He always seemed a little “off.”
Though he was a high-school soccer player when we met, I always felt that Ian didn’t quite fit in with the other guys at our charter academy.
His stiffness, awkwardness, and stilted language were giveaways to me that he wasn’t actually comfortable in his own skin, but rather “faking it” to get by.
Yes, he played soccer with the boys, but he was also spending hours on the phone each night speaking with (mostly) platonic gal pals, often seeming to secretly prefer our company. He certainly seemed more comfortable, his speech less forced and his laughter easier.
In all fairness, he did have a girlfriend for awhile during our Sophomore-Junior years. When the pretty blonde finally dumped him — a fact that surprised no one but him — she confided in others that he had threatened to “kill himself” over it.
Keep in mind, they’d never had sex, much less hung out regularly as a couple, so the threat struck us other kids as odd, especially considering that he feigned aloofness about the breakup.
Still, probably because he was the only dude I really felt comfortable around in my angsty teen awkwardness, I’d developed a crush on him while he was dating this other girl.
I moped for awhile, then became enamored with another schoolmate, someone charming, laugh-out-loud-funny, and effortlessly comfortable in his own skin.
Basically, he was the opposite of Ian.
Still, Ian and I remained friends, a part of the same tight-knit friend group of me, two other females, and Ian. He still somehow seemed like “one of the girls”. At the very least, he seemed to gain fuel and confidence from our camaraderie.
…
Our friend group — two other girls, myself, and, of course, Ian — stayed in touch throughout college.
Ian, now a part of the “coolest” fraternity on his campus, became increasingly preoccupied with his looks. He began to spend hours every day at the gym, drinking Creatine for muscle growth and (almost exclusively) wearing Abercrombie & Fitch.
He bragged about getting “hos” at frat parties. He said he lost his virginity to a beautiful Hispanic athlete named Priscilla. When I pressed for details, he didn’t offer any. He sounded confused.
He would later admit that the story about Priscilla was made up, the girl in question based off his crush in kindergarten. Yes, kindergarten.
…
After college, I moved to a city far away from our home state of Texas. A few months later, he moved there as well, saying he wanted a taste of life there. We became room-mates. I had been deeply lonely and also struggling financially to make rent on my pricey midtown loft. I welcomed the arrangement.
We both waited tables downtown. Me at a Spanish tapas place, him at a swanky Italian joint owned by a middle-aged gay couple. Most of the staff employed were attractive gay men. Ian regularly bragged to me about how attractive the gays found him, while also stressing to me that it sometimes made him uncomfortable.
When a gal pal came to visit the City, they ended up drunkenly kissing on the lakefront beach after we spent a boisterous night out. We had all been having a great time, doubling over with shrieks of laughter as we traded stories and bottled wine, way past midnight.
After the playful beach kiss, however, Ian suddenly had a deeply puzzling mental breakdown. Just moments after the innocent exchange, he crumpled over into the sand, sobbing loudly and repeating again and again the same infuriatingly cryptic phrase:
“Él siempre esta allí. Él siempre esta allí.Él siempre esta allí.”
“Who?” I pried, mad with curiosity. “Your dad? Jesus? God? Your brother?”
He wouldn’t answer, becoming increasingly inconsolable as he continued to wail and sob as if he were broken inside.
I became frustrated, wondering why on earth he would behave this way — blubbering and referencing some unknown male figure — after kissing a pretty girl on the beach.
Frankly, it both worried me sick and irritated the shit out of me. He looked so weak, so effeminate.
He never did tell me what provoked the meltdown or who he was speaking about as he cried, though I asked repeatedly.
…
One night while roommates in Chicago, we did something that turns my stomach to this day.
I remember it as being, for the most part, consolation prize sex, as he’d been extra brooding and clingy as of late, especially after discovering that I’d been casually seeing a coworker at the restaurant where I worked.
Well, something happened while we “did it.”
He began to bleed down there. A lot.
He explained, embarrassed, that because he was not circumsized some skin was ripped during the process.
I started to feel extra sick to my stomach.
This seemed like what happened to girls when they lost their virginity.
Had he lied to me? Why would he do something that pathetic?
The next morning, he hunted me down to the Dunkin’ Donuts where I’d been desperately trying to avoid looking him in the eye.
He admitted that he had lied.
He had been a virgin. I had taken his virginity.
I felt so sick. I never wanted that.
But the thing is — despite my sexual discomfort with Ian, and my nearly non-existent attraction to him, we began a weird, secret codependent semi-sexual quasi-platonic relationship.
I still adamantly wanted to date around. however. Ian was crushed, soon moving back to Texas.
…
He quickly got a new job there. This time he was working as a bilingual case worker for a local non-profit that served low-income individuals with HIV or AIDs.
Once again, most of his clients, and coworkers, were gay men.
Lost and alone in a city far from home, I followed soon after, back to Texas, where we’d grown up.
In my codependent, selfish stupor, I wanted the security and comfort of having him around — financially and otherwise — but didn’t want to be his girlfriend, though I’d occasionally half-heartedly put out for him.
I called him when the “check engine” light came on in my automobile, when I needed a buddy to pack up my stuff into a U-Haul to move from one apartment to another, when anything remotely inconvenient happened.
He, meanwhile, got his rocks off by parading me around in front of his former frat bros and others alike.
I was out of his league, and he loved it.
…
A few months into this arrangement, I got on my laptop to discover that Ian had been in my personal FaceBook page. He’d devised a plan: Sent me a “relationship” request, then hopped on to my open account and “accepted” it for me.
When I realized what he had done, he told me, with wobbly bravado, “It’s official now…You’re my girlfriend and everybody knows it.”
Though irritated, I figured I’d asked for it by stringing him along. Plus, he was a “good” guy who didn’t drink, do drugs, or party. Maybe we could make this work, despite my growing lack of attraction towards him.
He was very Catholic, so I decided that I was too, and used my newfound faith as an excuse to get out of sex, which, thanks be to God, he didn’t initiate very often anyways.
…
Not very long into our newfound ‘relationship” I wrote a letter to one my close friends, who was now living long-distance and raising two kids with her stoner husband.
In the letter, I described how I felt zero attraction to Ian, and how that fact that was starting to really bother me.
A couple weeks later, I received a letter in return from my friend. She directly addressed my complaint about not being attracted to Ian, writing that maybe chemistry wasn’t that important. Attraction— she wrote — was exactly what had gotten her knocked up and into an abusive marriage with a lazy bum.
Ian, in typical fashion, spotted the opened envelope amid the clutter on my kitchen counter one day. He read the letter and told me he knew that I wasn’t attracted to him, but that he was okay with it.
I was startled by his lack of self-respect and irritated as hell that he’d snooped through my private correspondences. I also burned with shame for not being able to be attracted to someone who cared about me so much.
A few weeks later, we rented a mainstream film based on the memoirs of an exorcist priest. After the movie ended, Ian once again collapsed in tears, confessing to me that he felt deep within his soul that he was meant to become a priest himself.
I was a little confused, but also secretly relieved. I told him to follow his heart.
The next day, however, he dismissed his confession and told me to put it out of my mind.
…
Still, I had already begun planning my own escape out of the relationship. Though we were both in graduate school at the time (he followed in my footsteps, even applying to the same school as me), I applied for a summer-length Au Pair program in Europe.
Once accepted, I dumped Ian and began preparing for my epic trip. When I got back to the U.S. three months later, I had a new man overseas. I soon realized, however, that I was also pregnant.
My European lover promptly stopped messaging and calling me once I delivered the earth-shattering news. Ian, meanwhile, had been poking around, trying to re-enter my life, so I broke down and told him what had happened.
Furious, he punched a wall. Then he told me that he would raise the baby as his own. Initially, I was open to the idea, though I never agreed. As the weeks slowly passed, I became more and more reluctant. I told him I was moving home with my parents and would raise my baby there, instead.
Just a few short months after my baby’s birth, Ian reached out to let me know that he was joining the seminary to become a priest.
…
At one point, years into his vocation at the Seminary, he became suicidal, and was sent home to his parents for a temporary respite. After a couple months, he returned to school, eventually relocating to the Vatican in Rome to complete his training.
When we caught up via telephone a couple years ago, he told me that he had been spending the past few years living in dormitories full of other young men. He loved it, he said. In a low and disapproving whisper, however, he added that some of the aspiring clergymen were secretly gay.
Then, one week before his final ordination as a priest following nearly a decade of rigorous schooling, he dropped out of the program completely.
He informed me pretty quickly. We had been sporadically texting more regularly as of late, because I had taken an intense personal interest in investigative journalism, particularly in topics related to sexual abuse scandals within the Catholic Church.
I made it clear, however, that my feelings were strictly platonic.
Ian told me that was fine. He actually already had a girlfriend, he explained. Someone he met living in Rome. According to him, she is an investigative journalist at one of my favorite mainstream publications. He even sent me a photo of her, a photo clearly screen-shooted from a Google search.
I almost wanted to ask, words dripping in sarcasm, if her name was also Priscilla.
More recently, he texted me an update. “We are both moving back to the USA. I’ve got a new job there.”
“What job is that?” I texted back.
He told me he would be teaching at an all-boys Catholic school.
After all this time, he hasn’t changed a bit.
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
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White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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Photo credit: Andrik Langfield on Unsplash