“I couldn’t be for him what he wanted me to be.”

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Transcript for It’s Not You; It’s Your Gender

I guess I’ll, I’ll start at the point where I, um, actually first came out to myself, which was probably the biggest step in this process since everything else kind of followed after that. Throughout my, uh, adolescence there were, there was a lot of hiding and lie telling. You know, after I admitted to myself, “Well I may not be as straight as I thought I was,” then everything else kind of followed fairly quickly, I mean, given the relative amount of time between those two discoveries.  But, um, in general, I didn’t want to date boys. I was not interested in boys.

I got asked out by a boy at the beginning of the year, and I said yes because, well, because I felt like maybe I should just do something different, and this would maybe be the key to me getting over her. And, um, well, it wasn’t, but it did help me realize something else, which was that, I, uh, no, I really didn’t want to date boys. And that’s another thing, another pretty big regret that I have in terms of my, uh, past relationships is that, you know, I, uh, well, I couldn’t be for him what he wanted me to be. And, uh, it was a rough break up. I mean, no one wants to hear that from the person that they’ve been dating, that, um, you know, it’s not you, it’s your gender.

I broke up with him though, and then after that came out to pretty much everybody. I had a friend who, last year I guess, had expressed that, I think the sentence was, like, “I don’t know if I can be friends with them because I’d feel like they were, you know, hitting on me the entire time or, you know, checking me out the entire time,” and, um, I was really hesitant to tell her, but it sort of just slipped out actually the day after I had come out to my roommate, and, um, she was, she was a total sweetheart about it. I mean, she looked me dead in the eye and with like the sweetest, most sincere voice said, “You know what, if anybody tells you that this is wrong, and that you, you know, you loving someone who is a girl is wrong, then don’t let them say that to you because they’re wrong,” and she was like very impassioned about it, but people can really surprise you. And, um, they may say things sort of in a theoretical sense that don’t necessarily apply to how they actually feel about you as a person, and I think that, in many cases, that’s true that, you know, you are much more important to other people than your sexuality.

And at this point I’m out, I’m happy, and I’m actually dating a lovely girl right now who I guess we can call K for, uh, the purpose of this interview. She and I have been dating for, I think, three or four months at this point. And, uh, we’re very happy, and I’m happier now than I have been in quite a few years.