"My relationship with my partner is the gay version of marriage after 30 years," says a gay man who doesn't have sex with his boyfriend at all. How does their cohabitation work?
People, if they live together and have a partner relationship, usually also have sex together. According to some research, they even have sex more often than those who are single. But you're in your 11th year with your partner, and in terms of intimacy, your relationship is quite different...
That's true. (Laughs) I think we functioned quite normally at first, but now - despite the fact that everyone would expect us to be fucking literally every day - my partner and I don't sleep together at all. We love each other, yes, we live together, we spend a lot of time together too, but the sex isn't there.
Surely the obvious question comes to everyone's mind - what's the reason?
Somehow it came out that way. My partner and I also have separate bedrooms. This is due to different schedules, where I get up very early for work, whereas my partner works from home, so I would wake him up. (laughs) If someone wants to tell me something about sleeping in the same room with a snoring partner and getting used to it, I'll tell you straight away - I haven't got used to it and I don't plan to. I say with a bit of hyperbole that my relationship with my partner is actually the homo version of a heterosexual marriage after thirty years. We just got to that stage in some accelerated mode.
While it's not uncommon for there to not be much sex in a marriage after thirty years, sex in general doesn't just happen at night. Plus, even people who don't share a household but are a couple have a standard sexual life...
Absolutely, it's not about this lack of opportunity, we often miss each other in our appetite for sex. If I want to, my partner doesn't - and vice versa. And my partner is not a fan of the classic penetration, so once in a while we meet at least orally. But otherwise we've kind of gotten used to the fact that we're just completely incompatible on that level. I mean, at first we both tried, for about a year or two, but then the interval got bigger and bigger until we just ended up with classic sex altogether.
When you want to have sex, but you don't have that counterpart, isn't that frustrating?
Sometimes yes, my partner and I are quite different in many ways, but we get on well together. I'm also quite conservative and don't like change, especially change of something important. So the idea of breaking up with my partner just because we don't have the sex life expected by everyone is as scary to me as if I were to start looking for someone new.
So you're not even looking for a one-night stand?
At first I did, but it's kind of tiring to keep looking. While I have nothing against one-night stands, usually two people have to get more involved to make it worth it. And having someone steady just for sex probably wouldn't work either. Plus - and this is going to sound really weird - my partner and I are pretty jealous of each other, despite not really having anything together. (laughs)
I dare say that many people will now wonder how such a gay relationship without sex can actually be functional. Isn't it more like "cohabitation" than a relationship?
...(laughs) Sure, it can seem like that. But where is the line between friendship, love and what exactly defines these relationships? Just because I love someone doesn't necessarily mean that I have to sleep with them. (Laughs) I'm sure our relationship with our partner is not understandable to many people, but you'd be surprised how many other gay couples live like that too. The promiscuity among gay men, it's a really trendy topic, but it's also quite stereotypical. Just because someone is gay doesn't really mean that sex is the alpha and omega of their life. It's not. It's often about completely different things.
I'm sure that perspective is rarely seen, it's true. So what exactly is your relationship based on?
I guess it's the partnership, the fact that I have someone I can rely on implicitly. Someone who will always help me when I need it - and I don't have to ask them to, because they know exactly when that moment has come. And that goes both ways, of course. At the same time, I would say that you can't say that about a roommate. So we have a relationship that, in my opinion, exceeds many other - standard - relationships in quality, even if it doesn't fulfill the traditional "sexual requirement". Sure, it may not seem like an "ideal model" to everyone, but - what is "ideal" these days? I think nothing. So I'm grateful for what I have.
