Act I: A few months after things with red speed guy went up in flames, I started dating someone else, and as you all know I like my acronyms, I will call this someone PMM here. Semantically speaking, PMM is probably who I should refer to as my first boyfriend, but life goes beyond semantics - more on that later. PMM and I dated for about 6 months, and our relationship had many more relationshipy things than whatever it was that I had with red speedo guy (RSG from now on, to make my life easier). We had a nice relationship, and I liked being with him. But I never loved him.
For starters, I was still madly in love with RSG, and I would still be in love with RSG for many years afterwards. He was the one I wanted, he was the one I craved, he was the one who made my heart beat. PMM was not RSG, but he liked me, treated me well, and maybe most importantly, wanted to be with me. PMM was a placeholder, someone who was there to fill an empty space left by someone else. And before you judge me, we both got something out of it. I was a good boyfriend, I never cheated on him, I made him happy and I was by his side when he needed me to be. I should also add that I was not only just starting to understand my sexuality and the gay world around it, I was also only just starting to understand not being a teenager anymore - after all, I was just 21 years old.
But the fact remained that I didn’t love him, and this is the crucial thing that makes me not consider him my first boyfriend. My feelings for him. Or, in this case, the lack thereof. This is the deciding factor here. We were together for longer, we had more relationship things, but RSG made a much bigger impact on me than PMM. After a while, once the novelty started to wear off, PMM started to bother me. So much so that it started to make me resent him. I got progressively more impatient and more annoyed by him.
I don’t remember a lot from our relationship, mainly because I erased it from my mind once we broke up, but something that stuck with me was him putting this song on his car’s radio, and he would lipsync the part where Kristine W would sing “nothing in the world can make me change the way I feel for you”. The first time he did, I thought it was cute and sweet. Later on, I rolled my eyes.
The truth is, and I can see it now clear as the sunny day we had in Brighton today, that this had nothing to do with him. PMM was not a bad person. He was not annoying. He was just not who I wanted to have by my side. I blamed him for something that was entirely my fault. At first, it was lovely to have someone who wanted me, especially after going through so much drama. Later, this was not enough anymore. He was not enough anymore.
And then, for the next 5 years, nothing was enough anymore, and a pattern started to arise: I would break up with someone and tell myself that I wanted to be single, but that was not enough after a while. So I would meet someone new, jump into something with them much quicker than I should, and that would hold me for a while. Until it didn’t, and I broke up with that person. And the cycle would start over again.
Now I can also see how this fits into the OCD cycle I described a few posts back. Finding someone new was a way to get that shot of dopamine, to shush my anxiety temporarily. But it didn’t fix the underlying problem, which in this case was the fact that I was still in love with my first boyfriend. Although I will argue later that this is also not the problem itself, it’s a manifestation of something much deeper. But I am getting ahead of myself.
It does sadden me to think about the trail of discarded boyfriends I left behind. Some of them amazing people, who could very well have made me happy. Those guys understood better than me, and saw through my bullshit much better than me. I became the guy who people said they were better off alone without (I wrote about this previously here). I wish I could apologise to each one of them individually, but not only that’s not possible, it probably wouldn't make things better.
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