I don’t know whether I want a husband or a wife. I think that’s my fundamental problem. (Well, this week’s fundamental problem, anyway). I don’t mean whether or not I want a man or a woman as my partner – that choice is not mine to make. It’s just that things would be so much easier if I had an idea as to what role I’d like to play in a partnership.

And full partnership is what I have a right to expect, it seems, as the Western world is finally shifting in our favour, with the US Supreme Court decriminalising homosexuality in all states (ten years behind Ireland), and the Canadian government announcing it won’t contest recent court decisions allowing gay marriage, both in the same week.

The argument for gay marriage is so persuasive that I doubt it will be long before it reaches these islands. Mainly because the institution of marriage is strengthened, not weakened, by including same-sex unions. To introduce a second-tier “cohabitation agreement” or “declaration of partnership” legal framework – marriage-lite – to accommodate queer relationships would only lead to heterosexuals wanting it too – as in everything else. When change comes, it will be total. And then, finally, sexuality will have to be talked about properly in schools, which is when queer misery in adolescence will really begin to lessen, and as a result, in generations to come, there’ll be less of us walking around hurt and damaged and treating our capacity to love like a cancer. It’s a bright future. We’re not there yet, but it’s on its way.

Not that fulfilment springs from a right alone, of course. The heart is a curious beast, and when released from bondage it may mourn the safety of the prison bars. But it should never have been put there in the first place.

Anyway. That’s the bigger picture. What about me? Giving myself permission to dream of walking up the aisle (which, funnily enough, I never have before) I ask myself: do I want a husband? Am I husband material? Or, given the success of feminism, are we all, man and woman alike, lamenting that we don’t have wives anymore? Personal assistants and cooks and cleaners and personal shoppers and chauffeurs and childminders and hostesses and nurses – and sexually available too? Can I have one? Oh, they don’t make them like that anymore. What’s the point of marriage, then? Exactly. It’s confusing for us all, really.

It’s all negotiable now. It’s unhelpful to have a preconceived paragon of divine perfection as the ideal spouse, because we’re all flawed and human, and no one can match up to it. I know queer theory is supposed to herald a Saturnalian revolution in everything remotely traditional and biologically determined, but chaos can’t be tolerated for long. It’s not about whether I put my fleshy bit in your moist orifices or you put yours in mine, or both or neither. One cannot live life without some guidelines, some general rules of engagement – when driving, we need traffic lights and white markings and a general agreement to drive on a particular side of the road, otherwise there’d be a bloodbath. (Although, sometimes, at the end of a night out, I imagine if some psychic camera could detect the vibrations from broken hearts, the stragglers would be wading through gore across the dancefloor.)

It’s a question of attitude, of the stance I take in life when meeting or hoping to meet new guys. In other words, this summer, I want to date, and I want to entertain, and I want to get out there and acknowledge that I’ve no excuse anymore – I’m no longer a student with a shitload of work to do and no money. Well, I’m no longer a student, anyway. Faint heart never won fair maid, and that goes for the fair guys too. But just because I’ve been that fair youth, and I’ve known what it’s like to be on the receiving end of attention from bravehearts, doesn’t mean I know how to become one. But become one I must, it’s the only option.

Christ it’s terrifying. The real thing is terrifying. To meet people properly, good-humouredly, naturally, without chemical assistance, without falling over or stammering or sweating like a terrorist, and without looking like a practised Lothario. The last time I went out, I didn’t check the label properly on the deodorant I’d picked hurriedly off the shelf. (It gets very hot and clammy in London). It said “powderfresh” which I thought was innocuous enough. But it didn’t specify which powder. As the evening wore on, and I had not managed to catch anyone’s eye, let alone chat anyone up, I realised that I was powerfully exuding the aroma of a woman’s compact, circa 1977. I was standing there, sweating like a pig, painfully aware of being forty and fourteen stone, and smelling like my mother. I didn’t manage to make a success of that evening. Didn’t quite get into my stride.

To go up to someone at a bar or in a café on my own and come up with a line that is amusing, unthreatening, not desperate, not too earnest, not too postmodern, that successfully manages the tightrope between self-deprecation and overconfidence, and that has a subliminal subtext woven into the words that says, let’s have some fun, let’s be kind: that’s what I’d like to do. And when I’m met with a stony glare or an awkward silence or the mutual anxiety levels reach hysteria, I’d like to be able to smoothly and painlessly move on and let my self-loathing scar remain firmly unpicked. True confidence is not about being sure you’ll get what you want every time – it’s that you will survive it when you don’t.

The easier choice, the quick-fix answer to all that messy vulnerability, is to play the sport of sex and score without putting your heart anywhere on display at all. We guys can do that all the time with each other, it’s instinctive and it’s arousing and it’s addictive and it’s insubstantial. And, ultimately, immature. It’s not what makes a good husband. A man, as opposed to the puer aeternus – the eternal playful boy of the contemporary gay scene. Marriage requires people to grow up – and gay men need marriage, as other men do, if not more so. It’s not to get a wife – it’s to aspire to being the best we can be, as men.