You Think You Know a Guy

I’ve never been one of those guys that felt like I knew I was gay since I was a kid. I didn't fantasize about guys, or girls for that matter. I didn't think any guy was cute. I just have no recollection of having those little symptoms of, “Oh, i'm gay.” I’m 27 years old and I just believed that my homosexuality was a symptom of my environment. Yet unchangeable just the way my sense of humor is a symptom of my environment and unchangeable. Recently I was talking to a friend about relationships. We started talking about my relationships with girls who want to be in a romantic relationship with me and I would be totally down to be in a romantic relationship with them if I were sexually attracted to them. I started to wonder what it would be like to be one of the girls who are friends with me but are attracted to me as more than just a friend. That's when it happened. I realized I had been doing this with my good straight guy friends. I realized I didn't have a single good straight guy friend that I didn't consider attractive. I had been harbouring these romantic feelings for them but misinterpreting them as a desire for deeper friendship. I then started thinking back to straight friends I had as a kid and realized that I had been doing the same thing with them, just more obviously. Of course since they are straight this would put them off and we would stop being friends. However in my initial interpretation of the event it was just they didn't want to be really good friends with me because they already had some or I wasn't good enough to be a really good friend. So being the scientist I am I had to test my theory and I called my mom to see if she had noticed that when I was a kid. Among other things she confirmed that she had noticed that. So now I can say with confidence I was born this way. I know that difference shouldn't matter much but it does. It causes me to merge my sexual attraction with men to this desire for deeper friendship with my friends as two sides of the same thing. Before I always had an issue with being anything more than sexual with guys and it ruined a lot of relationships for me.TLDR: Through empathizing with women, who are my friends but also have romantic interest with me, I was able to re-frame childhood memories and discover I was born this way. In doing so possibly set myself up for healthier relationships with men both gay and straight.