I need to face the void, the emptiness, reflect on the reality of being on my own, see what’s going on inside. Meditate. Face the blank page or screen or wall; let something original and creative emerge, from a place of calm, of quiet.

I know in my bones that it’s the route to greater inner peace, and a more productive creativity, as it’s worked before for me, and it works for my clients. Yet I am avoiding it at every turn at the moment. It is overridden by a conflicting need: to meet, to make connections, to have my curiosity sated, to explore, to imagine, to play, to plug in to the energies of other people, to have fun.
On the face of it, most people would think it’s a no-brainer of a choice: screw the void, party! The road of excess can indeed lead to the palace of wisdom, and the pursuit of pleasure is, after all, what seems to drive the world. And I have no relationship at the moment that would be affected by my shenanigans. Except the one with myself, but we’re barely on speaking terms at the moment.
For many men, we try to get away with as much no-strings selfish pleasure as we can. It’s almost an existential issue – life is too short to not try and extract as much fun out of it as possible. In many men’s lives, we let other people, usually women, act as the brakes, the moderators, the reminders, the “nags”. This is relatively harmless if everyone is consenting and it suits the temperaments of those concerned; indeed in some ways it’s the traditional matriarchal Irish family model, the wife who mothers everyone, including her husband, who, as often as he can manage, gets out to the pub or the bookies or whatever takes his fancy or gives him his pleasure, and then comes home to the customary scolding.
The downside to that is that men can completely avoid emotional responsibility for themselves, remaining perpetual children on a leash, and women become eternally emotional responsible, the fun sucked out of their lives. But it’s such a common a feature of heterosexuality.
It can get particularly shocking, however, when men “forget” they are responsible for their own children, and need to be reminded. Which they do, time and time again. It is something I cannot really understand. While I have a lot of sympathy for the plight of men fighting for custody of their children, men who passionately do not want to be excluded from family life, I hear far more often about men who, hurt and resentful that they have lost the pleasures their relationship once provided them, cut themselves off from their children out of spite, refuse to pay maintenance or play an active care-taking role.
In their minds, they seem to lump the children in with their mother, and just try to blank them all out. It’s a very common story. It appals many women to see how men can sever such a fundamental relationship, as that of a parent to a child. But perhaps it simply is proof that, for many men, relationships are not the priority that they are for most women.
I’ve been thinking a lot about relationships recently, and how difficult it is for men to form them with each other, or at least sustain them. I’ve been listening to Robbie McDonald’s Mighty Quiet, an album written in rural Ireland, when he did exactly what I think is so brave and challenging and currently impossible for me: faced himself in his solitude, for a mighty quiet year, at the end of an eleven-year-long relationship.
The result is immediately one of my all-time favourite CDs, a touching and melodic memoir, a funny and uplifting reflection on the impact that love can have. The story behind it is that his lover left him to become a monk. They met in Dublin’s Gay Pride march of 1993, one I remember well because we’d just been decriminalized, and the sense of liberation was giddy-making. But it’s even more interesting to me that Robbie let him go, because he felt he didn’t want to stand between a man and his vocation.
When his lover tried to return, having had second thoughts, by then Robbie had moved on, and it becomes less of a clearcut melodrama, and more of a bittersweet real-life story, one which was told at the sell-out launch that he held in Bewley’s Café on January 12, complete with a great band and a couple of smooth classy tap dancers.
When I first met Robbie, I asked him if he’d actually asked his lover not to join the order. He looked startled; it hadn’t occurred to him. I wonder if this is where we men fall down when it comes to relate to each other in a non “no-strings” way. Relationships require us to make unfair demands on one another, to push each other beyond our comfort zone, into a pooled sense of responsibility, of family, for both to commit and hang in there when it gets tough, to make it last for its own sake, as a thing of value in itself, not only because it gives us pleasure. Women know this in their waters.
I’ve long had the presumably apocryphal fantasy that the only gay men who are really good at forming long term relationships with each other are Americans, and despite Robbie being of Irish parents, he is quintessentially American, with an emotional eloquence and openness that seems to make such bonds easier. This is despite the fact that one of my best friends from Dublin has just got quietly hitched to his boyfriend of five years, in a London registry office, with a party to come later in the year, and I wish them both all the happiness in the world, of course.
But let’s not let reality intrude into this column’s perspective. It’s never been relevant before, why start now?