[sebbie]

At this time of year, I cannot help but think back to my younger days and in particular how important it was to me growing up to have the opportunity to first learn about and then enjoy my own body. Wintertime starting with the shortest days of late December leading into early January played a particularly important role in this respect. The nights were long and the days are short, and a guy’s mind is not filled with so many distractions as seem to occur at other times of the year.

Somehow, for me, this meant a lot of time to myself, and, often under the cover of darkness, discover some stuff that I might not have discovered in the daylight hours. I have long suspected that practically every guy must go through this phase of their existence. A guy is in a situation whereby there is still much to be learned about merely being a male, and what better time to explore all of this than when a guy has time on his hands. School is probably out, and there is not the constant tension that arises from having to be mentally focused on the things going on around you.

I sense that not every guy copes in the ways I did. Some guy’s lives seem to focus at times like this on delving into relationships, perhaps early versions of somewhat sexual relationships with another person, most commonly at this age a female person. I realize that some of the guys like to brag to their male friends about where they got to in these early sexual conquests as if getting into a sexual relationship was a competitive sport.

A lot of people tend to think of teen-age relationships as being spur-of-the-moment kinds of things, but sometimes young people end up making better decisions than might have occurred had the decision been made later in life. One of my high school classmates dropped out of high school at age without graduating, to marry her sweetheart, about two years older. Some 53 years later the two of them are still happily married to each other. All I can say about this is “all the best” and that I am very happy that this all worked out so well for the both of you.

Having said that, I keep coming back to my own situation which suggests that getting into a relationship with a sexual partner (straight or gay) may not always be the secret to long term sexual happiness. Somehow, throughout my life, I seemed to have male friends who were in relationships with female partners and were miserable, and that is putting it mildly. As time passed, all these guys could think about is how much happier they would be if they could somehow go back into a situation whereby they were single again, without the heavy burdens that being in a sexual relationship brought to them. I’m talking about maybe a half dozen guys over the years in this situation, some who went through more than one divorce.

I became friends with these guys I guess in part they admired me for being “smart” enough not to get myself into one of these clunky sexual relationships that lead to so much unhappiness for both participants. They realized the life I was navigating seemed to be working out fine without all the baggage associated with having a sexual partner. But still, there were and are mysteries in how one can operate as a guy without being in some sort of a sexual relationship with a partner.

Or perhaps not.

To be continued…