A friend I have known for over 25 years (since childhood) came out to me as bisexual a few days ago. It has triggered a lot of self-reflection on my part and brought up a lot of new and old feelings that I don't really know how to deal with. I am feel very loved that he trusted me enough to tell me as one of the few people who know and I hope I was supportive. I am just unsure of what to do now. This is all going to sound a) very selfish and b) very hypocritical. He has always been a kind and non-demanding friend to me and I have always felt more at ease with him than many other people. He feels a bit like a brother to me.We rarely talk about very personal things, though I always assumed that I knew him fairly well. I also unconsciously assumed he was possibly asexual or a least had very little interest in sex. It is not something he ever talks about. This made him feel very safe to me. To give some background. I have known since I was 13 that I was a lesbian (I'm now 33). I came out to my friends at university when I was 18. Then my parents several years later. Then finally a couple of years ago to said friend and one other both of whom I've known since I was a child. I found telling them the hardest, because they knew me as someone and actually there was a huge part of me they did not know. I shut that part of my life into a little box and telling them meant being gay was who I had always been and was all the time not just with certain people. Since then I have felt much more comfortable in my own skin, much more confident, less anxious. But I have still never had sex with anyone. I would love to be in a relationship with a woman, but I have massive trouble of thinking of myself as a sexual person, let alone a desirable, sexual, lesbian woman. I have a very clear memory of deciding when I was 13 that I was not cool enough or attractive enough or brave enough to be a lesbian, but I could not have sex or fall in love with men, so I was just going to ignore my sexual feelings. Just live in limbo. As an adult I know this is a load of rubbish. I am gay, but I don't have to behave in a certain way to justify that, I just am. However, I go through long periods when I don't find any woman attractive and when I do I shut it down, because in the past my feelings have never been reciprocated, and I'm frightened and I think what's the point? In everyday interactions with casual friends and work colleagues I feel like I am walking through a minefield. I find it difficult to talk about sex (especially with LGBT people) and I feel left out of many conversations and I desperately don't want these people to know I'm a virgin because of the shame I feel around it. I feel like there is something terribly wrong with me. I feel unloved and unlovable. With my friend I never had to worry about any of this. Now he tells me that he finds both men and women sexually attractive and although he is a virgin he wants a relationship with someone. My safe little bubble has burst. I feel like a complete s**t that this is my main reaction, not, I am so happy for you and I hope you find someone. Our stories are so similar that it upsets me. I see me reflected in him and it is very painful to talk about. I just don't know how to respond because I don't want him to see how unhappy and ashamed I am. Worse I don't want to find out that actually he has no sexual hang-ups at all and I really am on my own. I am very aware of how c""""y a person this makes me. I want to be supportive.This could be an opportunity for both of us to have a friend who really understands, but I don't want to be vulnerable. I also don't know if he wants that, or he just wants to tell me and leave it at that for now. I guess I'm asking what should I do?
Two options here: 1. You can choose to open up about how you feel. It's really not as scary as you think, and you may find out you are supported by a true friend. Even if he doesn't feel the same shame you do, maybe he can help listen and help you overcome it. Friendship is not a contest, people discover things earlier than we do, and we should feel happy for them. But they can also help us too! This is an unrelated situation, but I felt the same sort of jealousy for a friend in a completely non-lgbt related thing. She is just now graduating from college and I haven't even started yet. To make matters worse, I am four years older than her. I felt like a failure and a worthless being as an adult of my age, and I was too embarrassed to even talk about this to really anyone. However, she had proven to be supportive and has helped me study. Doesn't look down on me and just says we've had different circumstances in life. So even if he has no sexual hangups and is ahead of you, he might understand. Or like you said, you might be in the same boat and you could really bond over this. 2. Another option is that you really don't have to talk about your love life or sexual feelings to anyone if you don't want to. Some people keep it to themselves, and some people just don't want to be vulnerable like that- and that's okay. I don't talk about this topic to any of my friends as I believe it is private and best kept to one's self.
Thanks for replying Creativemind. You write "Friendship is not a contest" and you are correct. Your friend sounds like a decent person and she is right you have nothing to be embarrassed about. I think you should be proud, that despite your fears you are going to college. Congratulations! I am honestly delighted for my friend. He has seemed much happier over the last couple of months and now I know why. He is a genuinely lovely guy and deserves to be happy. When a friend gets a new job, or a new partner or a child I am happy for them. I am happy that they are happy. So why am I so upset? I am finding it really hard to write this reply because I don't really want to admit how I feel. I don't want to be this awful person. 1. If he does feel like me I don't want to see his pain, because it is my pain and I don't know how to deal with it. Despite all the logic I often feel my lack of sexual experience as a failure on my part to be "normal." I feel broken. I feel pathetic and abnormal. I don't want to project that on to him. It is very probably not how he feels, it is a reflection of how I feel about myself. I don't want to feel about him how I feel about myself. Because sex didn't seem to be a big part of his life, I never had to acknowledge how potentially similar our situations were before. If he wants to talk about it I don't know what to say. I can't offer him advice, I don't have any. I don't want him to think I feel about him the way I feel about myself. 2. If he does not feel like me I don't want him to see my shame. I don't want to him to look at me and feel pity or think I am pathetic or just not understand. With other people my sense of jealously and aloneness is tolerable, because we are in different circumstances. I can convince myself that my lack of intimacy is due to circumstances and that I am doing the best I can at the moment. If he does not feel the same as me and our situations are so similar then it is not circumstance it is just me. Neither of these reactions are very helpful for him at a time when he is probably in need of a friend, not a person with a whole mess of their own to deal with. I am going to leave it up to him whether he wishes to talk or not. He may not do. I'm not sure what I will say if he does want to talk, but thank you for your help. It has allowed me to clarify how I feel, before I go bumbling in and damaging our friendship.
Hi Bookhoarder: (love your handle!) I hope this will make sense as I am writing when very tired. I really appreciate your posting this as I have had some similar (but slightly different) issues come up for me recently. Firstly, re: virginity. This issue also comes up frequently on other forums including heterosexual dating ones, usually in the form of the person who is a virgin being worried about their lack of experience and thinking badly of themselves because of it. So you are not alone in your concerns but they may be as unfounded as they are for others: From my point of view, I think it's important to remember that, generally, whenever two people get together to have sex for the first time, they are really both inexperienced simply because they don't know each other. Having sex for the first time and beyond is a process of getting to know one another and what each other likes and dislikes. First-time sex is always rather fumbling, hesitant, and awkward - I've heard it described as "bumping noses". So you're not really the only inexperienced person in the room, so to speak. Secondly, anyone who would make an issue of another's lack of experience doesn't seem like a very kind or forgiving person to me and I consider kindness/forgiveness to be an absolute prerequisite to my dating someone (or being their friend). Everyone had to have their first time sometime and with someone so I think the people who consider it a deal-breaker would do well to say so well before things get started and if they do that is about them and not about you. Thirdly, I think your friend, if he is a true friend, would not think less of you because of a lack of experience. I can't imagine feeling that way about any of my friends. Nor would I consider it a threat to our friendship if they wanted to talk about it or didn't want to talk about it. ********************************************************************** As I said above I have some similar issues although it's not about sex for me, more that I am fifty years old and have never had a long-term relationship. I'm not going to go into detail so as not to derail your thread (I may post about it later) but basically i didn't think it was an issue til this year. My attractions, to both men and women, also seem to be few and far between, nonetheless, I developed an attraction to someone this year who also seemed to be attracted to me but it didn't progress very far. However, I really had a profound reaction to this attraction not going anywhere - I have been overwhelmed by sadness at times since then and I realized that I am grieving the fact that a long-term relationship hasn't happened to me (?yet). On some unconscious level, I really thought that it would have happened by now because (apparently) it happens to others quite readily and seemingly with little effort. So I now find myself regretting that I didn't make more of a conscious effort before now to "look" for someone and wondering what other choices I've made in my life have fed into this situation. I wanted to tell you this because I think that if being in a relationship is one of your goals in life (and I would suggest that it is given what you've written) that you do something about it sooner rather than later. In other words, I encourage you to learn from my mistakes so that you don't find yourself at my age with my issue! I encourage you to consider seeking out a counselor who can listen to you and help you parse through the issues that might be holding you back and to help with reframing how you think about yourself. Reading about attachment styles may also be something you want to consider; it has been very helpful to me. Being a virgin does not make you abnormal, unlovable, broken or pathetic - I would encourage you to challenge those thoughts when they arise - being a virgin means one thing only: your future first partner is out there somewhere. I think, as well, you might want to consider that the fact that this has arisen with the coming out of your friend is a signal from your unconscious that now is an opportunity to do something about what you really want. Hugs.
I think you feel left out because you are a 33 year old virgin, like you said. I personally don't think there's anything wrong with that, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a social stigma to some people. So I can greatly empathize with being scared and ashamed. Not just talking about it, I'm sure you're also scared that other lesbians will judge or reject you for it, and that is normal. I'm also a virgin in all definitions of the word, and I'm 26. A lot younger, so I can't imagine how much worse you have it, but I can relate to the feelings of being shy about bringing it up. Personally, I think I might prefer dating another virgin, but not because I think non-virgins are bad or less desirable. I just like the feeling of knowing I'm not alone and that I can feel less awkward with someone who has no experience to go off of. Knowing the first time is more about a connection than trying to live up to expectations. Sometimes it can be hard to talk about something we perceive as such a large stigma, and I used to be afraid of that too. I told my friend about me being an older virgin, and she knows many people in the same boat. She's kind of happy for me that I never faked it with a guy or forced myself in an uncomfortable situations despite being older, and maybe your friend will feel that way too. But it's hard to not be jealous if you feel they are ahead of you.
