average life

I scooped the butter in the pan and turned on the heat.  The Roommate was at the ward’s Family Home Evening and I was making pasta with white sauce and a side of sautéed green beans.  After the butter melted, I tossed in the flour and started stirring.  When the mixture’s consistency smoothed, I poured in the milk and continued stirring.

I often cooked when I had a free night.  I wasn’t very good, the food often ended up rather bland, but I enjoyed it.  As I stirred, I thought about one day cooking for other people, but the thought didn’t settle anywhere and floated out of my mind as easily as it had entered it.  It’d been over a month since my most recent breakup and I was starting to settle back into my single life.  It was getting easier and easier to switch back into seeing my future as a single person and I wondered if one day I wouldn’t be able to switch into thinking about the future and having someone else be there as well.

As I stirred, I stretched my other arm to the sink, pan in hand.  I flipped on the faucet with the pan and filled it up, mostly to see if I could.  I turned off the water and placed the pan on one of the stove’s other eyes.

Even though the thought that I might get to the point later in life where I had lived singly for long enough that I was incapable of a relationship sounded like an emo thought, I was actually unbothered.  I had learned a lot about myself in the past few years and I realized that the things I was looking for in a man were severely limiting my dating options.  In the past, I had ascribed to Spencer W. Kimball’s teaching that “it is certain that almost any good man and any good woman can have happiness and a successful marriage if both are willing to pay the price”.  If both of us worked hard enough at it, I could make a relationship work with any good person.  Well, after dating several good women and several good men without permanent success, something had to be wrong with the formula.  Either:

1. The person I was dating wasn’t a good person.
   While I’ve dated people who weren’t perfect, most of them have actually been decent, caring individuals.  So this one was out.
2. I wasn’t a good person.
   Well, I definitely had some flaws, but I didn’t classify myself as a bad person.
3. We weren’t willing to pay the price.
   Hmm… This one is interesting.  With women, I certainly wasn’t willing to pay the price as, for me, it tended to involve me to sinking into some pretty dark places, but with the men I’ve dated, I think it certainly could be said that we worked quite hard at making the relationship work.  In the end, though, it wasn’t enough.

So what else could it have been?  True, President Kimball probably wasn’t really expecting his words to be applied to relationships between two men, but that doesn’t mean that his thoughts didn’t have value.  So if two good people who worked really hard at a relationship failed there had to be more to it, right?

And as it turns out, there was.

Later in his talk President Kimball outlined more thoughts on building a successful relationship:

First, there must be the proper approach toward marriage, which contemplates the selection of a spouse who reaches as nearly as possible the pinnacle of perfection in all the matters which are of importance to the individuals. (emphasis added)

Aha!  So, it wasn’t really any good man and good woman (or man, whatever), but the two had be perfect for each other in all the areas that were the most important.

The water was coming to a boil, so I dropped in the angel hair pasta.  I also poured some olive oil into a skillet and started to heat it up and tossed some diced Roma tomatoes, chopped parsley, spices, and shredded parmesan into the sauce.

True, I hadn’t dated tons, but I had dated enough to know the things that I was looking for, things that the guy would have to be fairly perfect in.  But running the numbers didn’t seem too promising.

The person had to be a person: ~6,000,000,000 candidates
Call me old fashioned, but I wanted to be with another human.

Yeah, he’s going to have to be a “he”: ~3,000,000,000 candidates
This was one area where perfection was a must.

He’s going to want me to be a “he”, too: ~150,000,000 candidates
I had heard estimates the the percentage of people who were gay was around 10%.  I considered that to be way too high and settled for a still-generous-sounding 5%.

Into the olive oil, I dropped the green beans and the chopped almonds that I had almost forgotten I bought when I was at the farmer’s market.  The beans were damp and started to spatter.

Mormon background: ~250,000 candidates
Okay, this number was probably high by at least 50%, but it was about 5% of the 10 million Mormons on the books (divided by two).  This didn’t account for the fact that there was more women in the church than men and didn’t account for inactive or former members, but I had to start somewhere.  Also, this was the requirement that I had the least surety about.  I liked to think I would be fine dating someone who never had any real connection with the church, but it was hard to deny that I really wanted to be with a Mormon (or former Mormon).

A guy who wanted a family: ~10,000 candidates
Big hit here.  I had met more gays who wanted to legalize gay marriage more than they wanted to get gay married (other than a nebulous “yeah, you know, someday”).  Another reason for the big number drop was the likelihood of a Mormon gay to make his family the old fashioned way.

A guy who wasn’t threatened by my participation in the Church: ~500 candidates
Things were starting to look pretty sparse here.  As much as they wanted to respect other peoples opinion, many of the gays I’d met ended up being unnerved by my continued participation in the Church, especially post-Prop 8.  It was true that my relationship with the Church had evolved over the last few years – I discovered that too much exposure to the Church caused very undesirable side-effects in me while no contact at all had unfortunate consequences of its own.  There were plenty of things I thought the Church could do better, for sure, but the Church was always going to play some role in my life and anyone I dated was going to have to be okay with that.

I pulled the beans off the heat and sprinkled it with grated parmesan cheese.  I stirred the sauce some more as it sat warming on the low burner.  A large drop sloshed out and splattered on the floor.  I was wondering if I was going to make it through the meal without making a mess.  Nope.

Reasonably attractive: ~150 candidates
I wasn’t overly picky when it came to a guy’s appearance.  I was pretty thin, so I was self-conscious around guys who were much bigger than me, plus someone around my age, plus or minus five years or so, but what made a guy really attractive was common interests and personality, which brought me to:

A guy with whom I shared similar interests and who had a good personality: ~0.75 candidates
So out there was a cute, funny guy who was a little nerdy, raised Mormon, wanting to eventually start a family and was, apparently, about 4 foot tall.  Given the distribution of the world’s population, though, I’d probably have to learn Korean or something.

Dealbreaker.

I put some of the pasta on my place and poured the sauce over it.  The parmesan was melted over the green beans and the toasted almonds smelled a little like popcorn, which I decided was a success.  I scooped them up and put them next to pasta and sat at the table.  The food was blandish per usual and while I ate I opened my laptop.  The email chain that some friends started in order to arrange a viewing of Dial M for Murder devolved into a discussion of the position of a certain overly-tan Swedish male model on the hotness scale.  I contributed my opinion.  I emailed former coworkers asking what time we should meet up to eat at the new pizza place in West Midtown that was all the rage amongst the foodie-wannabes.  I read the message from Carrie that settled on Friday as the tentative day to go watch Rango.  I perused The Pioneer Woman for recipes to make with Jessica A. for the rest of our friends.  I sent a Twitter DM to the Terry’s asking what would be a good evening to spend time with them and their adorable three month-old daughter.  It was true, I likely was never going find a man with whom I’d fall madly in love, get married in one of those five states, and adopt a couple of crack-addicted Chinese girl babies, but, you know, whatever.

I could always just buy a motorcycle.

I’ve been pretty evasive, I realize, when it comes to the topic of me blogging.  I mean, what’s the big deal?  It’s just a blog – the internet is littered with millions of them.  It’s not as if people blog anymore, anyway.  Blogs are passé, having lost to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr (until those lose to the Next Big Thing).

Even so, I’ve had a long, overly personal history with blogging.  So sit back, kids, because it’s about to get overly personal.

I started this blog back in 2004 after having just broken up (in a rather poor fashion) with a girl, dropped $2000 on a new computer, and changed my major from computer science back to film.  Like every blog in the world, it was poorly written, overly trite, and dealt way to much to school and television, but, whatever, it was a blog, who cared.  I didn’t.  Obviously.

A year later, I started a my first secret gay blog under an anonymous screen name that I ripped off of another gay Mormon whose blog was the first dealing with the subject that I had ever read.  I found his frankness at discussing his feelings incredibly refreshing and I started one to give me an outlet for my own thoughts.  It did and those thoughts terrified me.  After only a few weeks of posting almost every day, I deleted the blog.

Of course, it wasn’t to be the last.

I graduated, moved to Atlanta and started another secret gay Mormon blog.  Like the first, I poured my tortured little soul into it which, of course, meant that was almost unreadable by anyone other than other tortured gay Mormons.  They did read it and I read theirs, amazed that were others out there sharing the same struggles.  While it wasn’t always the best environment (angst usually begets angst) it was kind of nice to talk to people who knew pretty much exactly how I felt when it seemed like no one else around me did, try as they might.  Of course I maintained this blog with no clue as to the existence of the other one.

This new gay blog, though, also collapsed under the weight of its own self pity and was shut down to the world.

Time passed.  I was becoming more comfortable with myself and I decided that I wanted to start the process of coming out which, of course, involved starting a blog.

This one would be different than the gay Mormon blogs that I had started previously.  Firstly, it would be less angst-ridden.  Secondly, it wouldn’t be a gay Mormon blog at all, at least not in the traditional sense.  While I had enjoyed the virtual companionship of those who understood how I felt, I decided that I wanted to write for people who didn’t really understand how I felt – most straight Mormons.  It would be lighter, a bit snarky, and would help people to see things from a new perspective without pushing them too hard out of their comfort zone.  This blog would also serve as the platform for my coming out – finally merging two parts of my life that have be divided for a long time and in April 2008, the first post of  Soy Made Me Gay was published.  Unlike my other gay Mormon blogs, the readership of Soy grew steadily and included as many straights (and those who claimed heterosexuality) as it did gays.

Then Prop 8 happened.  As the campaign when on, my daily unique count climbed into the triple digits, which meant that Soy was more read than anything I had ever written, probably including a letter to the editor that I had published in Time magazine when I was eighteen.  I struggled to maintain a positive tone as the two groups that represented me best carried on a disturbing war of words that exploded across the Internet.  I became ashamed of both of them.

Still, I came out on the blog as planned, having come out to my family a few weeks earlier to ensure they didn’t find out from the Internet and having come out to my ward in testimony meeting the day before.

The email started ramping up.  At first they were simply messages from people saying that the liked the blog, thought it was funny, etc. – which I found very flattering and caused my ego let out a belt notch or two.  Then the emails started getting personal.  People started talking about the struggle they had with accepting family members who were gay and how my blog had helped them to come better to terms with it.  At the height of the campaign, I was receiving two or three emails a week from gay Mormons – some sounding young – asking for advice on dealing with their sexuality, advice on coming out, and giving praise for being a good example – especially after I outed myself.  Some of these conversations happened over email, some over IM, and even others were happening over the phone.

All of this was happening as I saw the words of other Mormons insisting that they had to protect traditional marriage from attack from the gays.  People like me.  The gays called the Mormons bigots.  People like me.  I was starting to hate them both and certainly didn’t feel like, nor want to be, an example to anyone.

After the election was over, the president was black, California marriage wasn’t between men anymore (or between women), but readership stayed up and the messages continued.  I was nominated for a couple of Niblets (Mormon blogging awards), and one of my posts was published in Sunstone with the editor requesting more submissions.  Behind the scenes, I was sick of the whole thing.  I wanted to move on, and so I shut Soy down.

And I tried to move on for a long time.  I started other blogs, which usually only lasted a post or two.  I tried to return to my main blog, but it didn’t work.  Every time I tried to write something, I couldn’t.  Somehow all the pressure and expectations and anger had shut down the part of me that connected my thoughts and emotions to my fingers.  And so, I stopped writing.

Time passed.

I went to church.  I dated.  I changed jobs.  I fell in love.  I was dumped.  I dated some more.

After my most recent breakup, however, I found the part of my brain that had bound up my expression was starting to loosen up a bit.  I’m still not sure why I’m not paralyzed at the thought of typing my thoughts on random items or writing a personal essay about other random events, but I’m not.  And so I’m going with it.

I make no promises, of course, because who knows if/when my brain will lock up in another overly-emotional fit or when I’m just going to get bored and decide that blogs really are so 2005.  I’m here for now, though, and since I’m currently living in the ‘burbs, you’re probably going to hear a lot from me.

It’s not like there’s anything else to do out here.