I want to believe...

This story started after my disaster with Lilly... My new year's resolution was to meet new people, 2014 was going to be the year of love... well, there is still time for this to happen, the year is not over yet...

When I got back from Christmas, I was reading 'The Rosie project' and I decided to copy the protagonist's scientific approach to love and message my highest match on OkCupid.

Of course, I should have read the end of the book to understand that there are no perfect scientific matches when it comes to love and that love finds you by chance...

If you want to read the book, this is not a spoiler, you know from the title that he is going to end up with Rosie... They should have named it 'The Wife Project', it would have maintained the suspense until the end... anyway it is still the best book I've read this year and it is definitely worth reading it...

Back to my story, I found my highest match on OkCupid in Brighton, 89% match but... she was not my type...

She seems a bit cold and distant from the pictures. In one of her pictures, she reminded me of someone I know that has a facial expression of constantly smelling a fart (The use of 'fart-smelling' to label some a bit snooty comes from my friend the zombie M&M).

However, I firmly believe in science and psychological tests (after all, are what I do for a living.... ) and pictures might not always reflect reality, so I send her a message. I was still not too convinced about meeting her, but it turned out that she was living with ... let's call him Mike, a quirky nice guy that went to class with me in my first year at Sussex.

If she was a friend of Mike, she should be a cool person, so I agreed to meet her at the White Rabbit.

When the day came, I wanted to cancel... I was looking for an excuse, anything to not go and pretend that online dating is a natural way to meet people, anything to avoid the awkward experience of meeting a stranger in that uncomfortable situation that I've been in several times with bad outcomes...

I was not feeling like making an effort but finally, I pushed myself to go...We were meeting at the White Rabbit but ended up in the same coffee place where I met Lilly and the American runaway married girl (for a change)..... The waitresses might think that I am some kind of serial dater lesbian or something... judging from this blog, it might actually be the truth...


She arrived late, I supposed that arriving late was part of her persona as she looked and acted like a star diva from a black & white film noir... When I saw her, I thought that she was possibly the most beautiful girl that I have ever seen.... it was classical beauty, there is a difference between attraction and beauty. Tinderella was attractive, but not particularly beautiful...

When I saw her, I realized that I'd seen her before in town, after all, there are not that many tall ginger girls in Brighton that dress in 50's vintage clothes, Brighton is a small town... I remember seeing her passing by on North Street and I thought that she checked me out...... but that must have been a year a go or so as I don't catch the bus on North Street anymore...

Back to the date... It was possibly the best and worst first date that I had in a very long time.... the worst because she was making all of the questions and comments that you are not supposed to make on a first date.

She asked me if I had any illegal addiction (what kind of question is that on a first date?). She also told me about her sob story and hospital experiences and about her special connection with her mother.... which is also something that you shouldn't tell on a first date to a stranger as it sounds a bit like Norman Bates on Psycho..... Don't get me wrong, I have a good relationship with my mother, but I think that bringing that up as a topic of a conversation on a first date with a stranger sounds weird...

The worst thing was when she called me a 'small person'.... well, I am not a tall person either but I won't say that I am a 'small' one. Does 6'3 (160 cm) for women qualify for being called a small person? Her comment made me feel as if I was some kind of a dwarf or something... I guess it was not her intention, I justified all of these wrong questions and comments due to the fact that she said that she spend a very long time in a hospital and perhaps, her social skills and interactions with people maybe were a bit....  undeveloped or... just different from the average person...

AH! I just remember that she also said that she was going to have babies within the next 5 years!!! Brilliant comment to make on a first date, your fertility agenda for your near future.....  although for some reason I suppose that it is a very lesbian topic of conversation...

ALSO! She said at some point something like: "people YOUR  age". She clearly called me old....!!! She was only 3 years younger... OK, I am 28, but I think that I am still young..... It is true that maybe I have a bit of a Peter Pan complex as I still live in a student house with 5 other people, but well,... this is the price I pay for having changed my career from marketing manager to doctoral student...

All of the 'worst' balanced out with the 'best' of the date. Despite not being my type and all of her inappropriate comments, I thought that in a way, we connected.

We both knew what it is to be stuck in a bad health situation. That kind of experience impacts your life and, I guess that finding someone that shares that with you, enhances your kinship with them and gives you a strange feeling of connection.

It was also the best date I had in a while because she was a 'believer'. She believed in love truthfully and during the date, she was narrating stories about people that found love... She was a good storyteller and a 'believer' and that compensated all of the rest.

I think that believing truthfully in something is what makes you being able to find it. Only people who believe in love find love... 'Skepticals' will be always waiting for something else, but 'believers' will create their own story...

Was I ready to believe and create my own story with another believer? I felt that I was stuck in the motto from the famous X-Files Mulder's office poster that said: 'I want to believe', I was feeling more like an 'in-betweener', someone who really wants to believe in love, but not feeling love stops you from believing in love and not believing in love stops you from finding love..... so I was feeling stuck in a circle and perhaps, it was time to break the pattern, Could a 'believer' be the key to break the circle.... ???

The first date had its 'good' and 'bads' that I thought that I would have time to balance them carefully and decide if she was worth a second date. However, when we were leaving, I said something about her ride home and she misunderstood me and thought that I was asking her out for a second date... so I didn't argue and went with the flow...(She had hearing aids in both ears....).

There was a second date, and she took me to a posh restaurant.

The funny thing is that during the whole date, I was trying to remember from were did I know the lesbian-looking waitresses... she clearly recognized me and we had an awkward moment of 'hey! I know you....!' but I didn't say anything as I was with my date... Where did I know her from? She was clearly a lesbian, and in Brighton, I know a lot...

Do I know her from an internet site?... I think that I would have remembered that... Where did I know her from....?

Finally, two days later it hit me.... she was working in the same building as me when I was working in marketing about two years ago now. She was the mail girl... it's funny how you take someone out of their context and your mind is unable to recognize the person...

Back to the date.... during the second date, despite being distracted trying to remember where did I know the waitress from, we had time to talk a bit more. She was telling me about her work and career projects and I was trying to find the connection that I thought we had on the first date.... but somehow it was not there...

There was something about her that whenever our eyes would meet she would look away... Was it shyness or did she simply didn't like me?

The second date left me with mixed feelings... After that, we didn't have much 'alone' time. Our third date was 'cinema with friends.... and our fourth date was her Birthday party, so she was surrounded by people all the time... at that party, whenever I was trying to talk to her and join her group of conversation, she would somehow find an excuse to go somewhere else and walk away.

I came to the conclusion that she didn't like me at all... not even like a friend as she avoided me all night.... but then... why did she invite me to her Birthday in the first place?

After her Birthday we kept in touch so I asked her to come by my house for a 'game night' with my housemates and some other friends.

We do game nights every now and then and I thought that it was a good opportunity to spend more time with her and see if there was something or if we were going to be just friends...

One hour after she arrived with Mike, she said that she was tired and needed to go home.... leaving her housemate Mike at the 'game night'...

OK, right! now it all makes sense, it was obvious that her friend Mike liked my beloved gay housemate from the night we went to the cinema and therefore, she invited me to her Birthday to get them together.... too bad that my gay friend was out of town that night.... now everything started to make sense.... but then.... why did she ask me to go out for dinner again by message? I was confused...

A couple of weeks later we finally met up again, only the two of us, it was a good opportunity to see if her only interest in meeting me was due to my handsome French gay housemate.

We went to the beach for coffee the two of us and it was nice... but again, after about one hour she had to leave.... and then, it took us a while to get back in touch... I hate to leave things unfinished so possibly under the bad influence of a gay man, I asked her through WhatsApp about what was happening...

I wanted to talk to her in person, but it seem impossible to find a suitable time for both to meet up and in the meantime several weeks had passed since our first date... I send her a cute 'make-it-or break-it' message, with a movie reference included, asking her if she thought of me as something else or just friends...

I know that this is the kind of message that you should not send to someone that you met online but well,... I wanted to know if she was interested... I think that in a way, I knew the answer already.... she was not interested in me....  but I wanted to believe, I think that I was more interested in her because she was a 'believer' and a good storyteller than anything else...

I wanted her to convince me that love exists with her stories, and perhaps create the perfect plot for a book or movie: "The highest scientific match turns into love...." but my attempt to trust science to find me love ended with a WhatsApp message with the words 'but let's be friends....' which of course it is just what people always say but never actually happen...

Now I know, after finishing 'The Rosie Project' and my own experience with online dating that your highest match on a website might not be your other half...

Perhaps, I need to do like the protagonist in the book and ask out the first girl that walks through my door, that might be the way to find my Rosie.... but again... 'The Rosie Project' is a fiction book and stories like that don't happen in real life....  Or is it that not believing that those stories could happen in real life makes you not have those kinds of stories in your life?

My Tinderella story...

This story begins with a new phone application called Tinder. I thought at first that the app was very "straight" oriented when my housemates showed it to me but, I still opened an account to try it. I believe that you always need to be open to exploring new ways of finding love but, I didn't really enjoy the way of swiping profiles right and left. Choosing a love partner should not be based on a first look impression so, after a few right and left swaps and got bored and disenchanted.

A few days later, while I was struggling with a complicated statistical analysis for work, I got a notification from the app on my phone that I had received a message from a girl called Natasha. Sexy name I thought so, I opened her message:

- Hello Beautiful...

I like receiving compliments from an online strangers, but I replied with my "ready-made" usual online dating answer that aims to move the conversation to the offline face-to-face territory:

- Do you live in Brighton? Do you want to go for coffee sometime?

She answered that she did live in Brighton and that she rather skip the coffee and invited me to her house straight away...

I was a bit shocked but turned on at the same time.... to much intellectual work that morning and I needed a break...  But... Going into a stranger house in the middle of the day? It was only 12 and I probably should be thinking about getting some lunch.

She insisted:

- I've got an hour to kill, I think that you should stop questioning yourself and come and have an adventure. It will make a hell of a story... (exact message... but with some punctuation and grammar corrected)

WOW!!!.... That was direct! Is she a psycho....??? I should close the app, delete her conversation and block her right now... But... if I started writing this post is because I didn't...

She sends me a third message:

- We are young. We will die one day. I want to have interesting stories in mine...

Hell yeah! She is right. I was actually having an existentialist crisis that week (or maybe that month.... or maybe I been having it this whole year.....???) and I was feeling adventurous so, I accepted her invitation.

Google maps indicated that her house was only 12 minutes away. I got ready and made my way.

But... What I am doing??? I am going crazy???? Going into a stranger's house in the middle of the day when I have a complicated statistical analysis to finish.... and I also have to do my groceries... and do my laundry... and..... when I realized, I was ringing her doorbell.

She opened a sateen rope and she was already in her underwear. She was holding two glasses of a sparkling alcoholic beverage... Oh WOW!!! I was not expecting that when I woke up this morning...

Well, I have to be honest here and say that despite the exciting situation, the environment was not as exotic and luxurious as you might be imagining right now... The rope was likely to be from H&M. The glasses were plastic cheap glasses from a £1 shop and, the sparkling thing did not even qualified to be called wine...  But... What the hell... She was a very sexy stranger in her underwear... and she was inviting me in...

I took the glass and downed it pretty fast and then.... well, there was not much talking after that... (I leave the following hour open to your imagination...)

The pillow talk started with her telling me that she was waiting for a friend to come with a van to help her move to another house on the other side of town. She said that she had a pretty busy day ahead of packing and moving. I suddenly realized that the entire house was packed in boxes and only the bed seem to have been left untouched by the moving operation.

Well, I had my statistical analysis waiting for me at home, and my food shopping.... and, my laundry... and, my house chores... So, I cut short the pillow talk and made the first move to dress again.

For whatever strange reason, when I was at her place the thought of asking her if she was going to the gym kept prompting into my head. However, I never made the question as I didn't want to sound like a stalker trying to find out her weekly routines.

Before I left, she told me that she studied at the same university and department that I am currently working... and that she liked my Chemical Romance which was playing on the radio.... (as opposed to the Music-Nazi girl that declared her deepest hate for them on our first and only date).

We exchanged phone numbers, but we didn't contact each other again. However, how small is Brighton that I bumped into her that following Tuesday. Of course, she was at my usual body balance Tuesday class. I guess that my unconscious mind recognized her from the gym and kept prompting the question of whether she was going to the gym into my mind as a conversational cue or some sort of strange mind connection.

Now, I bump into her from time to time at the gym but we barely talk. For all I know she might have a boyfriend (since it says is bi in her Tinder profile....) or a girlfriend.... or she just wanted to experiment... or she might just invite strangers into an empty house every week... All I know is that at least I collected a very interesting experience... However, it would never have happened without the influence of another online date that I met before her (a story that I had actually not been able to write yet... but it will come soon).

Fuck Tinder, I'm single.

This was the story of my Tinderella... I had it once so, I don't think that I will ever go to a stranger's house again in the middle of the day. I've been there, I've done that and, I don't need a T-shirt to remember the experience!


Overall, it was an exciting experience, but the learning was that it is easy to find sex from a dating application where you swipe right and left based on looks but finding romance is a bit more difficult... and I want romance... Can Tinder deliver romance?

My coming out story...

In my last post, I took a stroll down memory lane and recalled my first online date. In this post, I would like to share my very long coming out story... 

I usually like to hear other people's coming out stories. They tend to have the ingredients of self-empowerment and pride that make a good story. However, not everyone has one, some people grew up in an environment in where they didn't need to come out as gays or lesbians... Hopefully, in the future, coming out will be a curious anecdote mentioned in sociology and history books, but for now, the society has not fully accepted same-sex love. Some coming out stories are really painful, but they all found the happy ending that standing up with courage and willingness to live truthfully to yourself and being who you already are brings.

Picture taken in an Art Gallery in L.A. September 2014.

My coming out story has two parts.... first I had to accept who I was and then, I had to lose the fear of what other people would think of me for being who I was. Both parts were a struggle with my own self and both parts of the story are closely connected.

The first part of my coming out story, discovering who I was, happened between age of 16 to about 21. When I look back, everything makes sense now, I was gay but I didn't know what gay was: "The dots only connect looking backwards, not looking forward..." (Steve Jobs, 'How to live before I die')... 

I was in denial of my sexuality because I thought that being gay was being a fat short-hair butchy woman. The society told me that gay was being an outlier runaway and I didn't see myself reflected in that stereotype.

I didn't know many gay people... the only lesbian that I knew was a walking stereotype. This is like the chicken and the egg.... Do lesbians create the stereotype or is the stereotype who creates them?. 

Slowly, I started to understand that a lesbian perhaps was not defined by her clothes and hair style, but by her love for another woman. Then, I started to allow myself to contemplate the possibility that I was maybe experiencing feelings for some women.... However, I tended to block those thoughts in my mind.... I was not supposed to be gay, I was supposed to be normal. 

Now looking back, I can see how I might have had some feelings for women in the past, but didn't really put them into context.... I blocked them and I didn't allow them to grow....

My final Aha-moment happened in my year abroad. I met a girl for whom I was starting to developed those feelings..... It was one of those strange connections that I was not able to label before, but this time it was more intense. Perhaps because I was far from home, or perhaps because I was also slightly older than before and ready to acknowledge my feelings... 

One day, after a trip to the supermarket, I saw her in an intimate situation with a guy, he was whispering in her ear in the corridor of our student accommodation and I was walking by....  Suddenly, I started to feel very bad and I rushed into my room, I closed the door and collapsed on the floor by the intensity of the emotion with all of the bags from the supermarket in my hands... that was my aha-moment. 

It was not just that I was jealous, that I was, it was more about the confirmation that I was gay and had romantic feelings for another woman... (by the way it tuned out that she was not interested in that guy at all....). This was a confirmation more than a revelation, I was in love and it was a girl.... I was gay!.... and now what?

The second part, telling other people, was actually harder. I was afraid of  being disconnected, of being rejected and being labelled as the media stereotype of a lesbian woman... 

I saw my sexuality as a weakness, as something to be a shame of and I was not ready to tell the world. When I saw Brené Brown TedTalk on 'the power of vulnerability', I identified myself with it. She defined shame as "the fear of disconnection... it is something about me, that if other people see I won't be worthy of connection." I could see how for me, being gay was something shameful, something to be afraid of... I was a shame of a part of myself and scared of being rejected.... 

Also, since I labelled myself as gay but I was still in the closet, I started to notice that my friendships were not growing and my connection with my family was getting weaker. This was because, as Brené explains, "In other for connection to happen, we need to allow ourselves to be seen". By not disclosing my sexuality to other people, I was not able to make real connections. By omitting myself, I was creating meaningless moments and that was hurting me and undermining my self-esteem. 

That feeling of isolation is reflected in what my friend calls the 'sad eyes' of closeted people. My friend said that if you look at pictures from before he came out, he was always looking small, fearful, shy and unsecured, he had 'sad eyes'. 

I needed to start slowly to come out to my friends, but it seemed that it was never the right time.... Facing death is how I finally overcame my fear of rejection and I stopped caring about what other people might think of me.

In my year abroad in Canada, I had a moment when all turned white, I was suddenly embracing a peaceful feeling and there was only one thought in my mind: 

"This is it...".

I was hit by a car in a rainy day in the corner of Nicholas Street and MacKenzie King Bridge in Ottawa... Luckily, it wasn't it.... but I had a head concussion and was taken in an ambulance to the nearest Hospital. 

When I was release from the emergency room, in where they kept me lying down with my full back and neck immobilised by the stretcher for hours, I was given a leaflet that it said something like: "You have had a severe head concussion, please don't fall sleep and be monitored as in the next 24h you can die.... "

I had a whole day to process that I could faint and die due to the head concussion or perhaps I might not wake up the next morning..... 

I thought about my life, how I was living it and what it was missing... in this case, love, real connections and honesty were missing in my life. That day, I understood that only YOU live YOUR life, and what others might think, at the end it doesn't matter. You need to collect moments of happiness without worrying about other people's judgements... 

The next morning when I woke up, I thought that I was given a second chance and so I decided to start living my life differently. The first thing to do was coming out of the closet. Luckily, I was 4,000 miles away from home, away from my friends and family, from all of the ties with the society where I grew up. I was in a country where no one knew me... and where being judge didn't matter. 

Picture taken from my room in Ottawa (2006-2007)

One night, after I recovered from my head concussion, my dizziness and some sleepless nights after my accident, I went to a Halloween Party and I met a Spanish guy. He was dressed as a zombie M&M with an adapted costume that he bought at the dollar shop at the Rideau Shopping Center and had decorated it with some fake blood. 

He was funny, I thought that he was gay and that perhaps, I could talked to him about my sexuality. Few days after, I bumped into him in the hall of the Student Residence, he was smoking a cigarette outside and I invited him up for lunch. We talked about the experience of being away, my accident and we made plans to go to a house party together later that week. 

When we met up for buying beer at the liquor store that following night, I decided that carrying 24 bottles of Molson Canadian was the right time to come out. I needed to talk to someone about my feelings and since it seem to never be the right time, I just jumped into it, so I asked him:

"You are gay, right?" I attributed the condition of being gay to my companion first. Classic psychological mechanism of dissociation with the condition until the other party confirms on its part for the fear of displaying their own sexuality first and being perhaps socially rejected.

He smiled at me and nodded

"I think that I'm gay too...." I said. That was the first time that I used the word gay referring to myself out loud.

He smiled again and said:

"You think but, you don't know?"

He had a point. I had not kiss a girl in my life and, of course, I had no previous experience of any kind of intimate contact with the female gender.... It was then when I realised that I needed not just to acknowledge my label in front of other people, I needed to act on it... I needed to explore my sexuality. Being in a foreign country was going to help... 

That night, I also told to a group of people that were friends with the zombie M&M that I was gay. It turned out that one of them was also gay, and another one was bisexual. They were completely OK with me being gay, and for the first time in a while I was connecting with people, I was being myself and it felt good.

The learning from my conversation with the gay zombie M&M was that I need to explore my sexuality.... and in a pool full of international open-minded students in their early twenties, there were a lot of opportunities... 

House parties, sports events and lots of gatherings organized by the University..... However, the girl that I had feelings for was gone... She only stayed for a semester in Canada. I send her an email saying that I liked her after accepting her Facebook friendship request and finding out that she was also interested in women.

She answered back saying that she also liked me but that it was too late.... she has back in Europe and carrying on with her life... fair enough.... you need to take the opportunities when they come along.... and now it was too late.... I was a bit heart broken, but it was my fault, so I accepted my part and moved on....  

One night a lesbian looking girl approached me in a party.  She was actually a friend of the girl I liked before, but she was not my type.....She was short and very intimidating, you could smell that she was gay a mile away due to her tough way of walking around campus and her masculine body language. However, she had an intense deep purple-violet-blue eyes that could easily catch someone eye..... 

She kept on approaching me in parties and one night, I was drunk and I decided that well..., she was not going to be the love of my life, but she was nice and funny and.... available..... So on a drunken night out she became my first girl experiment. 

It wasn't bad, but I just didn't have feelings for her...  This experience confused me more than bringing any clarity about my sexuality.... It was not the intense experience that I was waiting for.... It was more like the experiences that I had in the past with guys....

Therefore, I thought that perhaps, I was not gay after all... I wanted to not to be gay so much.... I could see now how my mind was already trying to justifying my experience: You tried with a girl and didn't really feel anything different that with guys.... therefore, I'm not gay after all.... so maybe I should go back to guys and my life will be easier..... 

A week later from that first girl-experiment night, I was in a party again. I had a few cocktails and got a bit drunk..... My temporal alcoholism probably was due to the fact that I was having a bad month: the girl that I liked said that she liked me too, but she it was too late now.... I was feeling like an idiot for not acting on my feelings at the right time.... then, I tried to explore my sexuality with a girl but didn't go as expected.... so, I was very confused and anxious about my sexuality and love life in general.... 

I started dancing with this French boy. He was cute and tall, with lovely hair and nerdy glasses, a bit like the French version of a mix between Clark Kent and Harry Potter..... 

The night ended up in my room, I needed to see if I wasn't gay after all.... But what were the odds that it turned out that the French guy was in the completely same situation. He was also gay and was trying to see if he definitely didn't like women at all.... as you can imagine the night was not very promising... 

After he left my room, I decided that ending up with a gay guy was perhaps a confirmation sign that I was gay... from all of the available boys at the party, I chose the closeted gay... also, having feelings for a girl before was definitely a sign that I shouldn't ignore.... just because my experiment with a girl didn't work out, it didn't mean that I was not going to develop feelings for another girl in the future.... 

At the end of the day the 'feeling it or not' it is a matter of having feelings for the person, and I have to confess that I did not have feelings for my first girl experiment... I guess we all made mistakes... The moral of the story this time was that I needed to experiment with a girl that I had actual feelings for and stop messing around....

For a while, I was doing my thing without getting involved with anyone.... I started to go swimming.... and then, when I was doing my thing... without any plan I met a French girl.... 

We bummed into each other at house parties and at the poll quite a lot... She was very nice and had a nice conversation. We always ended up the swimming session chatting at the sauna.... or we were in a house party we would talked for a very long time.... she had the gay vibe and few of my friends confirmed it too.... 
I wanted to make a move.... Once I tried to shift the conversation to the gay zone, but she brought up her boyfriend... So, finally, I decided that perhaps, she was not gay and she was just friendly and that I was not going to make a move and ruin a nice friendship....

However, in my last night in Canada, she knocked on my door at about 4 am, I was still packing.... she had been wandering around my building since we said goodbye at the bar around midnight. She looked at me and hug me.... it was her way of telling me that she also had feelings for me.... 

At that moment.... I understood how the girl from the first semester felt when I send her the email telling her that I loved her.... it was too late... It was too late to see where this could have gone.... we were both coming back to Europe and we both had lives back home... 

We said goodbye and pretended to keep in touch for a while.... Thanks to Facebook, I know that she is now married..... to a GIRL!!!! I am very happy that she finally came out of the closet and left her boyfriend....

The lesson from this event was that we always regret what it didn't happen, and one more time, once the opportunity is gone.... it is gone...!!!

My year abroad was over and coming back home was going to be another story.... I had to face the people that I grew up with and tell them that I was now gay....  Well, I was gay before, but I was now ready to BE gay. This was going to be tough, so I started slowly with my school friends... Most of them were very understanding, however, they asked me the typical questions that we all get when we come out.... 

I remember that one of my friends said to me: 

"How can you be gay if you are way more feminine that I am?"  

To what I answered:

"Sexuality is not a matter of femininity or masculinity... gender identity and the conformity with the traditional gender roles in society is different from being gay or straight".

After given few speeches similar to the one quoted above among my friends, I told a few of my university friends too... But I don't think I told all of them. Sexual orientation among early-twenties university students tend to be often a topic of conversation so, I knew that any gay gossip would spread quickly. With some people I just acted as if it was assumed that I was gay and didn't do an official statement. 

Since then, I've been telling people when I meet them only if the occasion comes up, but I usually try not to make a big deal out of it... Brighton is actually a great place to live, most people is gay or gay friendly and no one judges you...

Regarding my family, I didn't tell my parents straight away. I was waiting to have a stable relationship to introduce it as something normal, but unfortunately, I didn't have too much luck in love during my first years of being gay. So, decided to put myself a deadline to come up to my parents: My 25th birthday!

Every Sunday before my deadline, when I was driving to my parents' house for lunch, I found myself going through my coming out plan in my head.... thinking that "today is the day, I'm going to finally tell them"... But whenever I opened the door and started to chat with them parents, it never seem to be the right time, it was never the right conversation nor the right moment...

One Sunday afternoon, when I was about to leave, I told my mum. 

She was sitting in front of her computer and I said that I was gay as if I was telling her that I was planing to have pasta for dinner.... without making any kind of speech or changing my voice.... as it was something very normal and did not deserve a special moment.... 

She lifted her gaze and said:

"Does this mean that you are not going to have children?"

She was worried more about not having grandsons than my actual partner.... I replied that one thing didn't mean the other and left...

I gave her a whole week to process and the Sunday after we had a lovely conversation over tea. I ended up crying but she was very supportive. I didn't tell my dad directly, but I know that my mum did that for me. 

My parents tell each other this kind of stuff, and he seems supportive. We watch movies whenever I go to visit and he lately keep insisting on watching gay theme movies. I guess that it is his way of saying that it is OK. 

At the end of the day, love for children is unconditional and if they love you, they will love you no matter what.

Finally, after my year in  Canada, and due to the fact the I didn't know that many gay people in my home town, I turned to the online dating world... so, here we go back to my previous post: "My first online date". 

I have had some off-line dating experiences too and I have being out on the scene, usually with the zombie M&M that I met in Canada.... and sometimes with other gay men too.... it wasn't until recently that I started to have lesbians friends... so the online world has been a big part of my dating life, possibly due to my insecurities in approaching girls out of a gay context... Maybe when I run out of online dating stories I will start with my off-line ones... but for the moment, I still have a bunch of stories on my pocket yet to be told... and the ones that are happening now...

Apologize for the long post...  but coming out was a long process for me...