Exactly four weeks ago today (Sat., March 14, 2009) things took a major turn for me in my journey towards sexual wholeness. This is a summary what has taken place so far.
1. A New Accountability Partner
I have known Brother A for more than a year, but because we live in different cities, we only interacted online, and infrequently. Last November, I started to have serious difficulty staying off pornography and masturbation. My accountability partners allowed me to slip through for many weeks. (I think they were sinning too since they avoided asking me the hard questions.) In desperation, I sought out Brother A for additional accountability, and I started this blog to process my walk. Brother A did a fantastic job of keeping me accountable, and my relationship with him started to change how I felt about myself.
The best part about my interaction with Brother A was when he talked to me in detail about the things that turned him on as a man! I was like a pubescent boy listening to a man tell him everything he'd want to know about the world of grown men! The impact was not just in what Brother A said, but the way he interacted with me about it.
Because I sent an accountability sheet to him every week, Brother A was privy to all of my secret homosexual sins. Despite knowing my failures, he accepted me and loved me--he would tell me so. He also started to talk with me about his own sexual turn-ons in open detail. I was able to get into the mind of a straight man and figure out how it worked. Because he was so open with me about sexuality, I started to feel like "one of the guys."
2. Meeting Brother A
A business trip took me through Brother A's city last month, and so he invited me to spend the weekend with him and his family. Exactly four weeks ago, I met Brother A in person for the first time.
We went to the gym together (he was not worried about being nude with me even though he knew that I struggled), he gave me massages (not in the nude!), I got to see how gentle and loving he was with his own son (hugging and kissing his 15 year old), and we enjoyed a great worship time together at church.
We also talked a lot. It wasn't just surface chatting; it was real, deep, and intimate. He related to me at the very edges of acceptability without crossing the boundaries. For example, when we were both nude in the public showers, we talked about having oral sex with our wives! I had never in my entire life felt so accepted as a man in my sexuality. And the fact that I was talking sex with a Christian man I respected was even more freeing.
It became evident by the end of the weekend that Brother A truly and genuinely liked me and loved me. Wow... an older, handsome, muscular, straight man who is deep, sensitive, and intelligent loves me! This is how I knew for sure:
Before we parted, I admitted to him that I had sexual feelings for him. I avoided looking at him when I told him, and I expected him to put an end to our relationship. Instead, he moved closer towards me--his body touching mine--and looked straight at me with the softest, most loving eyes. Then he told me that he loved me even more now, and that he wished he could give me a big, huge bear hug.
*Faint*
After that, I fell head-over-hells in love with Brother A. (Can you blame me?)
3. Deep Non-Sexual Male Intimacy
The first week after I left Brother A, I obsessed about him. I thought about him constantly. Each time I did, I would get this warm, achey feeling in my chest accompanied with a mild erection. Brother A had told me that he also sometimes felt this way, with women and with men, but for him it was a "sensual response of the body" and not sexual.
Because of my personal resolve to never fantasize about people with whom I have a real-life relationship, I did not allow myself to masturbate to thoughts of Brother A. It was really hard to do. To make things even more difficult, Brother A kept heaping his puppy-eyed, muscle-clad love on me over internet communication. I was forced to keep receiving all of his intoxicating emotional manlove without once being able to sexualize it. It was a nightmare in heaven! [post]
Five days after I left Brother A, I realized that I had not once thought about men sexually or had an instance of wanting to look at pornography [post]. I had not masturbated for over a week, and it didn't bother me in the least bit. It was then that I came to realize that what I really needed from men was not sexual intimacy but relational intimacy [post]. And that was when I started to believe--truly believe--that my SSsA has its roots in a deficit of male attachments [post].
[End of Part 1.]
I don't understand how you feel that this relationship with Brother A is going to move you towards a heterosexual orientation. It sounds like a highly erotically charged relationship.
ReplyDeleteI don't understand it either. It is just happening. And I am writing it down as I experience it.
ReplyDeleteYou met Brother A through the Internet, I take it? Was it through some sort of online community? I'm curious about how you and he came to the agreement that he would be your accountability partner.
ReplyDeleteDear Kurt or Pam (not sure who is who after having a quick visit to your blog):
ReplyDeleteHe came to be my accountability partner because I asked him. I met him through an online community and established a friendship there before I approached him to be my accountability partner.
It would be helpful to me next time if you gave me the context for why you are asking what you are asking.
Blessings.
This is Kurt. I am the underachieving half of the Willful Grace blog team.
ReplyDeleteI suppose I asked you these questions because I was contemplating writing a blog post about how we filter the facts around us through our belief systems, and two people with different belief systems can interpret the exact same experiences, or similar experiences, in completely opposite ways.
So I think that contemplating that issue made me really curious about your relationship with Brother A, which is something I think a lot of gay-identified men could identify with. But I think gay-identified men would regard that kind of relationship very differently. It would mean something very different to a gay man.
And as an aside, something that your posts about Brother A brought to mind for me was a story Mike Ensley (until recently the Youth Director at Exodus) wrote years ago about going camping with some men his age, and how he thought that was an experience that helped him to alter his sexual orientation. But I can't find that article anywhere.
But that camping experience is another thing that I think would mean something very different to a gay-identified man.
And I'm reading a biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of LDS, so belief systems have been on my mind a lot lately.
So you see, there's sort of a perfect storm of vague concepts just whirling around up there in my head. Maybe it will turn into a blog post. Maybe I will get distracted by my SuperPoke pet.
Aha. I see. Well, in my world, we call what you are saying "social constructivism." But there are physiological correlates that are biologicaly, and thus, one could say, universal. Sorry for getting all heady on you. Your fault -- you drew it out of me. ;-)
ReplyDeleteAll the best with your whirlwind of ideas, or even more scary, SuperPoke pet. *shudder*
Well, whaddya know, I did blog about it after all.
ReplyDeletehttp://willfulgrace.blogspot.com/2009/04/empty-box-faith.html