What I Need Is Relational

I have this pattern: when I feel weak and unsure of myself, I go to porn. When my self-esteem is low or I feel nervous about my work, I get a fix by searching out just the right porn clip to masturbate to.

More recently, in moments of weakness and vulnerability, I have found myself missing my straight-male friend brother instead. I no longer want pornography. I want my brother. To talk to him. To enjoy his company. To feel his love for me. To hear him tell me that I am okay in his eyes.

I have become attached to my brother.

This shift tells me that my problem, overwhelmingly, is not sexual but relational. What I need is some deep, intense loving from a male-figure in the real to make up for the years of deficit in male attachments.

That's my grown-up brain talking; offering a cognitive solution to my condition.

My boy-heart?

It just cries. Cries for a father who will love me, hold me, and tell me that he is proud I am his son, over and over and over... until I feel okay.

I can't expect my brother to do this for me. He has his own family, his own busyness. I must find myself more brothers like him. There must be more like him. There must be...

Lord, please bring them to me.

*weep*

The Smell of Brothers

Brothers smell. They stink. Just like me.

Brothers can look good, but they never appeal to me in a sexual way. Even when they splash on the best of colognes, they still stink when you get close.

Brothers have erections in bathtubs together. They laugh about it. Compare sizes. Then they argue and fight--someone took someone's soap. Erections go down. Up and down, their penises, like their crooked teeth and bandaged elbows, are mere physical extensions of their stinky bodies.

I have never fantasized about my brothers. The very idea of having sex with my brothers would make me throw up.

My straight friend whom I love so much is my brother. It should be that if and when I thought of him sexually, I would feel like throwing up.

Man-to-man love may spark feelings of warmth, and even be sensual--like kids in a bathtub. But it should also foster manliness. Talk of sex with women. Connecting at the level of sexual attraction towards women, not each other.

After talking with my friend, and being affirmed again of his love for me in a most nonsexual way, I feel my sexual attraction to him dwindling down and in its place a manly-brotherly love rising up.

I feel stronger. Like an essence of maleness is taking over me.

And it stinks, that male essence.

The kind of stink that women don't have. The kind of stink that women seem not to mind--in fact, long for and lean on. The kind of stink that make men prefer to seek out the natural perfumes that permeate through the soft skin of women...

(...their breasts... their nipples... lovely to the touch... to the tongue...)

I love my straight male friend brother.

And he stinks.

Just like me.

Just the way God meant it to be.

Radical Man-to-Man Love

As a boy, I used to stroke the belly of my puppy. He would lie on his back and enjoy every caress. I also noticed that when I stroked him, he would sometimes sprout an erection.

I am thinking today about how much I love my friend. My straight, male friend who shares with me his very heart and soul, who knows me in all of my vulnerabilities, and yet still accepts me, fully. My friend, who upon hearing how I struggle with same-sex attraction, comes close to me, his body touching mine, looks lovingly into my eyes and tells me that he would like to embrace me in a long, warm bear hug. My friend, who is not afraid to admit that when he feels loving feelings towards others, gets a tingling sensation in his loins. Not a sexual thing, he says. Not a desire to actually have sex; just a physiological reaction of love.

Dare I tell him that I too get the same sensations in the loins when I feel the love I have for him? Dare I tell him that I long for him to stroke me on the belly to the point where I would sprout an erection like an innocent puppy, all giddy and vulnerable?

Alas, I am not an innocent puppy, and I am not straight like him. I have crossed one too many boundaries and I am conditioned to associate male-love with orgasm. Unlike my friend, male-love for me has been sexualized.

How much can one man love another man before it becomes homosexual?

I think my friend lives at the extremes of man-to-man loving, right up to the edge of homosexuality but not crossing over. He has brought me this very edge, and I am teetering, doing everything I can not to fall over the boundary; to embrace his love for me without falling sexually in love with him.

I remember one time, in my adolescence, when I was stroking another dog, and it sprouted an erection. Out of curiosity, I reached out and touched its protruding red penis. I don't remember exactly all that happened after that, but I do remember that its face changed and its happy posture turned into a confused and possibly aggressive one. I also remember feeling as though I had crossed a boundary, and I stopped.

I believe that my straight friend loves me deeply. And I have come to love him back just as deeply, if not more. But it is uncomfortable for me to love a man so deeply and not have it turn sexual. I have only loved one other male figure so deeply and not have it be sexual: Father God.

Such intense man-to-man loving is radical. For me to receive such loving is like having someone open up a huge gaping wound in my heart, pour antiseptic into it, and having me lie there quietly, accepting it all without reacting.

It is killing me.

And yet it may be the only thing that will restore my manhood to me. To experience being fully loved by another man without having it be sexualized. To physically internalize God's masculine, fatherly love for me through the love of a straight man, in the real.

If it be Your will, my Lord, then let me die, that I may find myself resurrected pure and whole in You.

Words

He wrote back and said three words that landed deep in my heart: I love you.

I struggled to accept the sincerity of those words.  It's not his issue, it's mine.  Years of rejection and abuse from intimate male figures--fathers, brothers--taught me that love does not come from men.  The place in my heart reserved for receiving love from men had been filled in and painted over.

Lies.  All lies.  He said he loves you and he is excited to see you.  This is what you need to hear, and you have no reason to doubt him.

And so I wrote back, "thank you."  Only two words, but they allowed me to taste the possibility at the very core of boy-soul that I am indeed lovable and acceptable as a man, by another man.

Three words uttered; two words uttered back.  The impact?

I was able to help 3 different people with their personal problems today, and still feel that I have more love to give.

I have never felt so full in my heart.

One Picture Can Say So Much

This blog is now open to the world.

Feeling Down

I'm very low on energy.  I don't sleep much at night, and when I am up during the day, I am tired and sleepy all day.

I have work to do, and I am doing it, but slowly.  There is a sense of fear in approaching this work.  So many ghosts.  Can I do this?  Am I man enough?

Had I not installed the accountability software, I would have gone to porn to get my dopamine fix.  Feel-good chemicals for the deprived brain.  But I can't now.  My friend would find out.

I am feeling needy.  Very needy.  And I hate feeling this way.

I am writing this post, hoping that someone will read it.  But will anyone?  I fear that in my need to "let loose and test my change," in my abandon to porn, I might have driven you away.  In my raw honesty, I have disgusted your holy sensibilities.

I don't blame you.  I know that I tend to judge others when things are going well for me.  So, let me not judge you for your silence.  Let me not depend on you for my salvation.

I can depend only on Jesus, who loves me through and through, from the inside out.

Update

It had been almost a month since I last wrote. Where am I?

I had to make some changes to my computer more than week a ago and I discovered that I could look at porn without alerting my accountability partner. And so I have been doing that frequently, at first, as an experiment to figure out my software, and then because I wanted to engage in it.

Over the past month, I have been isolating myself emotionally from other men. I have not met up with my accountability partners, have not had open, connected conversations. I suppose this means that I am struggling. Yes, I am. Busyness is a convenient excuse, but the core of the issue is the will. Let me explain.

I am discovering the importance of "choice" in my growth into manhood. My decision to "let loose" on internet pornography (to test my change, so to speak) revealed to me that although I have started to change, the change will not proceed without further effort/will on my part. I need to choose to change.

So, more recently, I have found myself looking at porn of men having sex with each other--something that I had never really enjoyed looking at. With extra time on my hands to surf, I have been able to find ones where there is a semblance of emotional intimacy between the actors, not just the raw act of sex. One could say that I have "gotten worse," but I am not sure if that is the case.

The new feeling of "being one of the guys" has come in genuinely. This has not been fabricated, I am glad to discover. I miss talking with my straight friend. It feels so good to experience his openness and acceptance of me with holy love. Talking with him about sex stuff while having him know the details of my same-sex struggles is one of the most healing aspects of my journey thus far. He loves me where it matters to me most. I miss interacting with him so much more than I want to masturbate to pornography. With him, the longings in my boy-soul is met; porn does not meet the deeper needs of my boy-soul.

I have wanted to write this post for a couple of weeks now, but busyness--and shame of needing to confess my recent porn habit--had kept me from doing so. But I am glad to have forced myself to write this. It is healing. Stops the isolation, so that I can proceed in my journey into manhood.

Once I publish this post, I will go and take care of my software vulnerability. Put a fence around the porn so that I don't tempt myself with awful, unhealthy candy that will rot my boy-soul and stop him from growing.