Insert Witty Title Here

Watching Celeste and Jesse Forever made me revisit the age-old question of “Can you be BFF with your ex?” In my experience, the answer has been no. I dated my best friend in high school and when it ended, I didn’t have the wherewithal to cut him out. Instead, we just resumed our close friendship without the sex for FIVE YEARS. Oh, it killed me and all my friends were just like, “Ryan, what the hell are you doing? He’s your ex. You can’t be friends with him.” I would dismiss them, saying that it happened back in high school so it didn’t count. We were older now, more mature, and could totally be best friends without it getting weird.

Wrong. So wrong. This is always wrong, right? When has this ever worked out for anybody? Maybe in your 30s and 40s when maturity is a real thing instead of something we PRETEND to have but it certainly doesn’t happen when you’re a 22-year-old psycho with little experience in relationships. Simply put, I lost my shit for five solid years. As long as we continued to be best friends, I was a damn basket case. Why? Because I had never had such a close friendship with another gay guy before or after and it screwed with my head. Our bond was so iron-clad that it made my feelings all smudgy. If we got along so well, why weren’t we together? Isn’t that what you should do with your best friend who also likes boys? Shouldn’t we just get married and be best friends forever?

We often take for granted how precious a thing it is to be a best friend, how many people can’t freely use that term, how many have never experienced that very particular kind of love. When you think about it, to pronounce someone in your life as being more important than all of those other friends somehow, as being on a different plane of relationship that, despite not being romantic, is still profoundly important, is incredible. So many wait for the cue from their most-beloved friend to be able to tack on the profound, terrifying modifier of “best.” Who wants to be the person who prematurely proclaims the other their one-and-only-best-friend, when they were not ready to take that leap themselves? It’s the “I love you” of platonic relationships, and to be able to securely declare that with someone is a privilege not bestowed upon everyone.

2. Being loved.

While there is no guarantee that you are just going to wake up one day and find your soulmate in the produce section of your grocery store, the idea that you should ever quit the entire game of loving and being loved because it hasn’t worked out yet is awful. Sure, the media may tell us that women fall off of some invisible cliff at the age of 30, after which they are wholly unloveable, but we all know that’s bullshit. Aside from there being many kinds of love outside of the romantic kind — all of which are wonderful and highly worth our time, if underrated — there is no expiration date on the kind of enjoyment we can find from being kind and loving to others and receiving that kindness in return. Love doesn’t have to be some blonde man in armor riding up on a white horse to take you off to the wedding registry at Neiman Marcus, but it does have to be something you’re open to.

Is it just me or is going on a “friend date” more nerve-wracking than going on a date with someone you want to sleep with? First of all, the stakes for rejection are so much higher on a friend date. If I go on a “date” date and the dude’s not into it, I know it’s not entirely personal. He just doesn’t want to see me naked and that’s fine, I can totally respect that. THIS BODY IS NOT FOR EVERYONE, OKAY? But when you go out for drinks with someone you feel like you have a friend connection with and they don’t text you ever again to hang out, the rejection stings like a mother. Because it’s clear that they just didn’t vibe with your personality. THEY JUST DIDN’T LIKE WHO YOU WERE AS A PERSON. THEY HATED YOUR BRAIN.

I’m turning 26 next month, which means that it’s rare that I ever go on a friend date. At this point, my friend group is pretty solid and the likelihood of me meeting a new BFF seems slim. How would I ever, like, actually meet them? At a party? Sometimes I’ll meet someone who I think I really like but I’ll be too shy to make a move on them. I want to give them my card and be like, “Call me and let’s go on a friend date. I feel like we have a special connection and I would love to have an opportunity to explore that more, if you’re interested.” But, um, no. I can’t do that! Can I?!

1. Do I really want a relationship, or am I just afraid of being alone?

As we get older, people around us start pairing off — and never is the progression from “Let’s all see how many Jager shots we can do in a row, single buddies!” to “We are thinking about renting a place on the beach for a week or so this summer” more pronounced than in your 20s. It’s hard not to look around and feel like you’re suddenly the odd man out, the one who’s getting picked last for kickball, the third wheel everyone has to feel sorry for and take on their pseudo-dates. And if you’re female, take whatever societal pressure there is to pair up from your peers doing it, and put it to the power of 10. We have the media, more or less since birth, telling us that our manifest destiny in life is to find some rich guy on a (preferably white) horse who will come and rescue us from our stifling jobs as secretaries and take us off to some beautiful four-bedroom in Connecticut.

But is this what we really want? Sure, for some people, finding someone to spend your whole life with is easily in the top three life goals, but it can’t be that way for everybody. And even if it is your goal to find a soulmate, is your ultimate expression of that love going to be in the same cookie-cutter wedding that all of your friends and acquaintances are having? Do you even want to get married? It’s the kind of pressure that is so deeply embedded in us that even when we have someone, even when we’re at our happiest, we can’t help but look over our shoulder and wonder — just briefly — if these are the kinds of decisions we’re making to please all our overbearing relatives, and not actually us.

Behind every great gay man, there’s a real desire to have an awesome straight dude (and I don’t mean sexually). For many gay men, having a close straight male friend is akin to capturing the holy grail. It’s something that is fetishized and yearned for on both sides. In the past, I’ve sought out the company of straight men because, in a way, I feel like it validated my masculinity. It made me feel more versatile, like I could pass for “straight” and inhabit a heterosexual world more seamlessly than my other “gayer” friends. I’m not proud of this logic. On the contrary, I think it’s totally screwed up and an obvious indicator of self-loathing. Why does it give me so much pride when I gain the approval from heterosexual males? Am I that eager to not be perceived or defined as gay? I think it’s just another example of gay men’s aversion to be labeled as “femme.” If you go on any gay male dating/sex site, you’ll see a large percentage of men who are looking for “straight acting guys only.” They identify themselves as jock types and make a point to say they’re not into “femmes.” In the gay world, “femmes” have the least amount of power whereas so-called masculine men possess the most. So if you’re the kind of guy who’s never going to be described as “jockish” and you want to feel accepted, being friends with straight guys can often feel like the next best thing.

This obsession with masculinity and, by extension, straight culture, definitely bleeds into the straight guy/gay guy dynamic.

There will come a moment when you are sitting beside your phone and waiting, waiting in a way that makes the seconds drag on for hours and sneer at your desperation. You keep picking it up and checking it, making sure you haven’t missed something, that the machinery inside didn’t suddenly malfunction and fail to vibrate or blink when a message came in. This time, you trick yourself into thinking as you pick it up and check for the fifth time in two minutes, they’ll have written you back. How long has it been that you’ve been waiting for a reply? An hour? An afternoon? A few days? It doesn’t really matter. Your whole life of late has been a perpetual state of waiting for them to get back to you, to acknowledge your existence — and nothing really matters until they do.

When you miss someone who lives in a different state, someone whose phone has a foreign area code and whose city’s weather you check every morning when you wake up, someone you’re learning to love but you can’t say love yet so you say, “really, really like,” and, “think the world of,” and, “more than I’ve ever liked someone before,” someone who stumbled into your life by surprise, the missing can be particularly pernicious. It pries open your fingernails and crawls underneath, swimming just below your skin and settling like cement in your heart.

I want to know you. You seem like someone worth knowing. Every day I feel like I’m surrounded by people with hard edges and sour faces but I get the sense that you’re different. Too often people seem to think that they have the answers to everything. Their faces are trapped in permascowls and they can’t be bothered with anything besides their own narcissism. You aren’t like that. You still ask questions. You’re still looking for the answers.

We survived so much together growing up. Our biological father abandoned us when I was 6 years old. So when Marcus was only 10, he became the man of the house, and did a damned good job of it. And when our first stepfather turned out to be abusive, it was my big brother who saved my life by chasing him off with a baseball bat on more than one occasion. If it wasn’t for my big brother I’m not sure I would have made it to adulthood. But it wasn’t all bad. Not by a long shot. My big brother taught me how to catch tadpoles out at Farmers Lake, he memorized all the lyrics to Michael Jackson’s Thriller with me, then introduced me to The Dead Milkmen and punk rock. When I came out to him at a bar in New Jersey well over a decade ago, he told me he loved me just the same and I knew he meant it. And when he finally found the courage to come out to me a few years ago, he moved out to California and into my home. I did my best to give him a crash course in gay culture. He was a quick learner. Maybe he knew deep down he didn’t have much time.