Guy #168 – Meet some of my issues…

“The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
William Blake

Ever since I started 168guys.com, the question I get asked the most pertains to what I will do after I reach 168 Guys.

The answer is both simple and not so simple.

Let’s start with simple.

When I started writing this blog, the number 168 was just a ballpark figure of the amount of Guys I’d been with. I began writing in October of 2015. As I started chronicling my sex life, I recalled more and more of the Guys I had sex with. Eventually, I opened up an Excel sheet, wrote down every Guy I could remember and ranked them according to their chronology. As it turned out I was about 20 Guys shy of Guy #168 at the time.

So when people asked me what I’d do after reaching Guy #168, I’d tell them I’d be doing what I’d been doing for the 167 Guys that preceded him: Make a note of it in my Excel sheet and move on to the next Guy.

Which is what I did, so for those of you in fear of this blog coming to an end, my Excel sheet currently lists 260+ Guys and I’m still out there, every day, advertising my whorish selfies on Grindr, looking for Guys to connect with, Guys to get high with, Guys to write about and possibly someone to love at some point, although there’s a good chance I have issues prohibiting that last part from ever happening.

Which brings us to not so simple.

I have issues. Let’s meet some of them:

I don’t date Guys because I want a relationship, but I am constantly on the lookout for that one Guy who befits my image of what perfection should be. Being a bit of a narcissist 99% of the Guys I do I dispense with even before I wash my hands clean of them, and truth be told it’s comforting to know 99% of Guys couldn’t hurt me or my feelings even if their lives depended on it.

My relationships with Guys are mostly short-lived, yet each and every time I engage in conversation with someone on Grindr, in a bar or at an orgy, part of me hopes to find someone I can establish a meaningful, lasting connection with. Relationships lasting longer than one date are the exception however. Either I make the effort to invest more time in a Guy and this effort is not reciprocated, or the other Guy gets back to me and I dismiss him for being too needy.

I am good looking. I get stared at a lot when I’m in a gay sauna, flaunting my deceitfully youthful exterior for anyone willing to admire it. Being good looking is a blessing as much as it is a curse. Seeing beauty when I look in the mirror gives me a sense of entitlement bordering on the unsympathetic. I am polite whenever I reject someone, but on the inside I feel anger toward the many Guys hitting on me and resent them for not being more like those few hot Guys who are not nearly as generous with their attention.

I wasn’t always attractive. In fact, for a long time I believed myself to be irreparably weird looking. Having spent the first 24 years of my life in a closet, I have a lot of experience falling hopelessly in love with girls who would have made the perfect daughter-in-law to my mother, were it not for the fact they thought of me as their little brother they wouldn’t dare share their vaginas with. One can imagine what happens to someone when you stir rejection in a bowl of narcissism and let it simmer for 24 years: I was damaged goods even before people started touching mine.

Consider how happy I was stepping out of my closet and landing in a world where I was considered doable by practically everyone who lived there. To this day, every time someone compliments me on my looks, every lusty stare I get, every bit of attention, it all acts as a band aid, covering the wounds of being a 24 year old virgin, a dorky figure who at one point was convinced sex was only meant for other people. At 35 years of age, that failure of a human being still exists, occupying my subconscious like a Bond villain that just won’t die.

At first I wasn’t very picky when it came to having sex with Guys. If it felt right I would go for it, often with pitiful results, but still, the thrill of being considered attractive gave me a high I simply couldn’t stop chasing. It’s a high I’ve been chasing for well over a decade now.

However, the more beautiful Guys I catch, the more beautiful the next one needs to be. I’m a 35 year old narcissistic gay Guy who, with the right amount of effort, can still pass for a youthlike twink such as the ones I’m attracted to. Yet the older I am, the higher my standards become, the rarer I catch what I aim for…and what I aim for is perfection.

I’ve only been in love a handful of times. I tend to fall for people who are unsuitable relationship material. I can always tell they’re unsuitable, but my hormones usually stand in the way of accepting this as fact. Looking back, I’m thankful I never ended up in a relationship with any of the people I ever fell in love with. At the same time it makes me wonder if I should want a relationship with the next person I fall in love with, seeing as how I always crave someone I don’t need. The status quo is that love for me is like a mirage I stop chasing the moment it becomes real.

As you can probably figure, I’m not really the relationship type. I dabbled in relationships very briefly, with Guys #14. #143 and #144 to be precise. They all lasted only a few months. I enjoyed the intimacy of a commitment, but each time I was quick to point out the reasons why my relationship with a particular Guy would eventually fail. Once that happened, continuing the relationship would have been like walking all the way down a dead-end street you already know is a dead-end street. What experience in relationships I could have had I gladly traded for a life in the fast lane.

Said fast lane eventually brought me into a world where homosexuality is celebrated in all its extremities, a world where casual sex flows on waves of drugs that make the experience anything but casual. When I started writing 168guys.com, love and sex to me were inseparable. My issues aside, I firmly believed that anyone looking for sex is also looking for love. Even when I arrived at my first orgy, I figured all the people there were in it for the intimacy.

When I started 168guys.com, I thought I had seen pretty much everything there is to see in the world of gay dating. Then came the day I discovered orgy culture, XTC, GHB, ketamine or just plain old fashioned cocaine. Before all of this I considered myself an expert on gay life, gay culture and even gay relationships. One year and nearly a hundred Guys later I am more at odds with sex, love and dating than I was when I stepped out of my closet. And I’m 35, single and incapable of keeping a Guy around for more than one date.

Basically, I’m a narcissist, insecure to the bone, looking for perfection, and alone.

All in all I guess you could say I’m your typical gay Guy.

You see, the one thing writing this blog has taught me is that issues are what binds us more than perfection. The more people read my blog, the more people tell me they find it a very relatable read. It would seem confusion, insecurity, clumsiness, loneliness and a restless search for perfection are quite common in the gay scene. So instead of limiting myself to chronicling short snippets of gay life, over the past year the idea grew I could expand 168guys.com into a book, offering the world a peek into the world of gays, drugs, orgies, lust, despair, jealousy, passion, addiction, hurt, pain, joy, ecstasy and yes, even love.

So in addition to writing about all the Guys I ever had sex with and trying to figure out myself in the process, I’ve also been writing a book about gay life in all its glory and not so glory. It’s still far from completed, but I will of course keep everyone updated on its progress. Writing a book featuring my issues is a lot of work.

Fortunately, Guy #168 gave me enough material to work with.