I spent a very pleasant evening the other day meeting the mother of two sisters who are friends of mine; she was in town visiting them. Accompanying us all at the dinner table was a friend of the family – the son of Mum’s lifelong friend, whom my friends have met infrequently through their childhoods, on holiday. He was young, straight out of college, handsome, very endearing, and at that “life is all ahead of me, who knows how it may turn out?” stage, which is both magnetic and heartbreaking at the same time, to those of us old enough to know the price of dreams.

Something about his manner teased me, in its familiarity, the aching foreignness of his ease – it took me a while to work it out. As Mum was asking about his hopes for the future, and as he unself-consciously took centre-stage to answer in his polite and guileless way, I was distracted by some half-memory, like trying to remember a song’s title by running through the melody until the chorus comes along. Listening to the cadences of the conversation, the way he was presenting himself and the way he was respectfully received, I recognised the tune. I have been in his place, sang the same song – with my mother’s best friend and her two daughters. The security that allowed him to speak so freely and surely about himself was rooted in an alliance of families, the most enduring of ways in which human beings form relationships, and which I, as an urban metropolitan queer, have lost touch with.

Arranged marriages, at their best, are based on this very quality of confidence and mutual interest and respect – it’s a tradition which firmly rejects erotic and/or romantic attachment, in favour of a less frenzied, more sober approach to the business of forming a lifelong partnership. We in the West hear horror stories of enforced marriages and institutionalised misogyny, but that is not the full picture of arranged marriages. If we are to compare in its purest, abstract, theoretical way the two models of family, the one based on romantic (Western) or family-arranged (Eastern) attachments, undoubtedly the latter would be the one that would win hands down in terms of longevity and stability, which is the best for children, offering more continuity and a wider network of extended families to nourish and protect them through life’s travails. The fact that life isn’t theoretical or logical means that there isn’t a perfect model for child-rearing, however – but it doesn’t stop one wondering.

To those appalled at the thought of relationships not based on being in love, I would counter that there are many kinds of love, and we in the West seek love in exactly the same way we seek stimulation and instant gratification, with increasingly short attention spans and no time for reflection – we want the high of it, the buzz of it, the sense of arousal that comes from repetitive sensual friction. We want to be taken out of ourselves in the same way that e takes us out of ourselves; indeed, ecstasy, the word, has its roots in being taken out of place. We would rather be anywhere else but where we are now, in our uncomfortable isolated feelings – we want to be transported, carried away from being ourselves. We feel cheated when we fall out of love, when the romantic bubble bursts – we rage at our partners not living up to their initial promise of being constantly fascinating and stimulating and how we dreamed they’d be. We are not skilled in our culture to endure, to maintain, to see constancy as a quality worth developing – we feel we have a right to dump someone because they weren’t Mr/Ms Right or “our sex life wasn’t great” or “we got bored with each other”. We demand all-encompassing total satisfaction in our relationships, stimulation on all levels, emotional physical mental and spiritual, and settling for anything less than that is an admission of failure. It’s exhausting and dispiriting.

I can’t of course argue against romantic love – that’s very Canute-ish of me. I certainly couldn’t argue for arranged relationships, based on family grandees declaring with whom I should spend my life. Ever the rebel, I would probably refuse on principle.

But part of me would love it. Not the heterosexuality of it, but the fact that some wise old aunts and uncles might have put the word out to their friends to see if there was a man my age in another family who would be a good partner for me – the two of us being thought of in terms of shared interests and personality traits such as kindness and loyalty – in other words the information that only a family can know about its own, and in some ways are the essence of who we are. There’s no romantic lens to distort things, but a realistic appreciation of character, warts and all.

I’d love this to happen – not so I could marry the guy, but in some way to have something offered to me which is rooted in the best of intentions, and speaks not to a need for instant gratification, but to that deeper longing for long-term companionship, and an honouring of my sexual/emotional orientation at its highest, most spiritual level. With someone like that, at least there would be the chance of making a new friend. With family encouragement and respect like that, should anything happen between us, or to either of us, we would have the families to support us. Of course, as with anything family-related, it’s a recipe for interference and impossibly intrusive pressure, too; I’m not saying it’s perfect. But the strangeness of this suggestion begs its worthiness for consideration.

At the moment, I have very few ways of meeting a prospective partner that isn’t immersed in adrenaline and/or stimulation and/or testosterone – whether that’s in a pub or club or via a personal ad or on the Net. So far, my friends haven’t come up with a match for me – they’re not great party-throwers or goers. Although, I’ve managed to do it for someone else, a couple who are still together six years after I introduced them to each other. They met with endorsements in their ears about each other as women - no hype, no false front, but the security of personal recommendation.

Of course they were nervous meeting each other, but it was a different kind of nervousness – the basic foundation of trust was in place, it was up to them if they wanted to build on it or not.

And they did.

The split between families and homosexuals is artificial, created by fundamentalists, repressing their own perverse desires by rigid dogma and scapegoating. Families should be the champions of their gay kids, the prime cheerleaders and motivators and defenders of those who are more likely than most, even in a totally PC world, to feel isolated and ashamed about their difference.

At its most frenetic, the queer promiscuous sex-centred hedonistic lifestyle is at the cutting edge of the Western search for constant arousal, stimulation, and gratification; growth, progress, success, objectification, competition, onward and upward. Queer style and attitudes are everywhere – and the “family values” brigade have a point in identifying the lifestyle as potentially damaging. But instead of supporting and encouraging long-term homosexual partnerships, they decry homosexuality as an abomination – and the split perseveres and deepens with more hostility, with neither side learning from the other.

I am both a radical sexual queer and a person who wants a long-term companion. That the two have been difficult to hold together is part of my own struggle, but is also something I see reflected around me. The sense of secure, rich, calm stillness which emanates from people who are comfortable in their family circle, and extended network of friends, and who are not caught up in the commodification of their bodies and personalities in the race to find romantic attachment, is like finding water in a desert. I’ve stumbled into quite a few mirages along the way, and I’m getting kinda thirsty. But I don’t have anything to prove anymore, and having tasted the real stuff, I won’t settle for anything less now.