Sensitivity and the Straight Man

I was sitting on an old friend’s back porch this past weekend on a visit back to my hometown smoking cigarettes in the dark and recounting stories of the romance in our lives over the past nine months or so since we had seen each other. It was becoming quickly apparent that she had more to tell than I did as she had, in this time, gotten engaged and subsequently broken that engagement, began and ended several attempts at sustaining a relationship with the father of her children, and was in the process of feeling out yet another potential mate that she had just recently met on the internet. Not that that sort of story is anything new to my ears or of any shock value. If anything, this sort of back-and-forth, in-and-out of romance story has become the norm for most of the people I call friend, including myself. No, that’s not what made this particular conversation stand out in my mind, but rather the way she was describing the actions of the men in her life, the fragility of their emotions, the absurd sensitivity and the irrationality of their behavior. All these things so often traditionally attributed to the supposed emotionally weak-minded female and stamped onto gay men in ridicule. All these things so traditionally scorned by the masculine man suddenly flying out in the open like so much dirty laundry as if to say, well, I guess we aren’t that different after all.

Let’s take straight man number one. This one has apparently moved in and out of the house on at least three different occasions if not more, the last time involving such a balling fit of overwhelming tears, snot, and blubbering nonsense that she could not understand a word he said in his plead to let him stay. Over and over again he would leave the house with words like, ‘I know you don’t love me, so I’ll leave,’ or ‘I know when I’m not wanted,' all of which even the most naïve of people has to question the motives behind. And when he’s calling on the telephone not ten minutes later apologizing and rationalizing his way back to try again, it only confirms the fact that the whole emotional blow-up was no more than an effort to invoke a response from her that would stop him, profess her love for him, make him feel wanted. Nothing more than petty emotional games. If you have to go to those lengths to pull out an ‘I love you,’ from your partner, can you ever really believe that it’s true once it’s said? I know I only got one side of the story, but if even only half of what she was true, it would seem that the idea of the strong, emotionally-devoid straight man has been blown out of the water.

Well, I would probably have just blown that off as an isolated occurrence, but the stories continued. It would seem that the father of her children has repeatedly tried to convince her as of late that they should marry and try to be a family, including bringing a child of his from a previous relationship into the mix to be one big happy family. Over and over at a birthday party the previous day, she recounted how he tried to stroke her arms with affection and attempted to play the loving partner for the benefit of her and all the rest of the guests at the party, all the time telling her how nice it would be to be a family and how they should try to make it work. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that in my book, but when did straight men suddenly become so sensitive to the issue? And on and on she went with stories like this: dates in which the men were more concerned about the monogamy of the relationship than she was, men who actually called to apologize for not spending more time with her, men who fretted over going out with their friends over spending the evening on a date with her. Well into the night she continued, past my bedtime when I had to cordially excuse myself to my car and home for the evening.

Not that I claim to know very much if anything about the world of dating in the straight realm of society but it would seem that everything I thought I knew about how men and women were supposed to behave towards each other has been completely turned upside down. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, though. I have long preached the value of the individual, the value of the unique and nonconforming aspects of the human being. I guess if I wish not to be placed in a cookie-cutter mold myself, then I can’t really put other’s in one either. That would, of course, make me a hypocrite. What it really means to me, though, above all else, in some twisted way, is that we are more alike than we think whether we care to admit it or not: male, female, straight, or gay. Sensitivity seems to have broken the barrier into the realm of the straight American male.