What Do You Know About Love?

How romantic notions crafted by societal expectations nearly got in the way of my search for happiness.

Each week, The Queer Love Project publishes an original essay. Want to submit your essay and add to our growing archive? Find our submission guidelines and more here.

Detail of painting by Tom of Finland

“I want to tell you something that I’ve realized about us,” I blurted out. “It took me a while, several mistakes, but I think we can blame it on our parents.”

“What?” she asked, looking up from her iced tea.

“I know you think you love him, and you want to get married, but I just want to say: You don’t have to get married so young.” I took another breath and then raced on: “I used to think I had to make relationships work as well. It’s because we are co-dependent, like Mom and Dad. I would have made more mistakes, too, if I was allowed to get married. Luckily I got out before I got stuck.”

This was my white truce flag — but it backfired.

“What do you know about love?” my sister responded. “Two guys can’t love each other the way we do. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know what love is!”

My sister is brilliant and passionate. She graduated valedictorian of her high school class, received scholarships to attend top universities, then stalled out. It seemed she was now planning to tie the knot with her high school boyfriend, so I’d invited her to this generic restaurant in the mall in the small Southern town where our parents’ had settled to make the wisdom I wanted to impart seem “special.”

Two years apart in age, we’d always been antagonistic with one another, but after I’d left for college I thought we could make amends. I told her how proud I was that she’d excelled academically but now that she was trying to set up house, I saw the pattern, wanted to warn her from the path of sacrificing one’s potential for a partner, something I’d learned after my recent tumultuous break-up with my college boyfriend Brandon.

I felt her attack. It hit somewhere in my chest, and it startled me. The wound was fresh, but I was already trying to close it up, pretend it didn’t hurt. 

My sister and I had been aggressive to each other for nearly our entire lives. I was the eldest and she was two years younger; growing up we were a unit: — JerryApril or AprilJerry — never a single entity, which had soured into her feeling hyper-competitive and resentful. It boiled over when we moved to this small South Georgia town when she was a shy freshman and I was a gregarious junior. Vowing to not be closeted in 1993—despite my mom’s pleas that I keep my sexuality private—I quickly came out at our new high school so that I could claim control and not be shamed into secrecy. One morning, as Mom drove us to school, it boiled over.

“Jerry, you have to realize how hard it is for your sister,” Mom said to me in the passenger seat. “Kids are talking, and it’s embarrassing for her.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’m not going to lie for you or her or anyone else. It’s my life.”

The tension was building and then my sister snapped. “You love him more and he’s a faggot!” she screeched from the backseat. 

My mom burst into tears, but she focused on the road, and I felt the rage burn through me.

“Don’t ever say that again,” I said slowly and deeply.

I couldn’t tell if I was angry at her for hurling the epithet at me, or that she had made Mom cry.

“I’m never speaking to you again,” I said.

And I kept the promise. For over a year I ignored her, and soon she stopped trying to talk to me. But when I finally got my driver’s license and was ordered to drive her to school, a few days passed before I realized how silly and impossible this situation was going to be, so I broke the silence as we drove together.

“I just want you to know that you hurt my feelings,” I said. With these words, the spell was broken.

“I’m so sorry!” she replied, tears immediately flowing for us both. “I never meant to hurt you. I didn’t know what I was saying and I was so unhappy and…” the rest was lost to a burble of sobs. Immediately I felt bad and regretted that I’d punished her for so long, while also feeling somewhat proud that I had kept to my pledge and had the power to exact retribution. After making up, we’d kept each other at a distance. I’d left for college and felt liberated from family drama.

Our parents never fought. They’d been high school sweethearts. They married after graduating and had me the following year. Sometimes, their love for one another felt so intense, so intimate, that I didn’t feel like there was room for me. I wanted to discuss this with April, since she’d heard the same refrain, our parents had been young and in love and couldn’t wait for us kids to be out of the house, so they could continue their romance without us as distractions. I only remember my dad raising his voice to my mother once, and my mother screaming in retaliation. That was the extent of their arguments. They’d both come from abusive, broken families — filled with alcoholism and drug abuse — and they were committed to being the best parents to us, showing us how strong a marriage could be. 

“If I’d been allowed to legally marry a man when I was in my twenties, I’d probably made the same choice to marry young. ... Thankfully, I was spared that mistake.”

Now I realized, despite their best intentions, it set up an unrealistic expectation. We all had that same romantic notion embedded in us that we should find someone who we loved while young and stick by their side for the rest of our lives. If I’d been allowed to legally marry a man when I was in my twenties, I’d probably made the same choice. That’s what I desired with Brandon. Thankfully, I was spared that mistake. 

I wanted to tell my sister this and all the other things I’d learned by being out in the world for a couple more years than her. Maybe it was the big brother response. Although she was 20 and I was only 22, I wanted to protect her, to explain that sometimes emotional abuse is worse than physical abuse. 

By this time, I’d experienced both, but many people who know me — even though they think they know me well — could never imagine I could have been the subject, a victim, of either. Part of that is because I work very hard, spend a great deal of creative energy, to make sure the world sees a happy, productive, well-rounded and strong man. I want to be seen as attractive (but not conceited), smart (but not pretentious) and successful (but not proud, competitive nor braggadocios). The fact that I could allow myself to be complicit in a relationship in which I was made to feel stupid, ugly and weak was anathema to everything I hold dear. But the truth is that I was for several years. And I wanted to tell my sister this. Yet, once again, she drew a line: You are lesser. Your love is lesser. You can never understand. 

After my tumultuous college relationship ended (I’ll save those details for another story), I later admitted some of this to my mother. I’d never been very close to my parents—and didn’t share details about my personal life—but she was curious why I’d ended it with Brandon. He’d visited our family several times, and they’d all liked him, welcomed him to dinner and family outings. I explained that I’d wanted to make it work, that I wanted to find the love of my life, the way she and Dad had. 

“But he hurt me,” I finally choked out. “It was abusive.” 

“I’m so sorry this happened to you,” she said, immediately coming to my defense, as if he were a bully on the playground. “I would have clocked him if I’d known.”

It made me smile, but I was embarrassed, as if I’d proven how weak I was as a gay man. That she’d been right all along: I would be alone due to this flaw, desiring men, and this would forever make my life more difficult. 

I needed to hear Mom offer her support, however useless. Unfortunately, that mama bear protective streak has been one of her biggest flaws as well. She’s exhibited a violent temperament on multiple occasions to intimidate and defend when cornered. She grabbed a high school bully by the collar and yanked him from the window and has grabbed my sister’s partner by the throat in an attempt to “knock some sense into him.” While unforgivable, I also have empathy for these spasms of self defense. Her children are more important than anything. 

In this case, I didn’t care to be coddled, instead I was determined to prove her wrong. I could find sustainable love that was supportive rather than painful. I failed, however, to impart the foresight to my siblings. Both my sisters got married by the time they were 20, as did my brother. They kept to the pattern of high-school translating into matrimony. All their relationships are different, of course, with their own squabbles and successes and compromises and failures. My youngest sister managed to divorce and start all over, have a child and eventually find a man who treats her with respect. All before she was 25.

My brother, who is 10 years younger than me, left the small town where the rest of our family lives and he and his wife are happy and have started their family, busy figuring out how they can help one another succeed. He went to graduate school, where his wife supported him, and they both traveled to Taiwan so he could study Chinese. It’s a far cry from the life he might have had.

“In my case, marriage really was a cornerstone, not a capstone as many Millennials treat it,” he recently shared with me. “If I hadn’t married when I did, I’d probably be successful—but in a very constrained way. So when I explain my history, I give her and our marriage a lot of credit.”

April is still married to her high school boyfriend, and they’ve had two kids together, which has created its own new list of struggles. I’m proud of them all for persevering, even if their lifestyles are foreign and strange to me—as is mine to them.

She and I never spoke about her condemnation about men not loving the same way until a week ago, when I was preparing to publish this essay. After years of anxiety in which I’d built up this confrontation into something monumental, I explained how she’d hurt me that day—and how it had caused me to go on this decades-long quest to understand what the word “love” meant in its many permutations.

“I don’t remember that conversation at all,” she said. I was deflated, but she went on to explain that she was impressed that I was interested in the topic and confessed that she was also searching for the meaning of what “love” meant to her. So, now that we’re both middle-aged, it turns out we share a similar mission—albeit from different paths and perspectives.

After she read an earlier draft of this essay, she texted me to correct some of the facts (she was 21 when she got married and had been salutatorian of her high school class in 1997), and to offer her support.

“I love your storytelling and perspective,” she wrote. “Thanks so much for trying to save me from this codependent relationship [back then]. Pretty amazing that you recognized the pattern so long ago. It took me this long to see it. I ran from one abusive, dysfunctional family to another…”

The truth is that, despite being unintentionally cruel, in fact, she was accidentally correct and helpful in allowing me to see things that may have remained obscured if I’d not had that blunt attack at my lifestyle — even if not for the reasons she thought. It’s true men love men differently than the way men and women often do. While we may not have the confusion of different genitalia and hormones and societal lessons and imperatives that complicate heterosexual coupling, it doesn’t mean that our ability to love is any less vital, intense or fallible.

Men love men distinctly and passionately. We love each other with equal parts stupidity and good intentions. We cause pain and pleasure and all the shades between. We don’t have the weight of millennia of rules and restrictions binding us. We don’t even have generations of examples, so are often fumbling to mirror what we see with our families and friends and so many sentimental stories and fairy-tale examples. That’s where she, and so many others, get it wrong: It may largely be unmapped, and the rules are unclear, but we do know how to love.

Each week, The Queer Love Project publishes an original essay. Want to submit your essay and add to our growing archive? Find our submission guidelines and more here.