It is there that we meet “the guy” and fall for him, even if at some point it’s time to go back home.
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So, in today’s world, where gay men spend the money they would have spent on raising kids on travel (basically), we as a group tend to travel to other world gay-friendly destinations, for vacations or even for work, as gay male professionals in the workplace. All of Amsterdam! And that’s just a “Western” focus. We’ve probably heard of the “gay ghettos” of America: Hell’s Kitchen or Greenwich Village in New York City. The challenge is, fortunately, there are many places for gay men to feel this comfort and strong sense of community, historically and presently. Many gay men have to leave where they were born and raised in order to achieve this sense of comfort, what we clinical social workers call the “goodness of fit” with the “person-in-environment” theory (which I teach a lot in my graduate course on Couples Therapy in the school of social work at USC). In the United States, we are a nation of immigrants from other countries, in general, but for gay men, we often find ourselves moving away from the cities and towns of our Family of Origin because we often seek out cities where the LGBT community in general, and gay men in particular, are numerous, welcomed, and enjoy a sense of belonging, equal legal civil rights, and cultural validation. Straight or gay, people are often born in one place and live in at least several others before their life is done ( the average American moves 11.7 times in their lifetime).
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We’re not just born in a place and then live and die there for our whole life span. In our modern world, increasingly, we have a sense that people are mobile. HISTORY OF GAY MALE LONG-DISTANCE RELATIONSHIPS So when people hire me for gay couples therapy or coaching, part of what they are paying for in a consultation is that long experience and “abundance of data” of how previous gay male couples handled the challenge, and then you get the benefit of those who have come before you. As I like to say, the older I get, the stronger my opinions get, because there have just been so many case examples that either underscore what tends to work, or illustrate what doesn’t work, across many different kinds of gay male couples (national origin, ethnicity, economic class, age of partners, etc.).
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However, since my career has been so long, working with hundreds (really thousands) of gay male couples, I’ve gained through “observational data” many “example case studies” of how gay men have had long-distanced relationships and been successful – or not. This is why that dilemma sounds hard, because you really are trying to achieve closeness among distance, which sounds contradictory. One of these is, “How do gay men successfully navigate the challenges of a long-distance relationship?” And my answer is, “Very carefully!”īecause embedded into that question is the dilemma of two (or more, in polyamory) gay men in a relationship who are asking of themselves, and each other, to strike a balance between the emotional/romantic closeness that they feel, with the physical distance that stands between them when they live in different cities, states, or even countries or continents. As an LGBT-affirmative therapy specialist, and, more specifically, a specialist in gay men’s therapy, gay couples therapy, gay sex therapy, and gay coaching ( life/ career/ relationship), I’m often asked the same questions for guidance over my long (28 years) career.