I received a letter this week from a reader. He was responding, he wrote, to the tone of some of my recent articles. Believing that I am getting increasingly lonely and sad, and that I deserve a better break from life, he proposed that, if I needed to have a pint or a chat, I should get in contact with him.

Who is this generous soul? My knight in shining armour, coming to my emotional rescue? I have no idea. He managed, in a full, flattering page, not to reveal the smallest bit of information about himself, other than his first name. No address, no second name, no way of contacting him except through leaving a message on one of the contact lines, which, frankly, gives me the shivers. If he had included an address, I would have replied personally to him, and not through the pages of this magazine. As it is, I hope he forgives me for seeming so ungrateful.

There are so many people like him. Invisible, even when introducing themselves. I know, I’ve been there. It is the tendency to assume the role of someone else’s mirror, devoting all one’s energies to becoming as sympathetic, supportive and understanding a partner as a putative Mr. Right could possibly wish for. Often there is a “healing” component to this urge, in which one seeks out and attaches oneself to those who are very needy or psychologically childlike in order to bolster one’s feeling own sense of self-worth. To validate one’s existence, one tries to be indispensable to another. In another era, these qualities were those required of a category of human being called wife.

I have been like this. I have also felt time and time again on the gay scene the same tug of desperation in others, hidden behind waves of affection and attention. Especially in guys whose stated sexual pleasure is in meeting their partner’s needs. This guy writes that he “lives in hope of having a guy like you as a friend or companion.” I have often felt that quality of ‘living in hope’. It is all-consuming, obsessive, devouring. It feels like an aching gap that cannot be filled, no matter how hard one tries, in however many different ways. Without someone to love and care for, it seems, life has no meaning. I do not exaggerate.

REMEMBER

NARCISSUS

When someone like this does enter into a relationship, there is often is a dark flip side, with which I am not unfamiliar. It’s the payoff. It is when the ‘supportive’, ‘caring’ and ‘sympathetic’ partner begins to seethe with resentment that he is not getting the same amount of love and attention from his beloved. Considering all the times he has enquired how his partner is feeling, he feels unloved when the partner forgets to ask how his day went. I used to wail that my partner wasn’t curious about me, in the same way that I was curious about him. Using all my powers of intuition to try and secondguess him, I would get so angry when he “didn’t bother” to try and do the same for me. “I am not a mindreader,” I have heard, so many times, from more than one man. And it’s true. People aren’t. Unless they are Betazoid, of course.

The reason I have written about being lonely is not to attract possible suitors. This column is not a serialised small ad. (Although if you are 6’7”, built like a tank, with the soul of a poet, and a yacht, feel free to drop me a line . . .) Hopefully my writing about being single again not an uncommon thing when you’re a gay man) can show that it is not the end of the world, that life gets richer sometimes when one chooses not to focus all of one’s energies into being the perfect mothering lover. Relatedness is not everything. Someone once wrote that we fall in love to distract ourselves from the dangerous possibility that we fulfill our own potential. I don’t know whether that is true or not – try asking me that when I am next in love. At the moment, though, it feels right, for me.

When one becomes a mirror for someone else, one is actually hiding behind it. Those who are most adept at this game erase any unpleasantness such as neediness or ‘selfishness’ from their persona. In other words, anything that smacks of their own individuality and difference. In so doing, no real relationship is formed; for the one who is ‘being cared for’ does not get to know who is really behind the mirror until he has been neglected so long that the stench of martyrdom becomes overwhelming. But he stays, because the mirror is very beguiling. Remember Narcissus.

The man behind the mirror does not risk exposing anything of himself because of the terrifying possibility of rejection; so, he is invariably the one who leaves in righteous indignation first having given the best weeks/months/years of his life to his “ungrateful” (and often bewildered) partner.

It is only by exposing something of one’s own needs and desires and values that one can enter into a genuinely reciprocal relationship. It is risky, and if one has never felt safe enough to do it in the past, very frightening. But in seeking a real relationship, one has to take a risk.

The real risk, however, is in concentrating on yourself, fulfilling your own creative potential. To be proud of yourself, by yourself, and for yourself.