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Perhaps the most pressing issue with people nowadays is their penchant for instant gratification - everything comes so easily that we get addicted to the notion of immediate relief to our problems- even though this immediate solution has been proven not to last, or solve any issues at all.... This is apparent in sex addiction - people seek instant physical pleasures that last for as long as the sexual act is being performed; it does nothing besides satisfying our libidos. While this may not post a problem in itself, it gets stickier when we begin to view other aspects of our lives in the same light - friendships, relationships etc. While true emotional attachment takes time to cultivate, some of us seek instant 'friends' and 'dates' through meet-ups orchestrated through platforms such as this forum/ the apps (jack'd, tinder etc). Hitting someone up online takes nothing more than exchanging profile information and pictures that both sides find visually appealing. While these meet-ups may sometime lead to a true, long lasting blossoming friendship, most of us here should have experienced that many of these turn out to be hi-bye dinner chats and may more often than not result in a not so satisfying romp. Taking this into consideration, maybe this community should take a step back and give each other time to grow, develop and dive deep into understanding each other better - relationships that take a lifetime to cultivate are those which lasts for - well a lifetime.

We were dating, however we distant from each other. Some shit happen & we confronted the matter. He doesn't want to commit into a ltr at the moment however suggest we still can hang out. I ask him if he still has me in his heart, he replied "Yes." What am I to do.

First of three parts: http://myrighttolove.com/2012/09/29/finding-love-as-a-gay-man-in-singapore-part-1/ Very long but insightful and worth reading. I was talking to a 23-year old guy today. He had just broken off from his relationship of 3 weeks, and he said that at one point, he was thinking about committing suicide. When I was young, I had similar experiences – not the suicide though. So I thought that I could write about this, if it helps. I started ‘dating’ guys from when I was 18. By ‘date’, I mean I would go out with them and hopefully get to know each other further to develop a relationship. But at that time, that would mean meeting them for the first time and becoming boyfriends instantly. Sounds familiar? ***** We might decide to become boyfriends with someone because maybe he looks good, he might have a nice personality or we felt we could ‘click’. It has become a bit more complex now, as compared to my time. Then, when you see a ‘good looking’ guy (note: “good looking” is used loosely in this article. There is no fixed and objective definition, nor is it meant to be a favourable or judgmental term), for most people, we might think that it’s ‘cool’ to be attached to a good looking guy – eye candy everyday, so why not, we think. But it’s more complex now. Some guys want to date good looking guys and be part of a good looking clique. There could be a variety of reasons – for example, you may find people of the same characteristics with you so that you can identify with one another. So, for some people, it’s because they play DOTA. For some, it’s because they have the same interests – perhaps fishing. For some, it’s because they share characteristics of being considered good looking, and they might feel there’s something more common to talk about. Some guys are unhappy when a clique had ‘formed’, and they might feel that this clique is keeping themselves exclusive as THE group of good looking guys. Some guys might feel left out, and they might start judging these group of guys, or get upset with them. For some of you reading this, this makes the gay community sound superficial. First, it sounds like we only like to date people who are good looking. Second, it sounds like we only want to hang out with people who are good looking. But of course, I’m only bringing discussing the issue of being ‘good looking’, as an illustration here. The reality is a lot more complex. There are many variations to gay relationships and friendships. I have brought this up, because of the relevance to the topic on finding love and because of the prevalence of how often I’ve been hearing about ‘looks’ recently. But identifiers are used by any person – straight, gay, Chinese, Malay, man, woman etc – to make sense of one another, and this is not unique to gay people. What perhaps makes it unique among the gay community is perhaps, how homogenous these cues have become. The main reasons why such cues become adopted at such a high frequency is because of the high intensity of interactions that gay people have with one another, especially in a cosmopolitan setting, like Singapore. Also, there are only a few specific venues where we see a higher concentration of gay men come together. Plus with the high level of usage of the Internet and mobile applications, the speed at which these social cues and behaviors get seen and adopted by other gay people become very quick. Back to good looking guys who seemingly hang out together, if we are able to take a step back, we understand that visual cues are only one of many reasons that are used when people identify one another to be friends with. There are gay people who come together because they can talk about the same things, who like to do the same things, such as going clubbing or going to watch a movie, for example. But why do we get upset when we see people whom we think are good looking hang out together? There are several reasons. I would explore a few here. To come back to the topic of visual cues, even as there are other identifiers, visual cues is one of the most ‘influential’, because it’s the most easily identifiable cue. You can just see a ‘good looking’ guy – just like that, with your eyes. Thus being good looking has somehow been alleviated to become of a ‘higher’ status in that sense, due to the overt influence and identification. So, when we see a group of people who are good looking hang out together, we become jealous because first, we feel that since we are not part of the group where there is a ‘conferred’ status, we might think that we are not good looking enough. Second, we thus compare ourselves to them and it makes us feel lesser – lesser because of our comparison to the perceived ‘status’, and not to their looks. There are, of course, other reasons. ***** But I digress. The purpose of this article is to discuss about relationships. Why did I go into a lengthy discussion on looks? Because for this particular story in finding love, when we are young and we see someone for the first time, if he is good looking, we want to be with him. And because of the above reasons, we might want to be with him because it might confer a status symbol, for example. Also, we get to be attached to a good looking guy! It doesn’t matter whether we have something to talk about or if we can actually communicate! It doesn’t – because he is good looking and since we are visual, staring at him takes the cake – at least for when we are younger. So, that’s one reason. But there’s also a deeper reason. Why do we want to ‘fall in love’ once we see a person for the first time and want to become boyfriends? The funny thing is, we get together immediately and thereafter, we might think that we don’t actually have that much to talk to him. You can’t really talk to him, like you can talk to your good friends. In fact, sometimes, you even have to come out with things to talk to him, and rack your brains in doing so. Then we tell our friends, “But I don’t really think I can communicate with him. We don’t really have much to talk about and I can’t talk to him like I do with you. But I love him and I want to be with him, but I don’t really know if we can work out.” ***** If you stop yourself for a bit and think, the truth is, for some of us at least, we want to feel love and so we try to turn any person whom we meet, whom we think satisfy our basic wants of a guy, and focus our attention of turning them into our ‘love-giver’. So, we have to be be aware of this – do we feel an inner need inside us? A loneliness, a wanting to be loved? And many of us do. Truth is, we grow up being unclear about what it means to be gay, or what it means to like guys. We are unsure – when we have a relationship with another guy, what should we do? Is it like a straight relationship? So as we learn to understand what other gay people and relationships are like, we make sense from by learning from the people we meet. But wait! Why haven’t we even stop to think why this is the case? Why don’t we even stop to understand what we are doing? We go with the flow because since everyone else is doing it, it must be right – gay relationships cannot exist, it’s all about sex and I will be lonely for the rest of my life. If you’ve read carefully throughout this article, you would know where I’m trying to get at by now. We have learnt from the people we meet and follow what they do, without reflecting on what it really means for us, and why we do certain things. We need to look into our lives, understand how it had been developing and how our beliefs and mindsets have developed from them – and whether we can, with this renewed understanding, do something about them. In the next part, we will look into this further and discuss how we can better manage relationships which don’t work out. http://myrighttolove.com/2012/09/30/finding-love-as-a-gay-man-in-singapore-part-2/ http://myrighttolove.com/2012/10/01/finding-love-as-a-gay-man-in-singapore-part-3/