Tag: Writing

Guy #200 – The fan?

I first kissed Guy #100 in full view of about a dozen Guys that had come and gone before him, making the story of Guy #100 a flashback episode of sorts.

The ‘eponymous’ Guy #168 was someone I fell in love with the moment I met him. The experience turned out to be so intense and revealing of this gay scene we find ourselves in that he’ll feature in a book I’m currently writing.

Then there’s Guy #200, someone who also stood out for more reasons than just a numerological one.

Guy #200 was the first Guy to ever recognize me from my blog.

Over the past few years, more and more Guys have stumbled across 168guys.com. It’s linked on my online dating profiles, it features highlights from my sad selfie collection and I don’t shy away from telling people I write the story of every Guy I ever had sex with when they inquire about my hobbies.

Added to that, gay scenes are extravagant as they are small. Gay clubs are often a gathering of who’s who of who’s done who. Whenever I go out, I find myself surrounded by Guys who have seen me before, either during sex, on Grindr, or on my blog.

These days it’s not uncommon for me to go on a dance floor and have someone come up to me saying Aren’t you that Guy from that blog, 160 guys, 1600 Guys or something?

Anyone familiar with my blog will know narcissist me is not above sleeping with fans.

Not when they’re cute, that is.

Whether Guy #200 actually was a fan I’m not sure. We met at this gay party where XTC and nakedness were the main ingredients. He came up to me and said he recognized me as the Guy from that blog about all the sex.

To me, it was a special moment. People who are active in the gay scene constitute my core demographic. Guy #200 was the first random stranger to make me realize I’m not only read by people I know or have slept with. Being high, I instantly knew Guy #200 was someone I wanted to celebrate the moment with.

I did, though not exactly in the way I envisioned it.

I tried to steer the conversation toward Guy #200 praising me and my writing, but he didn’t seem that interested in my material. Instead, our conversation somehow ended up in a fivesome with him and Guys #201, #202 and #203, mere minutes into our relationship.

The fivesome was fun, but it lacked the Oprah’s Book Club feel I was aiming for when Guy #200 and I started dry humping.

I would run into Guy #200 on numerous occasions to follow, even having sex with him a few more times.

Whenever we run into each other, I can’t help myself: I remind him he’s the first one to ever recognize me, and each and every time he doesn’t quite respond to it on any level whatsoever.

“You do realize I will write about you someday?” I asked Guy #200 at some point. I believe that made him laugh briefly, but not in a way that steered the conversation into him praising me or my writing.

I suppose it’s safe to say Guy #200 never wanted me for my words. Which is fine, because I have no qualms with people liking me for my looks.

To me #200 will forever be my first fan though, even if deeming him a ‘fan’ would be like calling my blog the Declaration of Independence.

Not that much of a stretch when you’re high on XTC and the end result is a fivesome.

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.

Guy #163 – Being a dominant kiss-ass…

Being a psychologist who spends a lot of time in places where gays get naked, I see insecurity the way that kid from The Sixth Sense sees dead people: Insecurity is everywhere. It doesn’t know it’s insecure, although in the end it kind of does and for some reason I feel it’s my duty to help those with insecurities face their issues so they may overcome them and move on.

I like saying nice things to people. Sure I do it because I want them to like me, but mostly it’s a conscious effort to let people know that insecurities are like birth marks in the sense that everybody has them in places we don’t want them.

In short, I love making Guys with abs feel good about themselves.

Guy #163 had terrific abs. In fact, his entire body was more than could be summed up in one compliment. Also, I quickly noticed how Guy #163 felt insecure about himself. We met up at his place, where the air of arousal got perturbed by his constant restlessness. I offered him a few sips of a joint I had brought, but as it turns out people with ADHD become more like people with ADHD when they slow their brains down. The weed rendered Guy #163 unable to sit still for more than a few seconds.

Although I was in the mood for some conversation as a means to make the sex more interesting, Guy #163 and I soon got physical. I suppose it was the most sensible thing to do. Guy #163 clearly lacked the inner calm to carry a conversation and I was too high to carry it for the both of us.
During sex, Guy #163 remained somewhat frantic, occasionally checking if everything was in place. The only moment I could focus on our sex was when I positioned myself as the dominant factor in our little one-night stand. It was in that moment Guy #163 managed to let go a little and ride his high the way it was intended.

The thing is, I only like being dominant when the other Guy fights it, not when it’s blithely accepted. Being dominant with someone who immediately allows you to is akin to the bad Guy dying at the start of a movie or starting sex with an orgasm: It puts the reward before the effort.

So I did what I figured was the right thing: I started giving compliments, hoping to put Guy #163 at ease and only as I write this down do I realize how odd it must have been for him to be dominated by a kiss-ass.

I praised Guy #163 for his body and hotness. I told him I’d wanted him the moment I first laid eyes on him.

It wasn’t long before the sex was over.

I however wasn’t done upping my date’s ego. Even as he secluded himself to his bathroom to take a shower did I practically yell at him, letting him know how gorgeous he was.

“You should really stop saying how beautiful I am all the time,” Guy #163 said as he returned from his shower.
“Why?” I asked surprised. I couldn’t imagine anyone not wanting to receive a compliment. I love it when someone tells me I’m beautiful. How could anyone not?
“It takes away the tension,” Guy #163 said.

Oddly enough, I was both surprised and empathetic. Sex without tension indeed is like Will & Grace without Jack & Karen, but do we really need insecurites to create that tension? Do we need doubt to make sex interesting? Guy #163, despite his insecurities, seemed absolutely certain that we do.

I was reluctant to accept the fact my kind words were not well received. At the same time I couldn’t help but agree with Guy #163: Repeatedly saying how beautiful he was didn’t appear to make him feel more beautiful, at least not in the way he wanted to be beautiful.

I guess compliments are like orgasms: They’re more rewarding the harder you work for them. Silly me handing out orgasms for free.

Guy #163 and I would occasionally run into each other after our date, but sex between the two of us never again materialized, nor do I think either one of us wanted it to. My dominant self had killed all the tension by being a kiss-ass.

Shame, because Guy #163 had the most amazing abs.

Guy #162 – The perfect relationship for when you don’t know how to have them…

I suppose Guy #162 was the perfect Guy in many ways. We never talked, we never committed, we never expected anything from each other, but each time we met we had the kind of sex that reminded me how fun living can be.

Guy #162 and I only spoke with each other the night we met. He was a gorgeous Colombian twink and I have blond hair and blue eyes. Gravity did the rest.
The conversation was mostly a formality, but it lasted a good hour nonetheless, probably because I felt shy in the presence of such a beautiful Guy. I guess I wanted to give him the impression I wasn’t just in it because of his looks, despite the fact I wanted him because of his looks.

Looks aside, Guy #162 was a very friendly person who spoke English as a second language. His English was better than my Spanish, but in terms of complexity our conversation could just as easily have taken place on Sesame Street.
He spoke a little about missing his Colombian family and even got a bit emotional when he opened up about the worst thing that had ever happened to him: the death of his dog. I had buried my mother a few years before and spent my days tending to my stepdad who was currently knocking on heaven’s door. I couldn’t care less about a dead dog, but I was affected by Guy #162’s sadness, plus I really wanted to get to the sex part we had both agreed upon the instant we first glanced at each other.

So I empathized and got physical, two things that are really just one and the same when it’s sex you’re after. The kissing soon followed.

I enjoyed having sex with Guy #162 and he enjoyed me in return. After we were done we each went our seperate ways, only to run into each other a few weeks later. This time we skipped the talking and went straight to lovemaking. It was even better than the first time.

For a while we would run into each other occasionally and each time we did we ended up having sex. It was the perfect relationship for someone who, like me, is very inept at having them. Our conversation never exceeded Cookie Monster’s vocabulary and we gorged on each other as if we were made of oatmeal. The great thing was that, in those gorging moments, Guy #162 and I completely understood each other. Whatever we were feeling – lust mostly – it was completely mutual.

Sex with a beautiful person, in all its simplicity, is nothing short of a treat. I dare say it’s the kind of treat every Guy is looking for when they go out hunting.

Whenever Guy #162 and I would run into each other, we both instantly knew something sexual would sprout from it. We never made any effort to meet. We just did, our local gay scene being small enough for us to bump into each other every so often.

After we bumped each other the fifth or sixth time, I decided to up the fun a little by giving Guy #162 my phone number.
“App me sometime,” I said.

I haven’t seen or heard from him since.

Guy #158 – Dumped by an angel…

It was January 1st 2016, 4 a.m. I had spent the night before celebrating New Year at a party at a friend of a friend’s house, gobbling up the free wine as if there was no tomorrow. The place was Amsterdam, the city that never sleeps for a good two days a year, one of those being January 1st.

Generally speaking I’m not a big fan of the holiday season. I mostly like New Year’s celebrations because they announce the cessation of the generically merry festivities December is known for. So when the party at my friend’s friend’s place was starting to die off, I decided to try my luck at the local gay sauna, because surely there’s no place to not celebrate the season than at a gay sauna, a sentiment felt by many gay people, as the place was packed.

This particular night the sauna was filled with so many cute Guys I instantly knew I would start the new year on a positive note, something I was in need of at the time. I had just finished writing my first novel entitled The Super Secret Diary of a Young Dictator and had already received a few rejection letters from publishers who didn’t consider it the War and Peace of our time. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I had no idea how I would go about selling myself as one.

As I scoured that night’s sauna looking for someone to up my ego through means of anal I enjoyed the many luscious looks I was getting. When I went to the bar to get a drink I found myself standing next to a somewhat cute looking Guy who at sight of me started caressing my chest with a heartwarming familiarity that won me over instantly. I knew this was far from the cutest Guy I could lay my hands on that night, but I reasoned having some fun with him could serve as a nice appetizer for other Guys to come.

And so it happened this Guy became Guy #158, my first lover of 2016. We secluded ourselves to the darker corners of our already secluded venue, where we had lovely sex that eventually flowed into lovely conversation. Guy #158 told me about himself. He was an American artist who was currently traveling the world, going from one exhibition to the next, selling his work, doing what he loves and getting laid in pretty much every time zone. It wasn’t long before I realized Guy #158 was living the life I wanted to live.

Hoping to get some valuable life lessons I told Guy #158 about my predicament. I specifically mentioned I considered it meaningful to start off the new year doing someone who was living my dream: writing, traveling and getting laid. Guy #158 told me about the importance of marketing myself and that I couldn’t reasonably expect to be successful if I didn’t put myself out there the way I usually only do when I’m at a gay sauna. It was at this point Guy #158 suggested I self publish my book. Up till then I had not considered the fact we live in a time where we can post anything we do online, including entire books.

Guy #158 and I had a great time together and I was very appreciative of his wisdom, so when he suggested we’d leave the sauna and finish the holiday season in his hotel room, I immediately said ‘Yes’, looking forward to spending the day in bed with someone I felt absolutely at ease with while at the same time getting valuable career advice.

The two of us quickly got dressed and met up at the sauna’s checkout counter. Guy #158 was the first one to walk through, followed by myself a few seconds later.

That’s when things turned eerie.

When I stepped outside Guy #158 was all but gone. I found myself in a small alley that stretched a good 50 meters in both directions, but couldn’t see Guy #158 anywhere. Feeling a bit stupid I asked the bouncer if he had seen anyone come out in front of me. He said he hadn’t, empathetically but also with little interest for my social life, almost as if ‘No’ was the only answer at his disposal, him being a bouncer and all.

I waited in said alley for about ten minutes, doubting everything that had just happened. Guy #158 seemed to have vanished into thin air. At first I figured that maybe he was still inside, which is why I waited for him to come out. Yet in my mind I had a very clear memory of him leaving the sauna mere seconds before I did. Did he suddenly change his mind and ran off? Surely no human being could cover 50 meters in mere seconds after receiving the amount of anal I had just given this one. And if the bouncer had seen someone running away wouldn’t he have told me? Besides, why would Guy #158 have disappeared on me? We’d been having a good time. He had even told me how good he felt in my company.

Nothing made sense.

I felt like a bit of a loser, standing in the cold at 6 a.m. on January 1st, alone and completely at odds with everything that had just happened. Part of me questioned if Guy #158 had been real. The way he had disappeared lacked a rational explanation.
After enduring the cold for about ten minutes, not to mention the increasingly annoying stares of the bouncer who didn’t like me standing in front of his entrance as if I had no life to speak of, I made my way to the train station, disillusioned, disappointed and with less ego than the year before. The only thing offering solace was the career advice I had been given. While I’m usually not too keen on attributing the unexplainable to the paranormal, that’s what my whole affair with Guy #158 had come to feel like.

A few weeks later I published my book on Amazon and ventured into the ins and outs of book marketing. Guy #158 to me had become an apparition of sorts. I’m still not 100% sure he was real, that’s how unreal his disappearance had been. The theory best fitting my senses is that Guy #158 was an angel from above, sent to inspire me to get my life on track.

Since its publication The Super Secret Diary of a Young Dictator went on to sell a staggering 30 copies.

So yeah, I probably got stood up by a Guy at 6 a.m. on January 1st.
Or, at best, I got stood up by an angel.

Guy #136 and #137 – The ones who inspired this blog…

It’s not always easy not being the relationship type, especially when there are very few gay people around.

In fact, living on a small Caribbean island most of my Grindr conversations were with tourists and the occasional flight attendant. My window of opportunity for getting dates was often small. There have been many, many gorgeous Colombian Guys who dug my mirror selfies to the point they regretted not being able to leave their family to go hump me for a few hours. I regretted it too, and it wasn’t long before I became somewhat sexually frustrated.

So when I picked up Guy #136 from his hostel one night it was mostly because he was free and willing, not because his selfies had been stellar. We ended up having sex next to a pile of two-by-fours on an abandoned construction site with a view of the ocean. It was ridiculously bad, awkward and as a result even a tad gross. Guy #136 came off as a clumsy hump of nerves, part overly excited to have some fun, part hopelessly inept at doing so.

It felt off doing this primitive sex ritual with such premeditation and routine. Guy #136 and I both knew our relationship would be measured in minutes and that we should probably just ignore the other in case we’d ever pass each other on the street again (which is what I did when I ran into Guy #125 at the gym a few days ago).
Even though I wasn’t the relationship type, it had always been the connection with someone that made sex something worth chasing. It made me wonder what on Earth I had been chasing the moment I decided to pick up Guy #136.

The same question popped up in my head when I visited Guy #137 in his vacation bungalow a few sexually dry weeks later. Guy #137 matched #136 in clumsiness, but this time I realized it was me who was causing it. I remember feeling misplaced, simply because I wasn’t having any fun. I was living a sad derogative of an unrealistic fantasy. I halfheartedly forced myself to feign arousal so that Guy #137 might not notice how much of a disappointment he was to me, but I suppose I was unable to mask the disappointment I felt toward myself. I have no way of knowing what Guy #137 felt in my presence, but I’m pretty sure we both felt relief when I left. Our date had transpired quicker than a Judge Judy court session.

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It reminded me of my first date with a Guy, nearly ten years prior. I remembered the excitement of getting my first kiss from someone, followed some Guys later by my first good kiss. The more sex you have, the more difficult it can become to experience the thrill of it. More and more it becomes a matter of who you do it with and when you lack suitable ‘who’s’, you go for cheap thrills, in the case of Guy #137 a bungalow bedspring that squeaked its way through our ten minute date as if it was the soundtrack to our relationship.

So what was it I was chasing? And why was there this Grindr to facilitate other people chasing it? Construction site sex with a stranger by its very nature is a compromise on many levels. Stranger yet, unless people generally have lower standards than I do (and I highly doubt that’s the case), a lot of us appease to our limited options by default. It’s as if many of us consider ourselves lucky to have weird sex at all.

How did that happen?

After I got home from my quickie with Guy #137 I got high and recalled the first time I had sex with someone. I was struck by how the excitement of my first date contrasted with the sheer ambivalence of my time with Guys like #136 or #137, or #134, #131 and #124 through #129, to name but a very few.

I wondered if perhaps the story of my often clumsy but occasionally spectacular sex life could be fun for people to read, perhaps even helpful. The internet has a lot of sex, but it does a poor job picturing the social maze that accompanies it.

The thought of writing about my sex life for the world to see brought back the excitement my date with Guy #1 had been about. As with then, part of me hesitated to move forward. Then again, what better way to give at least some meaning to dates like the ones with #136 and #137 than to have people laugh about them?

I started writing the day I met and said farewell to Guy #137.

Guess there was something worth chasing there after all.

Relationship summaries:

Guy #136:
LENGTH: 20 minutes
FORMAT: Sex date
SEX SCORE (0 = Having to spell out your name to get a Starbucks coffee <–> 10 = The best sex ever): 2.5

Guy #137:
LENGTH: 8.25 minutes
FORMAT: Sex date
SEX SCORE (0 = Making ‘Tall’ the new ‘Small’ <–> 10 = The best sex ever): 2

 

Get the full story. Start with Guy #1 here.

Guy #? – A letter to a Guy I haven’t had sex with. Yet.

Guy #? and I met each other last December. We eyed, smiled and even talked to each other, flirted a little and took our relationship to the next level by becoming Facebook friends. Him being a French Guy living in Germany and me a Dutch one living in the Caribbean, we haven’t seen each other since. We have kept in touch though, sending each other metaphorical reminders of how nice it would be to maybe possibly have sex someday. I’ve also been quite loyal in liking his pics, especially those of his abs.

About a week ago Guy #? surprised me with a rather lengthy email. In it, he said he often feels lonely and that relationships, despite his best efforts, never work out for him. He spoke of an Italian Guy he had met on a getaway in Venice. They spent a few holidays together and established some form of long distance  exclusive relationship. Then came the day Guy #?’s newfound boyfriend started acting more like a friend and less like a boyfriend: distant and ‘uncuddly’.
After addressing the matter his boyfriend confirmed the two of them were only dating, exclusively for sure, but not something one would call ‘having a boyfriend’. There was a lot of liking coming from Venice, but little loving. His boyfriend expressed doubts about his feelings, the distance had became a factor and perhaps more importantly, it seemed ‘typical’ of all the relationships Guy #? gets into.

Guy #? also lamented the many Guys focusing mostly on his looks, neglecting the intimacy he aches for, worsening his thirst for attention and love.

Feeling empathetic and slightly aroused, I sat down to write Guy #? a decent reply. That somehow ended up being the following letter. With his permission, here it is:

 

Dear Guy #?,

“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle
Que nul ne peut apprivoiser,
Et c’est bien en vain qu’on l’appelle,
S’il lui convient de refuser.”

                               Bizet or something

First of all, you can’t find love. It finds you. The only thing you need to do is believe it will. Given the history between you and the Germans I can see why it’s not working out. They did try to invade your home after all. Twice.

Okay, I’m kidding, but the point is you don’t feel at home where you live. If love is what’s missing and you believe Germany and love don’t go together – and no one would blame you – you need to ask yourself: Are Germans bad for you or are your own issues standing in between you and love?

I know, it’s hard to tell with Germans.

I get why many of them would be interested in your physicality. It means you are hot. As with everybody strengths and weaknesses are often one and the same trait. It is precisely your hotness that gets Guys to objectify you. The only thing you can do is what I try to tell every hot Guy I meet and that is to simply accept and embrace their own hotness. The hotter the Guy, the harder they shrug it off for some reason. Some people face the obstacle of being unattractive. You on the other hand are often judged on account of your good looks. If I were you, I would count your blessings. (All six packs of them for starters.)

Sure, people can be shallow, but the more you open up to them, the less shallow they become (or the faster they run away from you, it all depends). Compromise is an important part of any relationship, except for compromising on who you are. My guess is your frustration stems from your ability to please others when you should be pleasing yourself. I generally find that Guys are less into me the more I compromise. And the more I like a Guy, the more I compromise, the end result being an unrewarding fling that leaves me feeling lonely. I guess you know what that’s like.

You strike me as the romantic type. The gay scene can be harsh to romantics. Gays can be bitches after all, especially to hot romantic softies such as yourself. That was a compliment by the way.
In that respect I’m certainly sorry to hear it’s not working out between you and that Guy from Italy, or as I like to call him: the competition. (Let’s face it, I dig you.) I feel bad for you, but it would seem your latest relationship took place on vacation. Could it be you mostly meet Guys when you’re in flee-mode?

Could it be you’re a hopeless romantic constantly on the run from Germany?
Relationships don’t work when you’re on the run.

Like I said, you can’t find love. It finds you. If long distance is the default format of your relationships, something is wrong: Long distance relationships have this tendency to be doomed from the start.

The question is whether you don’t feel at home because love can’t find you in Germany or if love can’t find you there because you can’t make it your home. You say you’re okay with a long distance relationship, but I’m not so sure you are. Something tells me you’d settle for distance because it shields you from defining the meaning of ‘home’.

Home is where the heart is.

5

Personally, I’ve had quite a journey finding my home over the past ten years, having lived in Suriname, Canada and now Curaçao. In fact, I’ll be moving back to the Netherlands soon, Curaçao’s depressing lack of doable men being a major factor in my decision. I hope I will find my home, though truth be told it depends on me more than my environment. The same goes for you.
I actually have no idea what kind of work it is you do and if it would be easy for you to leave Germany. However, I’d say the odds of love finding you are spread equally over Germany, Italy or any other place where gays have parades. The trick is to embrace your own beauty, which is basically the point of those parades. I think you’re focused more on acknowledging and admiring another person’s beauty than your own. That’s very sweet but equally silly.

I’m not saying relationships only work out when you live within Grindr range of each other. I’m saying you, like everybody else, need to live your own life and believe there will come a day someone will fit in, instead of trying to accommodate your life to that of someone else.

The sadness you feel now is very real, but it’s rooted in what you deny yourself.

Wherever you end up, make it your home. I know this doesn’t happen overnight, but it helps to stop fleeing, to focus on having fun in the place you live, ‘fun’ meaning whatever you want it to mean. And who knows, maybe Germany isn’t the right place for you. I’d sure hate to make love in German. I’ve heard African clicking languages that sound sexier than German. But that’s just me.

Focus on loving yourself and love will find its way to you, is what I’m saying.

By the way, I am aware of my wiseassery. For the record, I suck at finding love just as much as the next Guy, but I am presently enjoying the rides. Well, most of them.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you want to talk more.

Umarmungen und Küsse (see how godawful that sounds?),

Lennard

 

 

Relationship summary:

LENGTH: 6 months and counting
FORMAT: Anticipatory Facebook friendship
SEX SCORE: ?

Guy #96 – A long distance relationship that was absolutely fabulous until it absolutely wasn’t…

Guy #96 lived in Europe. I lived in South America. We had met on the internet. The two of us had a fantastic relationship together. It lasted 1 ½ years.

The first time we saw each other in real life was after 1 ½ years.

We would send lengthy emails back and forth, call each other and talk on Skype for hours, often a few times a week. And of course we also used our webcam for other stuff that could last hours.

At first I was reluctant to open myself up to Guy #96, there being an ocean between us and all. However it quickly became apparent Guy #96 was completely into me, falling for me even. That widened my comfort zone and allowed me to fall for him as well.

Of course it sucked we could never get to the physical part of our relationship, but we both agreed things were fun as they were with a webcam and that neither of us should do anything rash like buying a plane ticket.

I think I realized I was in love around the time I started chatting with him during work meetings. It was great. It seemed like our relationship could only go up. After all, we still had to look forward to meeting each other someday.

We did go up for a long time, until we peaked. We peaked before we ever met each other. There’s only so many things a webcam has to offer.
The thing with falling in love is that we often fall in love with an idea. Fueled by the absence of any physical intimacy, Guy #96 embodied the idea of having an actual loving relationship with someone, someone to maybe grow old with, someone who could be family. The longer our long distance relationship lasted, the more that idea wired itself into my brain. My hormones took care of the rest.

After about a year Guy #96 started acting distant. By that time I knew him well enough to know he wasn’t telling me everything that was on his mind. Slowly I came to learn he had a bit of an avoidant personality.

Instead of hearing about his feelings, pictures of Guy #96 with another Guy started popping up like mushroom clouds on his Facebook wall. Pictures of them cooking together, them sitting in a grassy field together, them celebrating Halloween together. All things people can do together as friends. I clung to the hope Guy #96 had found himself a very good platonic non-sexual unerotic friend which he somehow never talked about.
I started getting officially worried when Guy #96’s mother started liking their friend’s comments: A family was being formed, and I wasn’t part of it.

2

When I visited the Facebook profile of Guy #96’s friend I couldn’t believe my eyes: This Guy was most definitely less attractive than I was. Being a narcissist I accepted good looking competition as a part of life, but average looking competition was a bigger paradox than a Jew at a Nazi rally.

In a desperate attempt to sell myself on my looks I started taking selfies. A lot of them. I would spend hours setting the lighting and contrast buttons just right. And then I would post them on Facebook. I knew the whole world was witness to my vanity, but I was okay with it as long as Guy #96 got to see me and my pretty blue filtered eyes. Every time he liked one of my Facebook photos was a good day for me.

Then came the moment he finally opened up about seeing another Guy. By this time we didn’t chat as often as we used to. Every night he wasn’t online was a bad day for me, because I knew it could mean he was doing stuff offline with his boyfriend, stuff that wasn’t restricted to a webcam. Those were nights I used my webcam to make selfies.

Love can be a bit of a black hole. It sucks you in and before you know it your whole life revolves around one person. I resented Facebook for facilitating my obsession, but I couldn’t help myself: If I couldn’t be part of Guy #96’s life, at the very least I had to be a sad outside observer.

Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore. I took a month off from work, bought a plane ticket and went to see Guy #96. After 1 ½ years of Skyping our asses off we would finally meet, for real.
Although Guy#96 was now steadily dating his boyfriend, he would often tell me he had doubts about his relationship. I believed him. After all, wasn’t I the better looking option?

People always look different in real life, even if you’ve seen each other a thousand times on a webcam. He made a remark about my lower teeth not lining out as nicely as my upper ones and I mentioned his head was bigger than it looked on screen. Other than that, the two of us got along like we had on Skype.

Guy #96 took me to his place on our first date. Standing mere feet away from his bed I initiated our first kiss. It wasn’t at all like the kiss I had imagined. Instead of feeling relief I could only think about Guy #96’s boyfriend and the fact he had kissed him a lot more than I ever had.
To his credit Guy #96 didn’t cheat on his boyfriend as much as I wanted him to. While we used his bed to dry hump the living daylights out of each other, any hand that attempted to remove clothes, clothes that had come off so easily on our respective webcams, was pushed back the way it came.

For 1 ½ years I had waited to be with Guy #96. Given how much he had wanted me on Skype I figured our hormones would be enough to make him forget about his relationship with a Guy whose Facebook pictures were not nearly as photoshopped as mine.

Reality can be your biggest enemy when you’re in love. What seemed sound, reasonable and even logical in my mind was constantly challenged by it. I did my best to be the smartest, cutest, funniest and all round bestcatchiest me I could be. I knew Guy #96 was into me. He even told me he didn’t know whether to choose me or his other half.

I couldn’t fathom the idea I was fighting a losing battle. After all, wasn’t I obviously the bestcatchiest one on my Facebook page? I had over 100 meticulously crafted selfies to prove it!

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Guy #96 even told me he “kind of wanted to get out of his relationship”. It was around that time I started seeing the pattern:

Whenever I came close he would push me away. Whenever I threatened to leave him and his webcam he would seduce me back in. Guy #96 didn’t want me. He wanted the option of having me. His relationship with his boyfriend played out in front of their friends and families. Ours was a dirty secret. It’s not that Guy #96 didn’t like me and my selfies. He just couldn’t bring himself to inform the rest of the world of it. I believe he feared shame more than hurt.

The month I took off from work was intended to be a catharsis. Instead I flew back to South America feeling drained, sad, frustrated and more in love than ever.

Our ‘relationship’ continued as it had, through the safety of a webcam, but the only thing that grew at this point was the hurt.

So I made a bit of rash decision. I moved back to my home country to resolve our issues once and for all. I actually dropped my well paying job, my life and my more than decent sex life and moved 4000 miles to be with someone who liked me better on a laptop.

Of course relationships only work out when you love yourself, when you’re able to live your own life and when your wellbeing isn’t completely dependent on someone else’s Facebook updates. It’s just ridiculously easy to confuse dependency with love when you’re in love, even more so when you’re a narcissist.

Our relationship had consisted of what would have amounted to thousands of pages of chats, emails and texts, countless hours of webcam sessions but less than a handful of unrewarding dates that failed to live up to even the least of my expectations.
The reason I moved back was because I wanted Guy #96 to make a choice. The distance between us had always been the go to-argument for staying with his boyfriend. Now I had gotten rid of that distance, hoping to even the playing field that way.
The two of us saw each other only once after I moved back. We strolled through the city, smoked a cigarette here and there and talked about him having to make a choice. He still couldn’t.

It was painful, but I realized the only way Guy #96 would ever break up with his boyfriend was if his boyfriend did it for him. Guy #96 never made it clear what he wanted. What he wanted was someone else to want it on his behalf.

3

On our last night together Guy #96 told me he had never told his boyfriend about me. It became clear I would never escape the clutches of my webcam. So after surrendering my entire life to the non-existing wishes of Guy #96 I finally made a sensible decision. I broke up with him.

The two of us said goodbye on the same train station we had first met each other. I told him we would not keep in touch online. It was definitely awful saying goodbye to someone I so much wanted to be with but would never see or hear from again. I hugged him pretty fiercely when my train was about to leave. Knowing me I probably cried as well. I really wanted our final goodbye to be as worthy and beautiful as I imagined the two of us could have been. Sadly, our Kodak moment got interrupted by Guy #96’s cell phone: His boyfriend called. The last I saw of Guy #96 was him walking away from me, answering his phone. It was one final blow, telling me I wasn’t allowed to be part of Guy #96’s life.

I went off Facebook for about half a year. One might consider that my rehab.

It was exhausting telling people how happy I was living back in my home country. Few things suck the life out of you like smiling when all you really want is to cry your guts out. For a long time the mere thought of Guy #96 would turn my stomach around, make me angry, sad and of course ashamed of all my desperate selfies.

The thing with love is that the more you realize why something didn’t work out, the happier you are it didn’t. As time passes you realize reality can be a bitch, but it’s never the enemy.

About a year after our not so perfect goodbye I looked up Guy #96 on Facebook once more. It was a test to see if it would still get to me. Fortunately, I found myself feeling happy for Guy #96 when I learned he and his boyfriend were moving in together.
The very next day my laptop crashed. Every picture of Guy #96, every conversation…all of it got deleted from existence. All the proof of our relationship has since been reduced to the memory of a dry hump that ended in tears.

A few days ago I checked out Guy #96’s wall again. It would seem he and his boyfriend have their five year anniversary coming up. Reality knows Guy #96 and me never would have lasted that long.

I guess not making a choice was the right one for him.

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Relationship summary:

LENGTH: 1 ½ years
FORMAT: Long distance
SEX SCORE WITH WEBCAM (0 = Abstinence pledges <–> 10 = The best sex ever): 8.5
SEX SCORE WITHOUT WEBCAM (0 = The concept of Facebook likes <–> 10 = The best sex ever): 6.5

Guy #87 – Trying to be me…

Sometimes I miss Guy #87.

Sexually speaking, he was the cream of the crop. He looked awesome, felt better and our performance was stellar.

When I think of Guy #87, I wonder about what could have been, what I did wrong and what he never told me.

On paper and in practice, Guy #87 was one of my wettest dreams: He was funny, sensitive, sweet, daring, considerate, manly yet boyish, a math graduate and a dancer. His torso overshadowed my own imperfections, sharing time with someone who could actually think was liberating and sizewise he wasn’t nearly as Asian as the rest of him.

The best part was that he wanted me, that he actively pursued me even. Few things boost your confidence like being chased by someone hotter than you.

Even though our relationship was mostly sexual in nature, the two of us had dates that lasted entire days. It never felt shallow.
At times I wondered if Guy #87 could be more than just the perfect Guy for in my bed. Neither one of us ever came close to using words like ‘commitment’, ‘relationship’ or ‘going off Grindr’, but given the enthusiasm with which Guy #87 kept seeing me, I sometimes played with the idea of opening up to him, to try and be me as it were.

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We lived an ocean apart for most of the time we knew each other. This made dating difficult. Guy #87 would hit me up online sometimes, only to be disappointed to hear I was out of reach.
It was about two years after our last date that we were in each other’s proximity again. I contacted Guy #87 to let him know I was in his country and asked if he wanted to meet up.
“Hell yeah!” was his answer.

It would be the last time I ever saw his enthusiasm.

When we did meet up on what would become our last date, his behavior had changed. He allowed for a courteous Hi how are you I’m fine-conversation, but nothing beyond that. We had sex, which at best could be described as a distant echo of previous poundings.
After the sex we lay together for a while. It was cozy, but hardly as intimate as we had been before. I tried to initiate a second round, but it ended with Guy #87 saying: “You know, I’m not really that much of a bottom.”

Two years earlier he had done the exact opposite of saying that.

I’m not sure if it’s typical of the gay scene or if it’s just a human thing: Sometimes you meet someone, you hit it off nicely, you have a great time, the sex is great, you tell each other how great everything is and then, without warning, the other person stops making things great for some great unknown reason.

Guy #87 never hurt me, but the way we left things has always puzzled me. Did I do something wrong? Was I too eager? Or perhaps too distant? Should I have said how much I liked his brain? Or did he have issues he didn’t feel like sharing? And if that’s the case, I wonder if it’s something trivial or big, and why the change happened so suddenly.

Sometimes life throws you people who leave you with questions. I’m sure there are Guys who still have questions about me: the Guy who snored, the Guy with braces, the Guy who wasn’t perfect enough, to name but a few.

I suppose Guy #87’s sudden change of heart was karma for all the times I ghosted people who thought I was into them. Maybe Guy #87 was never really into me. Maybe he just sucked at rejecting people, like I do.

Or maybe the CIA did something to that lovely brain of his.

Yeah, it’s probably the CIA.

(I use ‘blaming the CIA for my failed relationships’ as a coping mechanism. When you think about it, it’s really sad how often the CIA has pulled the plug on my love life.)

 

 

Relationship summary:

LENGTH: 2 years
FORMAT: 4 dates spread over a long time
SEX SCORE (0 = Being Pacman <–> 10 = The best sex ever): 9.8

Guy #57 (Part 1) – Love.

I was 18 the first time I fell in love.

She was the perfect daughter-in-law: Smart, funny, independent and pretty.

I imagined us becoming part of each other’s family, going on fun family weekends. I had literally dreamed about us making tender love on one of our camping trips. In my heart I was ready to start naming our future children.

She ended up dating one of my best friends. I was devastated.

I can still relive the exact moment I found out about it. From that moment on every time I saw her my stomach turned. Every time she was close I stopped thinking, instead being consumed by sadness and disbelief.

It took me a whole year before I could act normal in her presence. I kept hoping she would call me one day and tell me she had made a terrible mistake, that I had always been her one true love and that she wanted to start talking about names for our babies.

Had I known I would go on to have sex with at least 168 Guys in my life, it might not have devastated me quite as much.

Love never hurt me as much as it did that time with her. It’s not because it was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but the first thing.

The more often you fall in love, the easier it is to see the pattern:

Fall in love
Get high
Then you hurt
And wonder why

Ten years after the love of my life rejected me I had my first date with Guy #57. It was on a Friday night. It ended Sunday evening. It was January 2010 when I had the best date of the decade with Guy #57.

Sex had never been as awesome as that weekend. We spent most of the weekend in bed, just being together. This one time he gave me the most sensual massage that lasted two full Enigma albums. I haven’t felt that relaxed since then. It was, as that old lady from Titanic would say, the most erotic moment of my life.

We started our relationship in that phase where every issue can be resolved with a kiss that turns into foreplay.
Also, I acted under the assumption that we would not be committing ourselves to each other. I figured our sex was the thing that held us together. So we openly spoke about our sex lives, even bragging about it perhaps.

Guy #57 told me he was afraid of getting hurt. On our second date he was afraid of getting hurt specifically by me. On our third date he looked me straight in the eye and whispered: “Who are you!?”

In the meantime I kept on telling him about other Guys I was talking to online.

The two of us went on a total of three dates. For me it was the start of something wonderful, but I had no idea I was in love with Guy #57.

My feelings became apparent through Facebook, where it suddenly said he was in a relationship. I have disliked Mark Zuckerberg ever since.
I remember reading through the comment section, which consisted of friends congratulating Guy #57 on his love life, and Guy #57 taking those compliments like the total bottom that he was.
Naturally I checked out the profile of Guy #57’s newfound boyfriend. I needed to know. To my frustration it didn’t have any pictures. There was nothing to compare myself with.

You can never quite prepare for when love hits you in the face, but it gets easier every time it does.

Still, knowing something is temporary doesn’t make it go by any sooner.

For a few months I kept on wondering about what had gone wrong, what I had done wrong. The strange thing is that Guy #57 kept in contact. He would often hit me up on MSN. Only when I drove the conversation toward the subject of him having a boyfriend he would stop responding. And then he would pop up again a few days later as if nothing happened.

Over the years he would sometimes hit me up on Facebook to tell me he still misses me sometimes.

We even saw each other again a few years into the decade. He suggested the whole in a relationship-thing had been a lie to protect him from getting hurt by me. I’m not sure I believe that. There was a lot Guy #57 refused to tell me, but I realized he was never going to.

The thing with getting hurt is that it never makes sense. You feel like you’re going to spend an eternity not knowing what’s wrong with you. Of course there always comes a time when it doesn’t matter anymore. The more you see why something didn’t work out, the happier you are that it didn’t.

I’m very glad I didn’t end up naming babies with my first love. And I doubt Guy #57 and I would have made the perfect couple.

I’m very thankful for Guy #57. He’s the first Guy that ever hurt me, the first Guy I ever fell in love with.

It’s always the lesson that sticks with you when you’re over someone. For my first love it was Stop decorating your closet! For Guy #57 it was Don’t brag about all the Guys you’re going to have sex with if someone you already have the most amazing sex with shows a sensitive side.

I definitely took that with me to Guys #58 through #168.

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Relationship summary:

LENGTH: 5-6 years
FORMAT: 3 awesome dates, 3 months of avoidance issues that somehow clashed, plus a few years of on and off friendship
SEX SCORE (0 = Garlic air freshener <–> 10 = The best sex ever): 9.9

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