Let's start with the pleasure, just to remind me why I risked so much pain. Being close; really close, is beautiful. In some ways, I never was as intimate before with anyone, never felt met on so many levels of mind and body and soul. Never felt as shy. Never felt as happy as I was walking through the streets of London holding hands with him and singing stupid songs. Never felt as safe as waking up and looking into his deep eyes.

Getting to know someone slowly, over a period of months, before even the first kiss, made the experience so wonderful, when we did get close, that I will never forget it. It was a soul connection, and in some ways always will be. It was the first time I'd taken that time to get to know someone. I was so nervous. I asked him to be patient with me, and he was. Even now, hurting as I am, just after the breakup, I know the time with him was worth it.

With classic timing, my life takes on a strangely surreal tone in times of stress; it's as if the world's probability factor goes haywire. The next day, in a severely shocked state, I'm sitting in the Royal Albert Hall with thousands and thousands of white middle-aged middle-class women from all over the world watching a three-hour pageant, a five-yearly get-together of an organisation called The Fitness League.

I'm on the lookout for my mother, who's in the third-last number, in the group from Ireland. I'm sitting with my aunt, and beside me is an empty seat, where my beau was supposed to be sitting. Why on earth he wanted to be there in the first place was a mystery; and, although he was still, oddly, offering to come, I felt it too much to bear to cope with his presence when he'd told me he didn't love me any more the day before. So, with the empty seat a constant reminder, I watched hundreds of women in their prime, of all shapes and sizes, go through elegantly choreographed demonstrations of their hard work and suppleness, in brightly coloured costumes.

And I couldn't make sense of anything. I was in a different world, completely. This is what women are like, I was thinking. And I don't really know women at all. The afternoon was a celebration of their grace and commitment to health; a truly life-affirming endeavour. The fact that it wasn't high art was immaterial; this wasn't theatre in the evocative, creative sense; this was pageant in the symbolic, crafted sense. This wasn't about external beauty, but something internal; this was a show of pride in being ordinary women with ordinary bodies making positive statements about themselves in a joyful way. It wasn't really meant for public consumption; they were doing it for themselves, and certainly not for men.

And my world, of men who love men, seemed so alien that day. Family seems a million miles away from me at the moment; no settling down, no security, except that which I can muster on my own and from friends, who endure my prickliness when I'm stressed and alone and not on top of things. The prospect of forging a joyful, committed, secure and monogamous relationship with another man seems light years away.

It seems impossible for me to square the circle between intimacy and desire, between security and sexual exploration. No matter how I try, I cannot interpret a lover having sex with someone else as anything else but a statement of rejection of me. Practically all women and most men I know would see this as a common sense statement, one which should hardly need even saying; but that's my bafflement. It seems more like a character defect in me, in the context of the values of the gay subculture of which I am part. The men I've fallen in love with in London haven't shared those values . . .

I have been no angel. I'm not blaming anyone or playing the victim. But I am curious as to how and why I've chosen, on some level, to fall in love with those who, ultimately, do not aspire to monogamy, and who see my (less than perfect) struggle to attain it as a form of sexual guilt and manipulation, aping a heterosexual model of relationship, and, most importantly, as a means of tying them down, robbing them of independence.

I feel like a needy nagging wife, and it puzzles me as to how I've got like this. Why can't I lighten up? Why do I take everything so personally? It drives me, and the men I get close to, nuts. To blame the scene or the subculture or the other guy is of absolutely no use whatsoever. I know that I have to deal with the world as I find it, or bitterness will consume me.

My aunt and I do our best to giggle our way through the show, and eventually the Irish group come on, and I find my heart stopping as I see my 67-year-old grey-haired mother doing her thing, perfectly in step with the group. The music catches me; it's mournful and called 'Anything But Lonely' and I find the tears welling up. I look at the woman who bore me and feel such love and admiration for her that it surprises me.

Later that night, I can't bear being on my own; it's a Saturday night and I have to go out. I go to my local, of dubious reputation, and watch a bad cabaret act and notice a guy, a very handsome man, in an England rugby shirt. To my astonishment, a pint-sized Jimmy Somerville in a gravelly Scottish accent comes up to me, pissed, and starts railing against men who wear England shirts, and so I confess that I've been cruising him all evening. At this, he laughs, and bops off.

Later on, I make a lewd suggestion to the object of my lust, and he agrees, gratifyingly, and we get down to it, in the corner of the club. Jimmy sees us and laughs, seeing that I've "scored", and then we all start joking and laughing and I feel I'm in the world again. Rugby Shirt turns out to have a boyfriend, and declines my invitation to come home with me; this seems so inevitable that I don't know why I even bothered to ask.

Jimmy gets so drunk that he pours scorn on everything, men in particular; gets very hostile when Rugby Shirt teases him. Eventually he's won around, but by then he's so drunk he's bitter and sulking. I did try to give him a hug saying I thought he was great, and his early songs meant a lot to me, but he had gone too dark, and rumbled menacingly at me, leaning against the wall, not really seeing me, to piss off. I went home alone.

I know I'm on the right track, fundamentally. I know that the only way to get close to someone, to be intimate, is to take time to know them really well beforehand, in a way that goes against the grain of the gay scene here. Perhaps next time, I'll fall for someone who is willing to stay and be kind after the romantic bubble has burst, and to at least aim for some form of commitment. For that's when love begins; it's an act of will, and an act of faith.

But I don't know what to do in the meantime. Testosterone is a curse; I've got too bloody much of it, and I feel like I'm on the hunt now. But I've also got too much of a need for hugs and comforting. The two are incompatible.