Email from a gay guy with a 'Type A' personality

A few weeks ago, a reader sent me the following email:

Dear GB

I'm 21 years old and I'm gay. I have been out of the closet for almost 3 years now. I'm a full time student in London, but also need to work full time as I have a small but time consuming PR company. I'm a classic type A personality and am 95% extremely satisfied with my life to now.

But I could really do with your advice about sex and sentimentality.

I've tried relationships a few times in the past but they're not for me - they consume too much time and energy and generally I end up resenting and disliking the person I'm dating very quickly.

Cruising, one night stands and plain old sex is way easier and much less complicated. So over the last 3 or so years that's what I've done - and I've tallied up an impressive count of notches on my bed post in doing so.

Up until recently I never minded this - I always maintained that I was simply liberated and could do what I pleased with whom I pleased. However over the last 4 months or so I have started to have severe doubts and insecurities about my sex life.

In some of your earlier posts you talk about hugging and comforting complete strangers with whom you've had sex - the story about the guy whose boyfriend left him to live with the lesbian mother of his child comes to mind. To a lot of people this would seem normal, kind and compassionate. To me it's alien and disconcerting. I don't even like to make eye contact with the person I'm having sex with - it seems way too intimate to me. I can't bear the thought of actually hugging them.

I've been able to have great interactions with people based on sex. Equally I've been able to have great interactions with people based on my sentiment towards them. But I've never experienced them both within the same relationship.

I'm worried that I seem so incapable of forging any connection with a potential suitor other than sexually. Whilst I'm content to sleep around at 21 I doubt I'll be happy to try and do so at 51.

I don't think I'm emotionally closed off or anything - I make new friends very easily and have a very open relationship with them. This is the only thing I just can't seem to get to grips with.

Do you have any advice GB? Am I just reading too much into it? Please don't let me become the guy in the corner of the club who looks like he used to be hot, but now just creeps the fuck out of everyone.

Thanks.

The impression that I get from this reader's email is that he is indeed a 100%++ type A personality. Although I think that the type A versus type B personality theory is too narrow to be taken seriously, it's clear to me from his email that the idea of a type A person was almost designed to describe this reader! The title of the email that he sent me was "sex and sentimentality", a perfect title for what he had to say, and the contents of the email are also perfectly focussed on describing his issue with a view to getting some help. And his last paragraph, painting a picture of what might become of him, was an amusing way to end the email :-).

The first thing to say is that I'm worried in case the reader needs professional help. Although he says that he doesn't think he's emotionally closed off, and that he makes new friends very easily, it could be that a lot of those friendships are quite shallow. Or given his type A personality, perhaps he only makes friends when he thinks that the person will be of some use to him. Indeed, the lack of emotional connection with people that he has sex with seems a bit extreme to me. As a banker, I myself am far more of a type A person than a type B person, but nonetheless I feel emotionally connected with other people far more than this reader does. As a result, I find the reader's behaviour hard to understand. So it's possible that he should talk things through with a psychologist, e.g. it could actually be one of those situations where there's something in his childhood that makes him behave like this. That's all the more true if I'm wrong and that his friendships are not shallow or not usually related to how useful the person may be to him, because that makes his feelings about his sexual partners even harder to understand.

It's true, though, that this lack of a broader interest in one's sexual partners is not exactly unknown when it comes to gay men hooking up with each other. My post titled 'Do you have sex or make love?' discussed that, and pointed out that even before online cruising, guys were still connecting with each other based only on finding another gay guy who could play the right role (e.g. top or bottom, etc). However, as the reader suggests, I'm sure that it is the guys who stay in that mode for too long who end up being the creepy guys in gay bars and clubs.

Some aspects of what I wrote when I got an email from a gay guy who works in the City might be applicable to this reader. Looking at Maslow's pyramid, it seems to me that at the moment this reader is near the bottom of the pyramid, focussing on safety issues. He could be so completely driven to succeed in his studies and with his PR company that he simply has no mental bandwidth for deep emotional connections and relationships. If so, when at some stage he feels secure enough to start trying to move one level up the pyramid to the love/belonging tier, then it's possible that his problem will correct itself. Indeed, perhaps that's the reason that he sent me this email, because he does feel ready and because of his prior focus on career he's not sure how to go about it.

Something else that I said in the post for the gay guy who works in the City was that he should try and become more altruistic. That might help this reader too. If he could force himself to spend time helping other people in some way, then perhaps that may help him develop the emotional and compassionate side of his personality.

Looking at it another way, for the reader to have a PR company when he's only 21 years old and still a student seems quite exceptional to me. Perhaps his problem with relationships is simply the flip side of what he's been able to achieve elsewhere in his life. To some extent the business world where achievement is everything is quite cutthroat and ruthless, so maybe he just finds it hard to turn that side of his personality off when it comes to boyfriends and relationships. To a hard headed businessman it might like seem like a waste of effort putting energy into caring about another person, but as one's life progresses and one suffers occasional setbacks, having a boyfriend who really cares about you and who can help you recover is priceless.

Does anyone else have any thoughts for this reader?