Wow, thanks for your great letter! If I'd known you were open to writing to me I would have written to you much sooner. Since I misinterpreted a lot of what's gone on between us, I thought you'd find a letter like that pretty intrusive.
Two things came through in your letter: You're pretty much a mystery to me, and I'm pretty much a mystery to you. (I guess that's really one thing.) But now that there's a communication channel open again, we can get to know one another at a slow and careful pace.
Since you seem almost more perplexed by my behavior than I am by yours, let me take a minute and try to state some obvious things about our history, and then ask a few questions about just how you view all this.
First of all, I felt that the Thursday night last summer when we made love was just perfect. We didn't expect too much and were very comfortable keeping things simple. It put me into a state of almost delirious exhilaration for days. It also made me very over-anxious to be with you and know how I stood with you. In this sense, the sexualization was undoubtedly premature. We just didn't know each other well enough to have any idea of what we might want out of a long-term relationship, and sleeping together seemed to place some kind of pressure on us to make decisions about a level of committment entirely inappropriate at that point. It made me anxious and you jump out of your skin.
When I finally got to see you again the next Monday — I could hardly stand the waiting! — I got a very strong subliminal message that at first I couldn't make any sense out of. You seemed cold. You said, "Getting fucked is easy." You said, "Sex is usually better to think about than to do." And you didn't want to be alone with me when I brought you to your doorstep.
I felt uneasy during the dinner because I felt that you were avoiding telling me something that I would have been very upset by. Finally, after sitting on your stoop for an hour wondering if I was at least going to get a goodnight kiss, I stood up and kissed you without warning and left. You seemed embarrassed by the kiss and just intimidated enough to say "Oh, thanks for the dinner."
When I got home, something came over me and I cried. I felt it had taken me the whole evening to get the message that, no, you weren't interested in being my friend. I can't really justify to you why I would feel this so sharply, but I can only report that certain sensitive people like you attract me in a way that I always want to be permanent, and the idea of losing you seemed like death itself. But also, I never sleep with people until I'm sure that they really care about me, and to see what I thought was care evaporate so quickly definitely hurt. It made me very bitter about the wonderful hug you'd given me because I now felt I'd read much too much meaning into it.
In former relationships where the other person turned cold I've tried to hold on, hoping against hope that they would want me back someday. I knew that this path led nowhere, that you had a right to push me away, and that I would just have to be a man about it. But even though I felt rejected by you, I still wished you well and wanted to find something important to give you.
That Saturday you were sitting with a group of friends and we smiled at each other sheepishly without saying anything. The next afternoon I found you sitting alone, so I came over. "I'm having a hard couple of days," you said. "I'm having second thoughts about my whole life."
I realize now that I could be all wrong about this interpretation, but it sounded as if maybe you had felt hostile to me for reasons that you now felt were wrong, as if my presence in your life might yet trigger some genuinely radical forward movement in your psychological development. I've been a counselor for years at the Center, as you know, and a big part of my identity as a creative person is the help I provide people who are trying to grow and change.
"Anything I can help with?" I asked, hopefully.
"No, I have friends I go to to talk about such things."
This time instead of feeling hurt I felt angry. After the way we had reached out to one another, after sobbing in my arms, now you wouldn't even talk to me about what was wrong! So I went off, saying over my shoulder, "Well, I'd like to talk to you sometime"
I thought that you might call me after a few days and say, "Okay, you're upset and I'm upset so let's talk." But it never happened. It was all I could do not to call you, not to knock on your door, but I was determined not to make things worse by clinging. So I was left with a lot of grief to work through that month, feeling as badly as if you'd actually died, but also feeling angry that you wouldn't lift a finger to tell me what had come between us and why you weren't trying to reach out anymore.
I did have a weak moment several Saturdays later when I invited you over "to escape from the heat." Without even looking up you said "Yeah, I'll call you." But you never did. It would have been better for me if you actually had died, because I wouldn't have had to feel that same grief again and again.
So I began a studious regimen of "respecting your privacy". I looked the other way when you when you were with your friends. I tried not to indicate that I needed any response from you. I suppressed the wince of pain and anger I felt when you appeared around a street corner. Sometimes just to avoid feeling too wobbly I'd cross the street and go around you.
By September I thought that was about it. I wrote you any number of letters but always discarded them because that was just more clinging. I would just have to heal up and go on. After all, it wouldn't be the first time I'd forgotten about some difficult experience.
But then out of nowhere we passed one another on the street one day — I remember you were walking eastward with a black guy — and as we passed you said "Hello" in a tone of voice that meant "Thanks for nothing!" As if I had done some terrible thing you wanted everyone to know about. This was a complete mystery to me! What the hell does this girl want?? She won't talk to me, yet she makes resentful remarks in public as if I'm ignoring her!! I simply had no way to understand this behavior in you (which proves my point that we don't really know one another yet at all).
It occured to me then that maybe all you really wanted out of me was the kind of jocular smiling and waving I'd done during the four years I had entertained hopes of getting to know you better. If so, I certainly wasn't going to put on that kind of charade! We had really been through something. We had tried to be important to one another and failed. That wasn't something to be made light of. That wasn't something to sweep under the rug. If any reconciliation ocurred it would have to happen in private, using sincerely felt words. No amount of waving and grinning would substitute for that.
Now the questions. I'm really delighted and grateful to get your letter, and I hope it leads to our becoming friends some day. But the picture you present seems very different from the facts I remember and which I have outlined above. Did the things I've described actually happen? How do you explain them? I need to have some way of understanding you or else I won't know what to give you or expect in return.
Just to set the record straight on certain other issues, though, I want to say a few more things. First, although I find people like you sexually irresistable, I mean it when I said I'm offering a friendship. I don't in any way consider sex a necessary part of any closeness we develop. We may even come to regard sex as a complicating factor which is better omitted; we wouldn't be the first couple to go this route.
Second, I am comfortable with "hanging out" with you personally on a stoop, but your stoop happens to attract a lot of people with whom I'm not at all comfortable with and which turns "hanging out" into a rather impersonal experience for me. The people who hang around and are nurtured by you are different from the kind of people who hang around and are nurtured by me. This is as it should be. I don't need your friends to like my friends. But for the time being, if we're going to "hang out" in public for the purpose of taking the pressure off our interaction, let's at least do it away from our respective groupies. Maybe we could take a long walk in the park sometime?
Thirdly, I no longer define myself as gay or straight or anything. I respond sexually to a purring cat, when it comes right down to it. Somebody once told me, "I'm not heterosexual or homosexual, I'm just sexual." I feel pretty much the same way. I respond sexually to people I'm interested in and I don't feel sexual towards people who aren't in my life. The fact that I've had a gay relationship has about as much bearing on anything that happens between us as the fact that I had a straight relationship did on my gay relationship.
I'm beginning to see that you're much more shy than I ever realized. But you're not shy about writing letters.
I'm sorry my trying to be close with you today upset you, but I stand by what I said about communication being important, and I want to try to make it clear to you why it has to be that way.
I'm a pretty flexible person when it comes to relationships. I don't even require physical proximity, since many of my friends live in other countries. But the one thing I cannot do without is honesty and openness. I don't demand that you react to me in any particular way, just that you tell me honestly what your reaction really is. Without that, relatedness loses its meaning.
This is I think pretty different from many of your former relationships. The way your breathing intensifies and your voice trembles, I sense that people have often demanded that you pretend to feel in certain ways that served their needs regardless of what it did to your mental health. This abuse made you into a very intimidated person, which today you cover up with a lot of brashness.
You often make defiant statements to me when you think I'm pressuring you even though I know I'm not. You love to shake your head and say "No!" even after the conversation has moved on to another topic, for example. Defiance can creep into the tone of your voice at the oddest times. When you were stood up by Tony and I said you should take better care of yourself, you turned on me and said, "Don't worry, I know how to say no!" as if you were warning off one of your persecuters.
Most of these protective maneuvers require only simple patience on my part. But some moments are truly baffling, as when you told me not to attack you if you lapse into a female cultural role. Would I have started a community center where people take years to sort out the differences between cultural programming and inner personality tendencies if I thought lapses should be attacked?
We both should face the fact that you will continue to feel intimidated and frightened in many situations for years to come, but when it comes to your relationship with me, it's important to begin asking yourself if the intimidation is being caused by my actually demanding that you be false to yourself or by the ghosts of your past.
I'm not asking that you be dishonest. I'm not asking that you love me or always like being around me. I don't need that from people. All you have to say is, "I need to be by myself today," or "I'm not up to being with you just now" and I would say, "Okay, next time." But instead you say, "Gee, I may be getting a hair cut today and I don't know when he's coming and I don't know what to say." This kind of response seems to protect you momentarily from anxiety, but it's not fair to the other person since they can't make other plans, and it does nothing to spare you from going through the same intimidation all over again the next time.
Of course, it's okay to be diplomatic and let the other person down gently, as I would try to do with you. But to leave them completely in the dark hurts the bond too much.
When I called you back the second time it was because I sensed that you were using a subterfuge and I wanted to explain to you how much easier things would be for you if you could learn to say what you feel. But it just made you feel even more intimidated, especially when I suggested that my firmness on this issue might be helpful in the long run. "Why should I have to explain every single thing I do?" you said. You hung up on me.
I guess one of the important things I've learned from the Center is how good it feels to be around people who ask only that you be yourself, and how good it feels to show them that same approval. Communication really facilitates this freedom and independence because people do have a legitimate need to know what's going on even when the other person needs to withdraw or be indifferent. Tony doesn't hurt you by going off and having a good time, he hurts you by not letting you know what he's doing. You don't hurt me by not wanting my company, you hurt me by not letting me know what you're thinking.
Creative people need lots of space, but they don't need to hide their needs from equally creative people who care about what they're going through. And sometimes creative people need to be told when what they're doing is self-destructive even when they don't want to hear it.
What I'm basically asking is that you see your relationship with me as an unstructured and open-ended process of learning how to make use of new channels of communication and new ways of giving, all so that your capacities for independence and self-reliance increase and your need for what I'm giving actually decreases. I'm asking that you use me so that you yourself can become a better person. That too, of course, may be a source of stress, but it would be the kind of stress that people feel when they're trying to understand or do something new and important or simply when their lives are unexpectedly changed for the better.
It's only when people are unable to distinguish between oppressive stress and the stress of growth that they make choices that aren't in their own best interests. If it doesn't become clear to you that the stress I bring has constructive implications, you will have no alternative but to reject me. This will sadden me, but I certainly won't hate you for it, no more than I hold it against the many other people I've tried to be involved with over the years. There are other people on the fringes of my life who are courting me, and my focus will simply shift to one of them at that point. It's important finally to see that it's not as important who you do it with as that you get to do this at all.
I think I see my needs as being much simpler than how you think I see them. You've sometimes thought I was trying to get laid or trying to boss you around. But all I really need from people is that they let me give them what I have to give, which is to talk about and share our lives in a way that may over time help us to better understand ourselves and shape our own destinies. In practice this often means that they need attention one week, and I need attention the next. Sometimes the focus stays on one person, who becomes in effect a student.
One of the several reasons you're a special person to me is because you've also chosen the avocation of healer. You helped to heal me last week, and when you're capable of it I want you to trust my attempts to heal you. It's all I really want from you. Anything else, from watching television together to being lovers, would be icing on the cake. This doesn't mean that I won't from time to time ask you to dinner, or steal a kiss, but you know how to say no and you're not a child.