Single and Loving it

This post was submitted by Steve who is enjoying the single life…

On a recent trip home to visit the family, I was confronted with a scene that could have been lifted from the sixties, if I were a woman approaching my thirties. “It’s been so long since you had someone special. Don’t you want to settle down and get married?” Now don’t get me wrong, obviously I have a good relationship with the family, but having gotten out of an exceedingly long relationship a yearsago, I’m having much too good a time to start another long-term relationship.

With the now seemingly inexorable march of legal same-sex marriage across the Western World, gay men suddenly find themselves being questioned by well-meaning friends and family, as if they’re on the cusp of becoming old maids if they don’t rush out to tie the knot with someone.

Here’s the thing, for many of us, while we can appreciate the importance of same-sex marriage as a civil right, particularly for men above the age of thirty, marriage never seemed to credibly be in the offing, so it was never something we actually desired. If gay millennials want to settle down and have 2.5 offspring, and what constitutes a so-called “normal” life, getting incorporated and homogenized into the larger straight community, then bully for them!

There are plenty of same-sex couples who have been together for years or decades who are quite comfortable with the status quo in their relationships. There are also many couples, married or not, who don’t want children. It seems like the “we’re just like you” message, that was both implicit and explicit in our arguments for equal civil rights, somehow got lost in translation. And the larger community now expects us to act in accordance with their breeder sensibilities.

If I should choose to get married, it will be on my schedule because both myself and my partner want to. It would likely be subject to the same rules that my previous long-term relationships were, with no insistence on monogamy, no plan for raising anyone, and mutual respect for our sometimes divergent desires in life.

In the meantime, I’m just having too much fun on MenNation.com to look for another LTR, and given my somewhat iconoclastic views on gay dating and marriage, I know that my next successful relationship will likely grow organically from someone who was a one night stand. I’ll just need a cover story on how we met for our parents!

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