Q: I’m gay and have been dating a guy for ten months. He’s great overall, and I would say for the most part we both want it to work out. But I am having a problem with his friends and other lifestyle choices. All of his friends are straight, and almost all of them are women. All of my friends have always been gay men, like me, so I find this strange. I don’t have any problem with women, but I don’t hang out with any women, and neither do most of my friends. He makes dinner plans for us with his straight friends almost every week, and I grin and bear it. They’re always old coworkers, so the whole conversation is them talking about old times or straighty talk about their children. It’s incredibly boring. He’s met my friends, and he likes some of them but dislikes others. It’s obvious that he is not comfortable relating to gay men, generally speaking. He does not seem knowledgeable about gay history or culture. For example, he strongly dislikes drag queens and never goes to gay bars.
“When contempt begins to overwhelm your relationship, you tend to forget entirely your partner’s positive qualities,” he writes in Why Marriages Succeed or Fail. Contempt, Gottman argues, destroys whatever bonds hold a couple together. You’ve been together only ten months, HOMO, and you’re not married, but it sounds like contempt has already overwhelmed your relationship. It’s not just that you dislike his friends; you’re contemptuous of them. It’s not just that you don’t share his spiritual beliefs; you’re contemptuous of them. It’s not just that his gayness is expressed in a different-than-yours-but-still-perfectly-valid way; you’re contemptuous of him as a gay man. Because he doesn’t watch Drag Race or hang out in gay bars. Because he’s got a lot of female friends. Because he’s happy to sit and talk with his friends about their kids. (There’s nothing “straighty” about kid conversations. Gay parents take part in those conversations too. And while we’re in this parenthesis: I can’t understand why anyone would waste their time actively disliking drag queens. But being a gay male correlates more strongly with liking dick than it does with liking drag.)
PPS: If a straight person told you, “I don’t have any problem with gay men, but I don’t hang out with any gay men, and neither do most of my friends,” you’d think they had a problem with gay men, right?
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