group in the bouldering competition over the weekend. I scored 500 points more than the next guy!

I love working out early in the morning but the dogs have taken over that part of my day, earliest I can get to a gym is around 9. When we left the house yesterday morning around then, I felt like it was a miracle lol

congrats, you must be in the wrong age group ;)

that's awesome t!

deflatormouse, well, i also beat the number one in the two age groups below me. ;-) i told yall i’m in good shape!

the issue is that the way competitions work is that you can enter in an age group, or in the “open” category, the latter being where the real crushers are— people scoring 700-1000 points higher than i can, at least right now. i would have come in 19th if i had done open (gendered “male”) and 24th if we’re taking all the open scores from both “male” and “female” competitors. (there were trans competitors fwiw, in both categories). out of 125 competitors that’s still pretty good, but i wanted a glory moment. if i am solidly flashing most V8s by next competition season, i will enter in the open category, tho it is unlikely i will ever place.

that's radical Alfred .... like what do you do at that hour
i mean what time do you go to bed

― Swen, Tuesday, February 27, 2024

I get up, make coffee, grade papers, shit, go on a walk. When it's all over by 7:30 I'm a new man.

My dumb gay autistic ass. I swear.
I'm waiting at the physical therapist's and the old Woodstock hippie next to me, beads around his neck and everything, says to me "Excuse me, do I know you from somewhere?"
And me like a champ immediately responds "I don't know, are you gay?"
He kinda laughs and says "You don't know, do you?"
My brain is still in autism mode so I respond "Well, that's why I asked!"

Like, to me, everybody I know is gay and if he knows me that's probably how. But I'm not going to assume he's gay, I don't have any idea, so I'm just guessing as to how he might know me.

Anyway then we get talking about how he's cool with it, he was in Haight-Ashbury back in the '60s, and I start infodumping about oh actually the hippie thing contributed a lot to SF's queer culture in ways that aren't necessarily recognized, a lot of these hippies moving across the country because they weren't happy where they were, their being queer had something to do with that. Then the other guy waiting chimes in about how he lives on Haight Street in PDX, and everybody mispronounces it because nobody in PDX wants to say "hate". Which is one of the most Portland things ever.

BTW he's seen me because we live around the same neighborhood.

LOVE that response. lol. i allllways wish i could be that blunt. i used to be when i was a kid and then it got lost in my neuroticism! ironic that neuroticism reads so closely to eroticism when it just about the complete opposite haha.

xp damn, Alfred, a walk even -- i swear y'all are in some kind of gay episode of Friends that i don't know about

the issue is that the way competitions work is that you can enter in an age group, or in the “open” category, the latter being where the real crushers are— people scoring 700-1000 points higher than i can, at least right now.

a mere technicality 🏆💪

how come all the people who get up early in the morning are so fit and energetic and the rest of us are meh, what's the correlation

you guys.. that "love" thread destroyed me yesterday, i miss my ex so much 😭

nooooo to painful feelings. what do you think you are going to do with these feelings? or maybe you don't have any ideas, which happens a lot to me as well. (i'm not sure if you've shared, apologies if i missed - are you on good terms etc or no etc?)

honestly,
i'm wondering if we can jump back in or if it's notching a boat to seek a sword
we're friends. i'm usually the one who reaches out, but he has also proffered gestures of friendship over the years
he was my only ltr
communication broke down abruptly 3 years in due to my insecurity and he ended it. i learned to love myself through this relationship, but i had to complete the work. i don't think it's still an issue.
realizing, finally, that if we're not together we probably also shouldn't be friends. i mean duh, but that's too hard to even think about (also duh)

2 bungled marriage proposals in our history (1 each)
it's complicated

ouch, sorry to hear. don't mean to sound like an overly glib advice columnist about it, but move on. i mean, duh. harder in the near term, easier in the long term. just rip off the band aid and block him on everything. this coming from someone who has recently contemplated sending his ex who ghosted him 9 years ago a letter asking for a friendship. and also someone who doesn't do friendship with exes. so your mileage may very much vary.

personally I don't see the problem with being friends with an ex, though of course the situation is so particular to everyone. I just think love is precious and if you can stay friends, it can be important. but I will say, the two things that stood out to me in your description of the relationship are that you only found self love after you were together, and that you're the one who usually reaches out. meaning, those might be two things that are important to consider in whether or not you put yourself out there.

otm

I'm friends with most of my ex's, and a strong sense of future -- a sense of self -- is necessary

that's well said

thank you all for your sensitivity and thoughtful advice <3

i'm friendly with most of my ex's too. mostly, we met on dating sites and had brief flings and in most cases it didn't work out because my need for alone time makes other people feel unwanted

but we have been able to turn those encounters into mutually supportive friendships, i think. at least as long as we correspond online or on the phone. meeting in person can be a little rough because when there's a very strong physical attraction and it is mutual and you know this, it is suffocating not to act on it.

with this one there's a very different energy. we were close friends before we dated etc

maybe i should elaborate on the self-love in the other thread. i mean, certainly i shouldn't. but idk it brought up all these feelings

I'm glad you brought it up because I've only been discovering mine in the last few years. it came out of a relationship that didn't work out as well, but has still been very much a work in progress. it's come a long way but still has a huge ways to go, which is a fascinating combination. very ambiguously colored emotion. I would welcome hearing about your journey with that anytime.

likewise, if you are comfortable talking about it, what happened in this relationship?

and like who would you have to be in order to love yourself?

it's a work in progress for sure, i still have a lot of shame and guilt but i absolutely feel worthy of being loved and i didn't before.

gotta go to work 💂

work <3 i'm on that too.

yaknow, it's not all that interesting, but basically i wasn't a very stable person for a while, and so couldn't find solid ground within myself. and that's not a great combination with partnership. so that bandaid really needed to be ripped off for things to move forward in my life.

it's a gr8 question - who would one have to be! i think i've always thought selflessness = worthiness but intellectually i think there might be something off about that ideology.

self-love is crucial and way more interesting and rigorous and challenging to do than its name would suggest. i for one am really interested whenever people talk about their own experience with it.

haha, it's not that interesting in my case

selflessness is kind of a high bar maybe

otoh my partner showed selflessness at times, and seeing him as more ascended than myself was part of the problem

so maybe you're right

i would think without solid ground you are more comfortable with risk and that can make your life experience fuller and richer but also it's a tightrope walk and you need to develop excellent balance?

"?" meaning i don't know, what do you think tbc

i don't like the word selflessness. we all have a self whether we like it or not. developing a relationship with it is what enables us to connect with others imo. my partner is always putting me first. it's going to sound weird to say this but i've had to learn to love it. because i always felt like he gets an ego benefit out of putting others first. so i've had to be like, so what. and suddenly not caring about that makes it apparent that he does it out of genuine care for others. but the self is always playing a part in what we do.

great post, otm

developing a relationship with it is what enables us to connect with others imo.

ime this has been a two way street

I live with someone who is - and he knows this - too selfless for his own good. This sometimes necessitates me playing Bad Cop when others are, albeit unwittingly, overstepping the boundaries which he’s too selfless to have set in the first place.

As regards self-love, that’s been the work of a lifetime, but SSRIs seem to have been the final piece of the jigsaw. Having basically got there at last, I find that it improves my interactions with others to a significant degree, ie now that I like myself, the path is clearer for others to like me as much as I like them.

ime this has been a two way street

― A street taco cart named Des'ree (Deflatormouse), Thursday, February 29, 2024 6:25 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i've been experiencing this lately. i have been generally treating myself better since my mid-30s. that created good enough conditions for a relationship. that relationship made me want to treat myself better even more, so i could treat him better. and now young pine is doing all sorts of stuff for how i think of myself.

i kinda want to link the love thread in this thread because my god searching SNA for "love" on a board called "i love everything" is... difficult

love

<3

i would think without solid ground you are more comfortable with risk and that can make your life experience fuller and richer but also it's a tightrope walk and you need to develop excellent balance?

― A street taco cart named Des'ree (Deflatormouse), Thursday, February 29, 2024 6:10 PM (two days ago)

"?" meaning i don't know, what do you think tbc

― A street taco cart named Des'ree (Deflatormouse), Thursday, February 29, 2024 6:11 PM (two days ago)

i def live fully lol, dunno how much longer i can keep that up. but i would concur that i am a full-on tightrope-walker, ya nailed that one. never thought of myself as someone good at balance but you're making me realize i do have some tricks up my sleeve. funny the way time works - my self-hate was always present but i became much more cognizant of it in the past 5-ish years, and have only become cognizant of making changes in the past year lol. whatever!

new contrapoints video dropped and i complained about another fucking three hour breadtube video and then i watched the whole thing anyway, because i was interested in the topic, which was Twilight. well no of course it wasn't, it was about who tops, but since youtube wants to be the disney channel you can't just do a video about that. and i watched it because when it comes to trans women, the answer is nobody, nobody wants to fucking top, and watching her video about it helps me process my own feelings about that.

for me intimacy isn't a physical act, it's an emotional act that's expressed physically. that's probably the biggest part of why i don't cum with partners. contrapoints talks about some of this, talks about women feeling selfish about asking our partners to spend the time it takes to get us to cum. the guy who's the worst lover in the world and then asks "did u cum" is definitely A Thing. because that's the thing if someone spends all that time and then i don't cum _anyway_ my partner's gonna feel like they failed. even though they didn't fail. not cumming is frustrating but it doesn't mean i didn't get anything out of it personally.

i need to feel a certain way in order to cum, be in a certain headspace, and i have a difficult enough time getting _myself_ to that headspace. and that certain way is, i mean, _taken_. i'm not actually that interested in being taken physically. it's more the feeling of _inevitability_, of not having a choice in the matter. i'd love to be able to _choose_ to cum, just be like "oh i feel like cumming now" and then cum, but it's never really worked like that for me.

with a partner that's inseparable from the feeling of being desired. that's the complicated thing. a lot of me only cumming by myself is _desiring myself_. that's something contrapoints talks about. contrapoints argues against the idea that woman = femme = submissive = receptive, argues that it's one of those social constructs. and kind of? when i present femme i feel desirable in a way i don't when i present butch. feeling desirable, for me, means feeling like prey. the idea that someone wants me enough to just... take me. that's important.

at the same time there's an aspect of, like, self-esteem to that. i've definitely been guilty of substituting being loved by others for loving myself. sexually, though, there's a taboo against wanting yourself. you're not _supposed_ to want yourself. it gets stigmatized. whether that gets called "asexual" or "autosexual" or whatever. since i first had sex i've felt like there's something _wrong_ with me for not cumming with a partner, for only cumming by myself. emotionally, though, wanting myself is kind of fundamental to healthy relationships. and sex for me is emotional. so it seems kind of fucked. "i'd do me" feels healthier to me than judging my self-worth based on whether someone who i _want_ to do me would do me.

the thing is that there's a lot more to intimacy than cumming. i need to do stuff with a partner, and that need has nothing whatsoever to do with my need to cum. this interests me because when i was running on T, the two were _extremely_ closely linked, but now they're not. sometimes i need someone to come over and tie me up because i need _intimacy_ with other people. that doesn't have to be people with whom i'm romantically involved but it has to be someone who i feel comfortable talking about my feelings with. like talking about my feelings with someone else... it is good, it helps me feel closer to them. sometimes i need to share my feelings with someone else by _doing_ something with them. this book i'm reading, _somatics for rope bottoms_, talks about rope as a medium of communication, and i feel that. physical intimacy is a medium of communication for me, a somatic medium of communication.

with kink for me, top/bottom, dom/sub, obviously that's an unequal relationship. that doesn't bother me because in a larger sense in a healthy kink relationship there's an idea of equity. that in intimate terms both partners get what they need. and i guess for me that's where the "top shortage" comes in. there's not, in fact, a shortage of tops. the world is lousy with "big dick daddy doms". i just have a hard time finding tops i can _trust_ to respect my boundaries. even that... my real problem is that i have a hard time finding _partners_ i can trust to respect my boundaries. i've been hurt a lot more by subs not respecting my emotional boundaries as a dom than by tops not respecting my emotional boundaries as a bottom. and i experience a lot of this from the right side of the slash. i've had to spend a couple of months convincing my girlfriend that i will respect her boundaries, in large part because her other girlfriend doesn't. she feels pressured and responsible to meet the sexual and kink needs of _both_ her girlfriends, which is a totally unfair expectation and has led her to withdraw completely from intimacy.

writing it out, i guess, the "top shortage" is less about people not _wanting_ to top and more... bottoms who are still learning to take responsibility for their own submission. i want to be taken. i'm afraid of being hurt, but not in a way that keeps me from taking responsibility for my own desire. not everyone on the right side of the slash is willing or able to do that, i guess.

Paragraphs 3 to 5 of your last post are very relatable, kate.