"I slept with my ex-girlfriend more often. She knew something was wrong," Jarek says of the self-discovery that accompanied the painful breakup.
Jarek, I know you currently have a boyfriend. But it wasn't always like that. Before we get to your past, let's start, perhaps unconventionally, with the present. What's your personal life like now?
My boyfriend and I have been together for six years. We live together, we have his grandparents' house that we're gradually renovating. We have three dogs, a domesticated hostile cat that we love anyway, and I'd like a raccoon, but I don't know if it's legal. (Laughs) I'm kind of the dreamer, my boyfriend is the one who sees reality more, which annoys me sometimes, but it's very good because he completes me. We like to ski, and now we go skating and we're exploring sports, so we started with paddle boarding for example. It's kind of our hobby - trying new things. We're active, even if we're not strictly athletes. We rather like the experience and the fact that we are doing something together. We're best together, I guess.
Is this your first serious relationship with a man?
I had one before that I considered serious, but in retrospect it was more of a situationship . The typical manifestation is intimate behaviour as in a partnership, but it is shrouded in a great deal of insecurity, which usually stems from one of the parties not considering the relationship serious despite all its manifestations.- ed.). I have had a lot of pain and tears because of this, and I have had shorter relationships between break-ups... But the real thing came with my current boyfriend.
Are you gay? Or bisexual?
I'm gay, definitely. I can appreciate a woman's beauty, it's not that I'm disgusted by women, as some might think. Some people might even feel that way, that they wouldn't touch a woman, but I can do that. It just doesn't do much for me. It's not the same. It's missing what makes sex interesting, exciting, thrilling...
In my relationship with my ex-girlfriend of five years, we had sex really often. We got along as people, it worked, but something was still missing. I did a lot of googling and wondering what it was. I thought it was lack of experience, gradually I gave it the label "boredom in a long term relationship". I just tried to find common reasons behind not being into sex, like simply that after a long time your partner gets bored, or that by it being my first, maybe I didn't know how to relax.
Have you two talked about it? Did she recognize it?
We did, but probably not in the ways you'd expect. It was more about figuring out how to spice things up, buying each other different toys, watching adult movies... We tried to keep some sort of spark going, and I think we communicated very well. Unfortunately, in my case, nothing could help, because I didn't realize until later that I just needed a man. (laughs)
She knew something was wrong very quickly. I have to say she's a great girl, patient and empathetic. At the beginning she tried to show me what she needed and how, because she had more experience than me. Then she tried to meet me with different surprises and so on. I'm sorry that it must have bothered her, I certainly didn't do it on purpose and tried to make her feel good. But I just think women have incredible intuition. If they listen to it, they know everything about their relationship before anything happens.
So your intimacy was regular, but still kind of imperfect?
I slept with my ex-girlfriend more often than I do with my boyfriend now. I feel like we really wanted to work at it, and I cared about her. I didn't want her to somehow take it out on herself, to maybe think she wasn't pretty enough or whatever. She definitely didn't deserve to feel that way and I wanted her to be happy in every way. It just had a similar charge for me as cooking dinner together or watching a movie - just an activity you do with your partner. But no big fireworks.
When did you realise you needed a man, as you say? That it's just not about working on the relationship, but about an orientation and a fact that you can't change - no matter how hard you try?
I had some suspicions for a long time, but I didn't want to listen to them. I was pushing it out because I was in a really good relationship, family was fine, school, work, everything... I didn't want to mess the whole thing up. And I didn't want to get out of that comfort zone, because it's kind of scary when you suddenly start dating men instead of women. For me, it was. Suddenly you're going back to square one and it's stressful and it's hard on your self-esteem and stability.
When my girlfriend and I were on our last vacation, she came up to me and just asked me if I was bisexual. That she had this feeling about me and had wanted to ask me for a long time. We both cried through the ensuing discussion. Then we broke up quietly when we came to the conclusion that I'm just into guys. And we're friends.
Did the breakup hurt? How did you feel about that woman? Did you love her?
Again, I thought so. But it was more like a very deep friendship. For me, losing a friend is almost as painful as losing a partner. We really understood each other as people, we shared everything. And even though we promised each other that it would continue, we were never completely open with each other again and our contact was practically kept to a minimum of wishing each other happy holidays, birthdays and being ready to help each other if something was wrong. But I lost a very important relationship to me, so the breakup hurt, even though I didn't learn what it meant to love on a partner level until I met my boyfriend.
We continued to talk about our first experiences of dating men and Jarek's relationship with his boyfriend. You can read more interviews again on LUI - always on Fridays.
