Looking For Love In Hookup Culture Is A Fool's Errand
LOOKING FOR LOVE IN HOOKUP CULTURE IS A FOOL'S ERRAND
JANUARY 31, 2021
BY ANDREW SCIALLO
Friends of mine would always say the same thing when they heard I was talking to a new boy,
“You should just have sex with him and move on. Just have fun.”
and after a while, I began to think they were right.
Perhaps I was taking the whole thing too seriously. I was too naive to think that Grindr, or frankly any dating app for gay men, was where I was going to find Mr. Right. I quickly assumed from our meetups that the men my age were only after one thing. I became less optimistic and more willing to start taking dating less seriously. I had to teach myself to lower my expectations and keep my emotions unattached and undetected.
It all became a routine: talking to men online, exchanging naked photos, meeting later that afternoon, and ordering the uber before anyone could get dressed. I would talk endlessly about these adventures with anyone who would listen. I wanted all of my friends to believe that I had defied everyone’s expectations, including my own, in that I was able to let loose and have fun. Though each time, when I ran out of people to tell my sexual escapades to, I found myself alone, feeling the come down from the high these one night stands gave me.
I was desperate for someone to know me for who I truly was, to see that I was caught playing a game that I didn’t know how to quit.
I waited for someone to come and rescue me from the casino because I believed that I alone did not have the strength to put down the dice and walk away from the roulette table. NO STRINGS ATTACHED is what you will see on several Grindr profiles when you log on for the first time. Why do we single gay men make it our mission to collect as many lovers as possible? As my therapist once put it bluntly, “It’s like gay men are all competing in a race of ‘how much dick can I get before I die?’”
When I consider the idea—that some gay men prefer to have ‘no strings attatched’—I find that for me, all roads lead back to my fear of abandonment. As a queer child, there is a rejection we feel from the larger society, either directly or indirectly. It’s a rejection from the normalcy of the rest of the world. In many states, it continues to mean the loss of certain rights. So long as we live in a society that treats heteronormaty as the norm, LGBTQ youth will find themselves panicked as young people when they realize who it is they really are. It is a painful time, and for me at least, it’s a panic that did not evaporate when I came out.
Like any heartbreak from the past, it finds its way into the present.
I had trouble sleeping as a child with thoughts of queer panic in my mind, Will my family still love me? Can I still live a happy life? Will I be able to have a family of my own? Even if these fears turned out not to be my reality, the questioning of them, the doubt of them, the fear of isolation as a child, still lingers long after they have been resolved.
It is not unreasonable then that before these fears begin to take shape in our lives, we instinctively reject our society before it has the chance to reject us. By isolating ourselves, what we are really doing is trying to beat the heartbreak of rejection to the punch. We push away all that we believe may hurt us until we have trouble deciphering between what is and what isn’t a threat.
It makes sense that gay men are afraid to get too close to each other. It is by means of survival that we protect our hearts, for they have been damaged enough for one lifetime. We spend our entire childhoods fearful of the damage other men may inflict on us. In the locker room, in the classroom, at the barbershop, or even in our home. The reward and the relief we get from this trauma happens in our adulthood when we finally have the freedom to love whom we want, yet how could we be expected to love something once believed to be our biggest threat? It creates internal confusion.
No wonder we would rather live life with no strings attached. I still want to believe in the love of men, but it is hard given our history. I know love is not always the thing that drives us, though I wish it was.
