Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
My Brother Came Out To Me Last Night
I should mention, for context, that I've been somewhat jealous of my younger brother for most of my childhood, adolescent and adult life. He was born with good looks in a way I was not quite born with, and then, in what I can only describe as an act of aggression, decided to go to medical school and become extremely jacked. I am fine. I do alright with the fairer sex. I have made my peace with this in the specific sense of someone who has not entirely made his peace with it but has successfully reduced it to an occasional background hum rather than an active grievance.
He is also, and this is relevant, the sort of person who has had men and women throwing themselves at him more or less continuously since approximately puberty, with the kind of effortless appeal that people like me analyze, in our more honest moments, with a mixture of admiration and despair. And yet, as long as I've known him as an adult, he's never been in a serious relationship. When I asked about this, which I did both seriously and as a recurring joke, he said he was aromantic and asexual and couldn't be bothered. His stated motivation for building an enviable physique was to "mog women," which is a sentence I found both deeply unhinged and strangely admirable. I told him this was fine because I could be interested in women on behalf of the both of us. He found this less funny than I did, and occasionally scolds me for letting my dick lead me into places neither of us would go with a gun.
(He had even shown me pictures of the girls in his batch, and the incoming ones. There was a startling paucity of hot women, especially in comparison to the batch that overlapped with mine. I'd know, I dated quite a few of them. I considered this a reasonable excuse too.)
All this serves to demonstrate that I believed him. Mostly. I'd put it at maybe 80:20 in favor of actually believing him, with the twenty percent being a vague unease I didn't particularly want to examine. He was categorical about it and the aromantic/asexual explanation was not, technically, impossible. I had, only recently, learned that he'd even kissed a girl once in high school, which was more than I'd achieved at that age, a fact I mention because it seemed like evidence at the time and I want to be honest about the quality of my evidence. I told him, several times and with complete sincerity, that if he were gay it would change nothing. He denied it each time. I let it drop, because pressing it felt more like satisfying my own curiosity than actually helping him.
He came out to me last night, under circumstances I won't describe except to say that they were upsetting and that my first instinct was to hug him, which I think was the right call. I told him I loved him and would continue to love him unconditionally, by which I meant at a level that extended to helping him with light body disposal if the need ever arose. He laughed. I think laughing was good. He cried, and I think he needed to let those tears out.
I had hoped for a little more time before telling the rest of the family, but our mother appeared, and he told her too. I could see he couldn't hold it in for another minute. She needed a moment, and then she was fine, because she is an extraordinary woman, and I have told her so myself, and I meant it. I would be doing well to find a partner who is even half the person she is.
Our father is a harder problem. He has a heart condition serious enough to have had him hospitalized for atrial fibrillation, which is the kind of detail that complicates an already complicated conversation. He's a good man and a better doctor than I can ever aspire to be, and he's not someone I'd describe as homophobic exactly, but he's also not someone for whom this information would be accepted with equanimity. I think he would come around, after experiencing some serious emotional pain and confusion. I'm less sure about the cardiac implications of the journey there, and neither my brother nor I have figured out what to do about it, beyond trying to get him to improve his health first.
Once my brother had actually told me, I was not particularly surprised to learn that his partner of several years was the person I'd known as his best friend since the start of med school. I was fond of him. I'd tutored them both through parts of medical curriculum. I'd thought of him as something like a younger brother, in the version of that concept that doesn't involve him sleeping with my actual younger brother. I would happily accept him as a brother-in-law, my brother could do much worse.
The problem is that his boyfriend is bisexual, wants to eventually settle down with a woman and have children, and has a shrewish and emotionally manipulative mother who has apparently made this preference known with some force, even if she doesn't know he's bisexual. They're both finishing their intern years, neither of them wants to do long distance, and my brother has said things are going to end soon. This is, I think, going to be genuinely painful for him, and I don't know what to do about it. Lesbians will tell you, if you give them the opportunity, that dating bisexual women has a similar actuarial quality to it - not universal, not inevitable, but a real enough pattern that people have been writing about it for as long as gay marriage has been legal in the West. My brother's boyfriend's stated plans match this pattern fairly well, and I'm sorry about that.
What my brother actually wants, as far as I can tell, is pretty unremarkable: a long-term monogamous relationship with another man. The problem is that this particular preference is not especially well-served by the available options. Indian gay men are - like gay men anywhere - by my brother's account and my own observations as a regular at a gay pub in Scotland (the people are friendly, the drinks are cheap, and I have a good essay/attempt at ethnography up about it), primarily not looking for that. Marriage out of genuine love rather than social convenience is unusual. This is not a value judgment about anyone's choices (which I consider none of my business), it's just a bad match between what he wants and what's available, and I find it sad in a way I'm not sure how to articulate. His preferences would have absolutely worked in his favor if he'd been straight, there would be no end of women queuing up to marry him, perhaps even three at a time.
He doesn't plan to come out publicly, which seems to me like a reasonable decision rather than a failure of nerve. India is not the country it was in 2013 on this issue. It's also not a country where "my son is gay" lands the same way in a rural extended family as it does in a Mumbai apartment, and the collateral damage to our parents from a wider family reaction would be real. My mother's side is probably fine, they're upper class cosmopolitan liberals. My father's is more rural and uneven. Even the people who would eventually come around might do damage on the way to coming around, and my brother has done the math on this and decided he'd rather not. I think that's reasonable: he has thick skin, but it's our parents who would suffer from the scandal. Keeping things on the down-low is simply the most pragmatic choice either way, for the foreseeable future. Yet I do not want him to have to live a lie.
One thing I keep noticing, now that I know: he passes as straight without any effort at all. He likes fast cars and action movies and video games. He is more fastidious and picky about clothing than I am, but well within the range of normality for heterosexual men. He was about as good as hiding his orientation as one can be, while refusing to screw dozens of hot women. He is as straight as one can be without actually being straight.
He has no patience for flamboyant men of any orientation, and his boyfriend is similarly nothing like that. This is relevant mostly because it's part of why I half-believed the aromantic explanation for as long as I did, which now strikes me as a somewhat embarrassing failure of imagination on my part.
He told me, among other things, about a gay doctor who had opened a hookup conversation by requesting golden showers with no other preamble. He found it funny that I immediately opened that essay I mentioned on my phone - a piece I've written about my experiences at the gay pub, which apparently contains my own account of politely declining the same request. We have more in common than I'd realized. Neither of us are looking for quickies with gay men, albeit for rather different reasons.
I told him he should have told me earlier. He said he thought I'd be fine with it. I said he was right about that, and that he should have told me earlier anyway. This didn't really go anywhere productive, but I think we both understood what we were trying to say. I am sad that it took him this long to find the confidence to express himself, but I absolutely do not hold it against him.
I've made gay jokes at his expense, in the past, not knowing. He says he never minded and wants me to act exactly the way I always have, and I've agreed to this, and I'm still a little sorry. He's told me not to be. I think both of these positions can coexist without one of them needing to win.
The thing that is keeping me up tonight, l is that I can't actually do much. I can love him and I do and I will. I can be the person he calls. I can be the person who acts the same as always. What I can't do is fix the relationship situation, or make my father's heart stronger, or speed up whatever social change would make this easier for him. I can't make the world different from what it is.
If anyone has practical advice rather than reassurance/validation, I'd be glad to have it. I'm not looking for confirmation that I'm a good person for loving my brother without conditions, which I do not consider an achievement. I want to know if there's something useful I can actually do.
Options discussed with him include emigration, continuing to pretend to be asexual, or even a lavender marriage with a beard of the lesbian type. He is too ethical to trick even an eager straight woman into marrying him for the sake of cover, and he wants to be close to his real partner, whoever that turns out to be. He is also less than keen on permanently moving abroad, at least for anything longer than a residency. He wants children, biologically his, and I want this for him too. I think he'd be a good dad, and that I'd be a good uncle.
(He's confident he's gay rather than bi. The one time he kissed a girl in high school was, in his words, awful, and he reports no meaningful response to straight pornography. If he were bi I'd probably have given him the pragmatic advice to sleep with men for a while and then settle down with a woman, which is the easier path through the particular society we grew up in. That option isn't on the table.)
PS: He is okay with me asking here.
I am a gay man and on the one hand I find your concern and thoughtfulness toward your brother charming and thoughtful but on the other hand somewhat patronizing and broadly misunderstanding the situation of homosexuality and why it is painful to be gay. Straight people usually imagine homosexuality as being difficult because of things you pointed out- your brother teases you and society preassigns expectations for your life in heteronormative ways and because, traditionally, heterosexuality is seen as a more standard and common and productive and positive situation compared with homosexuality. And indeed, even most gay men are stuck in this mode of understanding homosexuality vs heterosexuality today. But none of these things are even particularly bothersome and all of them are facile concerns compared with the fundamental impossibility of homosexuality that is incompatible with true fulfillment in a way that heterosexuality is able to provide.
The reason heterosexual relationships are so positive for people is that a man completes a woman and a woman completes a man. Every man compares himself to those around him. He is competitive with other men. When he is with a woman, he compares himself to the woman. When he compares himself to a woman, he sees his masculinity. Hopefully, he is bigger, stronger, taller, more masculine than the woman. He is absolved of the pain of inadequacy felt when comparing himself to any other man. Finally he is more rational, more brave, more logical than the other. A woman too is liberated with a man. She no longer has to compare herself to the dreaded prettier sister or neighbor girl. She's surely smaller, prettier, more petit, softer, more feminine than her man. She is sweeter and lighter and more compassionate. Finally the couple can be secure in their own traits in comparison with one another.
In homosexuality you find no comfort in this way. If your partner is more masculine than you are, is bigger and stronger and braver, you can only see in yourself someone less masculine and less big and strong and brave. If your partner is less masculine than you are, you can see yourself as bigger stronger and braver than him, but it is at the expense of your partner's ego.
In the end I think that homosexuality best operates on a level of respect and mutual understanding. I have three ex boyfriends whom I still respect very much as men and as people and as former lovers, but I know that each relationship was doomed from the start. We can love each other and respect each other for who we are but it takes a level of maturity to understand that the partnership can only ever be so deep.
Anyway, my point is that the real tragedy of homosexuality is not what you think it is. Do not condescend to understand his pain when your view is so facile and your experiences so superficial. No amount of social engineering is ever going to change what happens between men. The left can demand a change to opinion until they turn the world inside out and insist that 2+2=5 but they can't insist their way into fixing homosexuality. And neither can you, in all your good intentions, fix anything for your brother. It's not your load to bear.
I want to say you've expressed it before. I find it deeply interesting, and it mirrors in many ways why I don't "get" homosexuality. However:
That's because it is tragic and depressing and makes homosexuals look bad. No one straight or gay has ever expressed the issue I lay out explicitly to me, but damn if I don't notice it, over and over and over, in all of my relationships and all of the relationships of gay men I have known in the past and the present. self_made questions the generalizability of what I describe but in my experience it's universal. I wouldn't advise asking your gay friends about it either, really, it is better left unspoken, though it is sad that it's such a dead end situation that I've come to the conclusion that you just have to work it out on your own and accept it for how it is.
I don't know. Please expand this? It seems like the qualities men and women compete at are almost always completely different fields. A woman may be powerful and strong and brave at social relationships and keeping a house and other traditionally feminine domains but it's emasculating and weird if she's powerful and strong and brave - compared to you, a man - at traditionally masculine domains. Women may not "brag about being cowards" but if she's the one stalking around with a shotgun at the sound of an intruder at midnight while you cower under some blankets it's a weird dynamic at best if not utterly embarrassing for both of you.
More options
Context Copy link
They can do. I was going out with a girl in Japan who reacted to quite a few things (including goldfish with bulgy eyes) as, “Scary!” which is Kowai!.
It was unfortunately only with the benefit of more experience and hindsight that I realised her intention was ‘scary (cute nuance)’ not ‘scary (I have the spine of a jellyfish nuance)’.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There’s more than one way to have a homosexual relationship. Some couples are perfectly comfortable having a more masculine and a more feminine partner. I think the main upside of not being straight is realising you don’t have to fit into the heterosexual norms, but also that you don’t have to deny them entirely and can pick and choose - be a feminine man who feels safe and petite in your partner’s arms, but is also the main breadwinner, be a masculine stay at home parent, etc.
More options
Context Copy link
I am grateful for you taking the time to share your experience and thoughts, but I have strong reservations on how far your arguments generalize.
Straight men (or women) are both heterogeneous and heterosexual. I have very reason to assume that gay men are just as heterogeneous, if not heterosexual.
Sticking to the generally accepted taxonomy: we've got bears, twinks and everything in between. Some gay men want more masculine partners, others are attracted by some degree of femininity in their (male) lovers. Many/most do not see the strengths or desirable traits present in their partners as a form of weakness in themselves.
I would love to marry a woman who is smarter, more focused and more driven than me. I would not let that make me feel insecure or believe that I'm dumb. I rarely meet women who are more rational or logical than I am, because I already consider myself well above average on that front even by male standards - but if I did, I would like that.
My brother is perfectly masculine, even by straight standards. He likes masculine partners too, not dramatic twinks. So be it, he hasn't displayed any degree of insecurity that I would consider abnormal or concerning. He's sometimes a little insecure that I'm more academically talented than he is, and I'm sometimes insecure when comparing how well he has other aspects of his life put together, and how handsome he is (as I've already noted). That is normal, even expected among siblings.
He doesn't go around judging himself in an unhealthy way. He has said or done nothing that would preclude a normal, happy life in the most important sense.
I genuinely doubt that this is anywhere near as big a deal as you make it out to be. I don't say this as an insult, you might feel justified in your stance, but it doesn't align with the experiences shared with me by other gay men or even people replying in the comments.
I've had plenty of shitty relationships with women, and seen even more around. It is not as simple as saying that straight men are innately more satisfied in their relationships with women. Sometimes, people can and do love each other despite their insecurities and sense of competition.
Thank you nonetheless, I'll think over it, even if I think that your concerns are (probably) not applicable to my brother. He's my little brother, I know him, even if I just found it's not as well as either of us would have liked. But sexuality means little when I consider everything else. I don't/can't "fix" him, but I am prepared to do what I can to make his life easier, and I can't ask for more even from myself.
More options
Context Copy link
Fascinating view. Thanks for sharing.
Have you ever considered marrying a woman anyway and having a sort of beard-like arrangement?
Thank you, and you're welcome.
No, I've never considered that seriously. It would be very disrespectful to any woman because I know I would never love her. I am simply not attracted to women- when I see their faces or bodies I feel nothing, when I see a handsome man I feel excited. I have always had close female friends my entire life, and though my relationship with women has changed as I've grown and changed as a person, I've never been tempted or interested in pursuing any relationship beyond friendship with any of them. I don't think very highly of gay men who marry a woman either. I can understand men who want to provide their parents with grandchildren, and I am lucky enough to have older siblings who have had children of their own and so never felt pressured from my parents to reproduce, but even then I am bothered by the idea that he chose to pursue a life that runs counter to his desires and internal feelings. He deserves better, to have the dignity to pursue what he is attracted to, even as homosexuality is an imperfect arrangement, and she certainly deserves better than to devote her time and life to a man who can not return her love.
Oh I didn’t mean lying to the woman!!! More like finding a female companion to spend your life with, but you both are aware and have other arrangements on the side.
Idk it sounds like you understand the complementary nature of men and women, so I wasn’t sure if you’d considered a more platonic life partnership, something like that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes.
It's my big learning of 2026. Took me years to accept this about my sibling.
We have a shared upbringing, shared experiences, shared professions and shared genetics. I was his confidant, his mentor, his taste maker. As a result, I took mutual empathy for granted. Turns out, I was wrong. I couldn't walk a mile in his shoes, not for his biggest problems. Those problems are his own. The assistance I so eagerly offer, is counter-productive. It hurts more than it helps.
I've since accepted that I can't offer assistance without trying to erect safety nets around the worst possible outcomes. Problem is, I have judged those outcomes to be the worst in context of my own insecurities. Put simply, I was projecting. It's not the vicarious pressure of an Asian tiger-mom. It's less malicious, but harder to put a finger on. Big credit to my girlfriend, she helped me give form to it.
You can't protect your brother from being judged by Indian society. You can't protect your brother from your father. You can't protect your brother from his own demons. You can't protect him from heartbreak. He sounds like a great guy. You must trust him. Let him take his decisions. Just be there for him as an unconditional shoulder. Life will work itself out.
That's at least where I am today. It's a difficult pill to swallow. But, I'm digesting it, slowly.
I've seen this pattern with high agency people. The more they care about something, the more effort they want to put into fixing it. To them, everything is a problem that can be solved. Find a problem, break it down, chip at it, repeat until solved. It's horrifying to learn that there will be problems that both keep them up at night and they can't do anything to solve. But yeah, end of they day, it's is someone else's life. It becomes intrusive, real fast.
P.S: Random comments and disclaimers I need to give because I am hopeless like that:
Thanks for sharing, and for the advice! I remain very glad for everyone who came here and shared both advice and support. It's good to know that my situation is far from unique, even if I already knew that on an intellectual level.
I am pleased to have been mistaken for a high agency individual. Medium agency? Now I can accept that, haha. But yes, my instinct to show care manifests as trying to solve problems for those I care about. But I am, somewhat fortunately, more emotionally aware (and less autistic) than the average man, I'm pretty solid at just... being there. Hearing people out. Being a shoulder to cry on. Talking things through. None of my exes have ever called me emotionally unavailable.
I think my brother genuinely needs both forms of help. I was sensible, and first declared my very real desire to provide unconditional support while telling him I loved him, and that nothing he says or does could change that, let alone something as... unimportant as being gay. Then I asked him about his future and helped him brainstorm ways to make it happen. If he needs my heart or my head, I've got him covered.
Not quite the same dynamic here. My brother has most of his life together, barring the academics. I have my shit together when it comes to studying, but there are certain aspects of being an independent, functional individual that I struggle with. It's a work in progress. I scold him for not studying enough, he yells at me for being a slob and not doing {many things}. We don't mind, our dad is good at being a dad for the both of us. Our relationship is pretty close to the norm for siblings, at least siblings in a happy family.
I'm glad your girlfriend did you a solid here, God knows some men really need a few nudges from women to do certain things they really ought to. Been there myself.
Agreed. STEM gay men tend to be more reserved, masculine or... autistic. Even the ones who become trans don't act in the manner of a catty gay man or a twink. God knows I'd lose my hair if I was into twinks, they're like women but with the drama dials turned all the way up, generally speaking.
My brother really seems to be set on actual monogamy, not even the grey area that is swinging, let alone a paper marriage. Good for him, God knows that while I don't cheat, I am sometimes chafed by the constraints of a serious relationship. I wish it were easier for me to fall for a single person and never feel discomfort or desire for others. But I manage fine, and if he's like me in that regard, I hope he finds a like-minded person. I just regret that gay men are overwhelmingly unlikely to be as-into commitment and exclusivity as the average woman.
Thank you again, this was very helpful!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
One that the may not be obvious to you, or to even him yet, is that coming out is a process, and one that never ends, and for a wide variety of people, it's going to be more painful to be 'honest' everywhere than just being themselves. Coming out to you is a step, coming out to your mom if he does is another step. Even if you broadcast it from a megaphone while doing the full Folsome Street Fair on main street, there will still be people the next day you have to decide whether you need or want to come out to.
The flip side is that it's not a process that's fully under your own control. My brother got outed to our paternal grandmother by Facebook. I had to disclose to my employer once. The more you choose to do it, the less it can sneak up on you.
But that doesn't mean it's always better to be in control either.
I'll caveat that there's a reverse of the lemon problem, here. The people who are always down to fuck are always out on the market, and the people who want a long-term closed relationship aren't on grindr and aren't spending as much time at gay bars. There's places the two spheres meet, but especially given the various preferences and interests floating around, it's not necessarily obvious when you're crossing the boundaries.
There's also some messiness where a number of gay men self-identify as sluts but may not actually have casual sex or even want that high a body count. Sometimes that's because there's sluts-in-every-other-sense, and sometimes it's because they like the identity but don't actually have the drive. Hell, there's even people who love the idea of casual sex, but only with people they know so well and in such limited situations that it's basically just a small-case polyamory (or, hilariously, monogamy-with-named-sex-toys). 'Sapiosexual' is a really obnoxious self-identifier, but it is pointing toward and around a concept with some meaning, just corrupted as a signifier by the mess of people who kinda abuse it.
(I'm trying to write up something more serious for urquan on this, but I need to go into more detail for his use case.)
That may not be the most actionable information -- 'oh boy, tons of eligible bachelors that absolutely wouldn't give you a second glance' kinda sucks as a recognition point -- but I've... found it helpful to know.
I'll second other people saying that, especially if they were meant in good spirits, I'd rather people make jokes rather than walk on eggshells. It is kinda funny! It is something that's not really ever going to make 'sense' at a deep level to you! Just throw some self-deprecatory signs hitting your team too, accept a few jokes going your way, and it's how family should treat each other.
((Tbh, the most obnoxious stuff I encountered was were there wasn't any humor intended. There's still a very uncomfortable bit that, no matter how much my father is happy about my brother and his husband now, we'll both remember when he told us, trying to be nice and trying to be paternal, that he didn't care whether we brought home a white girl or a black girl or a hispanic girl, so long as we brought home a girl. The Saturday Night Live jokes were just funny.))
That's... a difficult situation, and if it helps, give him my sympathies as someone who's had to make decisions around (lighter) variants of the same problems. A lot of the answers are going to depend both on what he's willing to do, what risk (and what kinds of risks!) he's willing to accept, and how much his biology is going to fight with him. I'll avoid repeating the obvious 'try to have it all' stuff or diving into useless esoteric options (eg: just find a trans guy who wants to get knocked up who cares whether that'd even work for him), but a few unintuitive options:
There are women who you don't have to trick. For a fujoshi or a woman with a very low sex drive, a closed-relationship-focused gay guy can be an even more-desirable-than-normal catch. Sometimes that's a lavender marriage (yes, there are lesbian fujoshi), but sometimes it's just what works for people. Doesn't even have to be a lie; you can honestly say that you married for the sake of kids, but you're great friends: then people who need to know can know and those who don't can decide what they want to believe. This has some good options on having biological children, if some that might make for a few uncomfortable discussions and maybe a bit of a boner-killer moment. There's levels of gay where the flesh might be unwilling but there's no mental objection (or even fingers that might be willing to put in the hard work when required), and on the other side, my brother turned down a threesome he really wanted because the third's girlfriend wanted in the room fully clothed. If your brother's toward the latter end, this probably won't work well even if the woman in questions swears she's lesbian or asexual. On the upside, if you don't particularly care about a woman's appearance, you get to select for personality, and there's a lot of diamonds in the rough.
Ultimately, it's still a polyamorous relationship in the literal sense, if one where there third never gets dicked. It's also putting a massive amount of trust in a third party that you can't love and might grow to love you or need something more from someone, and to be blunt, while having little or no leverage over them. Optimistically, I know a few people who took this path and didn't divorce until after the kids graduated, and one who did and didn't divorce at all. You get a good idea of how much lust and love keeps most married couples from driving each other nuts once you see someone taking this approach. Even if that doesn't happens, it's a secret that has to last decades, and that's a lot of pressure, and I can't speak as to how the kids took it. I also don't know how prevalent fujoshi are in India, nevermind how he'd find one he likes well enough to spend decades with.
Being a unicorn isn't that bad, if you've got the right mindset. Chances are pretty good this makes biological children harder (barring finding a bi guy who likes the idea paternity roulette, tbf a surprisingly common kink) even if the couple in question wants kids, but if they do, you get to be the friendly uncle who's always around while skipping a lot of the bad parts of parenting like having to figure out discipline. There's jealousy in not being someone's one-and-only, but if you absolutely have to make a compromise on that, it can be both easier (they're not direct competition!) or harder (they can do something I can't, they're going to steal him!) where the one exception is a different gender. It's easier to be closeted, like this -- you'd be surprised how many older folk assume you're pining over the wife! -- but it's also even harder to come out.
There are risks, here, even with the compromises: being pumped-(and-pumped-and-pumped)-and-dumped does happen to gay unicorns as with straight women unicorns, like the fujoshi there's a risk of jealousy from the other partner and now it's fucking-polyamory, and this can get into weird legal situations even inside the United States or UK. I wouldn't even bring this up while he's with his current boyfriend, but if he's staying with him even as said boyfriend starts talking more and more as they start settling down, it's worth spelling out that this is a choice, even if he thinks he's not making any choice yet. And it is a survivable one, if not a perfect one.
Long-distance relationships can be both easier and harder than you'd expect. Having a partner that only exists through a VOIP call 300+ days a year sucks when you need a human touch, don't get me wrong, and I know more than one LDR that got really rough when the two long-time lovebirds found that they were only sexually compatible at a keyboard. You have a lot more space to select from, though, and a lot more people trying this stuff care about longer-term relationships to begin with. It's also easier to stay closeted (at least in meatspace), and a lot more compatible with a number of home obligations. On the gripping hand, though, this can turn into a massive psychological pressure such it feels like immigration to the LDR's homeland or emigration of the LDR Will Fix Everything, and that's both not true and can lead to bad decision-making with regret.
Also doesn't help with the biological child focus.
Be a good sounding board. Especially if he doesn't have many meatspace gay friends separate from his boyfriend, it's very easy for a guy to go quite literally nuts as they stew over hard decisions without any external grounding (or falling down the /r/relationships or LLM rabbit hole for said external grounding, which will quite happily work toward driving you even more nuts). It's a really bad situation to be in, and I'm not exaggerating or hyperbolizing when I talk about this like going crazy. Having someone you can be out to, even if they can't empathize fully with a specific problem, as long as they're going to be honest and serious and open-minded about a choice, helps a ton at not getting unmoored or badly fixated.
And that's going to be uncomfortable at times! I'm bi, and I still absolutely know more of my brother's preferences than I ever wanted to know. The watersports joke is not the worst of all possible worlds. It's still better than having family who can't tell if they're obsessing over someone.
Uh oh. I wasn't trying to prompt an instruction manual.
I'll caveat what I've said before with the point that I don't really engage with the gay community much any more, and when I did it was more of an experiment due to loneliness than it was a serious desire to build a world there. I think you could technically call me bisexual, but the number of men who do anything at all for me is very small, and very highly selected as the most feminine group among those. Basically the sort who you could sort of squint at and imagine they're a woman.
The kind of masculine disgust towards the effeminate and the flamboyant that you see in gay men like self_made's brother and the other gay commenters here was never true of me. Even limiting to that group, a 10/10 on my scale is about as attractive as a 3/10 woman, and that's being generous. I find true masculinity actively repulsive, and still cannot describe how even straight women could possibly find men attractive, despite understanding they have every mechanism of natural selection on their side. Given those limitations, and my romantic orientation that contrasts with what you typically find in the gay community (even if subcultures that are more assimilatory exist), the project was always rather statistically doomed to failure.
If anything, I'd say I identify more with the gynandromorphile concept that rae once discussed than with bisexuality-re-bisexuality, and I can't distinguish passing trans women from cis women in my patterns of attraction. That said, I do not experience autogynephilia and find the concept rather strange.
That's the actual takeaway I had from my college experimentation (my moral and visceral opposition to casual sex were pre-existing, though it strengthened them). Given such inclinations are fairly despised by straight men ("faggot"), gay men ("tourist"), and trans women ("chaser") alike, I had limited opportunities to act on it and ended up just dating cis women with whom my pattern of attraction was well-trod and socially legible. I broke some hearts along the way, and so some element of my subsequent interest in the topic is trying to find the right sequence of words so I can explain to myself, to the cosmos, to no one and to everyone, that my desire was never to hurt anyone and I was just lonely, lovelorn, and surprised by what I found in places I never expected to find it, and I broke hearts because I was afraid I would pull someone truly close and then devastate them in a worse way if I turned out to be wrong about myself.
Hm. I'm not familiar with any changes in the term's significance since around 2013 or so, but I dated a girl in school who unironically called herself that. And genuinely every woman I've ever dated has said words to that effect -- my current girlfriend jokes that she wants her children to have "your juicy brain genes." I'm not the sort of person that goes around bragging about IQ, but the thing that is statistically unusual about me is verbal intelligence, so it's not really surprising to me that people who went, "that guy is special" all identify the same trait in me as the most attractive one. But words, of course, are both my gift and my fortress, and the instrument I use to connect is the same instrument I use to hide.
Maybe it means something else now, but back then it meant something like, "attracted to intelligence as a personality trait more than other features (but not exclusively)." Some people are like that.
More options
Context Copy link
My brother is fast asleep, so I can't quite ask him right now, but I think that even just having close family and friends know the truth would be enough to provide him contentment. He's not the kind of person to agonize over what random acquaintances or distant relatives think, and neither am I.
Sure, there might be times when he struggles to decide whether his sexuality needs disclosure, but I don't think it'll bother him too much.
Thank you. After several people reassured me that they personally didn't mind, I'm over my (minor) worries. It made a big difference that my own brother straight up acknowledged that he didn't mind and didn't want me to change. I wish that had been enough to make me entirely sanguine, it almost was, and if he's happy why should I care what anyone else says?
Agreed. He's a sensible young man, and has his own strengths. I respect his ability to figure out his own goals and needs, while being committed to supporting him all the way through.
Anyway, this conversation made me emotional, so I went and woke him up just to say I love him. You really can't say that often enough, in my experience, and regret never feels good.
Good thing he knows literal fujoshis in his circle of acquaintances, and probably friends. You could well be right that someone might consider this setup their dream. And worst case, my family are gynecologists and he might become one. We can pull out the ol' family turkey-baster as and when needed. Intra-uterine insemination is easy enough, any
Tom, Dickand Harrycan pull it off.He's young. There's time to explore plenty of options, and I'm grateful for that. I'd be much sadder if, say, he'd only spoken up a decade later. Or whispered it to me on my death bed.
I do not quite feel ready to explore the true limits of his attraction to women, but I know it's very limited. Who knows, maybe from the rear any ass is grass and he's willing to mow the lawn. A sufficiently high dose of viagra could make someone screw a corpse, or at least hard enough to make it a technical possibility.
(Out of curiosity, do lesbian fujoshi consume yaoi, or just yuri?)
Call me shallow, but ain't setting my brother up with any uggo, be they man or woman. He deserves better haha. Although I must admit that I have learned the hard way that an unpleasant personality can easily overpower the allure of a pretty face.
I kinda went down a rabbit hole looking up what you meant by "unicorn". It seems I am not as terminally online or up to date with gay culture as I imagined. Huh. I guess I see the appeal?
I don't want to go into too much detail, but even during their intern year, his BF did some regrettable things because of "loneliness", and that's just a month or two of not seeing each other.
I don't think I can make an LDR work, from some experience, but my brother hasn't really tried. Who knows, maybe he'll change his mind. I just don't think a bi, severely conflicted man is the right choice, even if I like him myself.
I see you also mean other LDRs, and sure, I guess if he does meet someone as appealing, I think he might give it a good shout.
Hey, he's my brother. He's going to Claude and not ChatGPT if he absolutely must use an LLM for life advice. Jokes aside, I do intend to be there for him, and after @reo 's nudging, I intend to be proactive about it. I found out many things last night, and not just that he's gay. He loves me to a degree that makes my heart ache, and I didn't quite know it. If he can't count on me, what does being my little brother even mean?
I absolutely don't want to watch. Not even think about it the details really, but to be fair that's more to do with me being straight than a prude or homophobe. I'm the kind of guy who skips ahead when a porno decides to zoom in on the guy's face or his cock. Who decided that's a good idea??
Anyway. I wanted to say that I'm very grateful. You're tied with Reo for people who, by themselves, made this cry for help worth it. I'll pass it all along, thank you so much.
Bit of a tradeoff where the strength of other connections can make it hard to grok, rather than merely believe, when someone close says that they trust them.
I think a lesbian going after yuri only gets the title weeaboo, if that. Fujoshi are pretty much defined by the M/M bit, lesbian or straight woman alike.
It's been around a decent time and not really limited to or even central for gay stuff -- cfe 2014 M/F + F -- but it's not the most common term. I don't want to undersell the risks and downsides to it as an option, but it is an option, and compared to some of the other compromises he might have, not necessarily as bad as it seems from the horror stories. There are still horror stories, and searching for a long-term relationship like that is hard.
Oh, yeah, other LDRs, and specifically looking more broadly to start out. Would not recommend trying to turn an already-stretching relationship into a long-distance one on top of existing stresses unless there's literally no other option. That said, if he's having trouble with a shorter absence, even just long-drive-same-general area LDRs will be painful. I don't get touch starvation, but I've seen what it can do to people.
You joke, but there's significant risks to the thing telling you your ideas are great and should be acted on immediately being smarter and more rational, especially if you're already lovesick.
Fair, but not quite what I was trying to caution about.
There's a lot of tiny things that are going to suddenly seem to come in a whole different light, and they're going to show up everywhere. A joke that gets a smirk and could have a prosaic explanation will no longer have that prosaic explanation be the only one. A favorite media, or a style of dress, or haircut, or a guarded behavior around his cell phone or computer browser history, could derive from his orientation. Some of them will be genuine connections; some will be spurious. Some of them, you'll miss even now, and that's the dumbest class of infohazards available, and I'm not going to spell the likely ones out.
Some of them he will need to say outright, to someone.
Given your day job, you'll have heard much, much worse. It's still a little harder to handle when it hits close to home, and even more so when your expression is trying to outpace your actual thoughts. It will be uncomfortable, you will flinch, and you will need to not let that be what you remember from the interaction. Even the small talk needs to be more important, in your mind.
It will be normal again, some other day. It'll be something you don't really think about, no more than you think about his birthday or hair color or his favorite drink. Today, and maybe this week, your pattern-matching side will be oversensitive.
Heh. It is a weird decision. To be fair, as much as the old Blue Collar Comedy Bit was as much written for its politics as for its accuracy, there do genuinely seem to be some actually-straight guys that do seem to fetishize parts of porn scenes that involve and focus around the men, if only as some way to center themselves within the media.
But I will also say as someone with a healthy (if not exactly red-blooded) appreciation for a nice hefty set of balls and a hefty cock, there's a lot of straight porn that centers them on screen and doesn't do a good job selling them.
Fair enough, and my brother was very convincing when he lied/mislead me before. Not that I hold it against him, I understand, even if I'm a little hurt.
After intense and dedicated research (asking ChatGPT), I must believe you. But holy fucking shit. What the hell is going on here??
I'm not kidding, this is probably the most perplexing thing I've learned in years, I genuinely do not understand why a lesbian woman would enjoy watching media about two men making out. I understand why straight or bi women like yaoi, but lesbians?? I'm half tempted to dedicated my life to research into the topic, but I do enjoy making money.
While not as emotionally shaken as I was when my brother came out, on an intellectual level this is far harder to parse. Whatever, I'm a psychiatrist, I've heard some really weird things. I had a dude tell me he was dead while sitting there, talking to me, and he absolutely meant it.
You're right. I'm still coming to terms with it, and wondering about all the things I missed. But not to a degree that's debilitating, so I hope that reo was wrong when he says it might take months or years to process it. Either way, the fact that I'm fully supportive and don't see my brother in an entirely different light was established to my satisfaction the moment he told me, and that's what really counts. A few drinks, a few drunken chats with my gay friends in Scotland? I'll be as right as rain. I want to talk about this with my closest friends in India, but I promised my brother I wouldn't share with anyone who poses even a meaningful risk of outing him. You guys thankfully don't count, but even then I felt obliged to ask first.
I suspect they, like Clavicular, are best described as being male-to-male trans. Autoandrophilia for men who are already born male. Whatever, I've heard of weirder kinks, and I prefer man on women porn to the solo female/lesbian stuff, even if it technically has infinitely more times the men.
Thanks again, and I mean it strongly. You could make a killing as a coach for conflicted gay/bi men or even their relatives trying to come to terms with it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As far as I know lesbians are more into yaoi.
Kinda funny that yaoi appeals to everyone from lesbians, straight women and (some but not all) gay men, while it’s mostly straight men that are into yuri.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
For something useful I think you need to convince your brother that somethings got to give. His priorities are wanting everything and that's just not going to work. A doctor in the west will make enough money to find a partner and hire a surrogate if he wants bio kids so you should steer him in that direction. Canada and England have places that are virtually India now anyway. Really moving to Canada would solve basically all his problems so I think that is what the breaking point should be. He can't really be out in India except the most cosmopolitan urban places and even then. If his partner really is bi he's at best going to be a sidepiece after his partner gets hitched and married and being a homewrecker to a guy with kids is fucked up. I'm sure his partner is nice and all but it sounds like a reverse lesbian until graduation situation.
There's no future for him in India, ask him to map out his life in 20 years in India versus the west, it's much better to be gay in the west and I'm curious why he doesn't want to move abroad. There are definitely gay men who are willing to settle down with a partner and not in the scene, though harder to find anywhere I suspect it's much harder in India to find someone like that for a variety of reasons. I have some gay friends who want that and it is possible to find. It just seems like there's nothing for him in India and he can have everything else he wants outside it so he should just leave.
Thank you for the advice.
I genuinely don't think it's as hopeless as you think. Sure, my brother probably can't make it work with the current bi boyfriend, but that is far from his only option. It is unfortunate that he's still in love with him, and vice versa, but I've been in love with women I never intended to marry too.
I did specifically discuss emigration, look, I don't even live in India anymore, even though my opinion on the UK has soured considerably (I'm actively weighing my options once residency ends).
He is willing to make sacrifices: he is already closeted with regards to my dad and the wider public. He very badly wants our dad to accept him, which I think is quite likely if not certain. The wider public can take a hike, and even if they disapprove, the objective risks are minimal.
India is not the best place to be a gay man, but is also far from the worst. I'd say it's like America in the 70s or 80s, maybe early 90s.
If you want specific reasons for staying:
Our family owns a small hospital, currently in the red. We're trying to turn that around. My dad devoted a good chunk of his life to building and operating it. There's scope for expansion.
My brother never particularly wanted to be a doctor. Even I was not particularly devoted to the profession, though I was lucky to discover that psychiatry genuinely appealed to me. I wouldn't say he was forced into it, but he lacked focus and ended up opting in as the default outcome. He would rather be a businessman with a side hustle as a doctor than entirely devoted to medicine. I'm the opposite, the idea of running a business in India makes me feel sick. I am extremely relieved that he's consistently expressed interest in shouldering the burden.
Then there's our parents. They would accept both of us emigrating abroad permanently, but with pain. My dad still hopes that I'll come back after changing my mind. They're getting old. They're getting frail. They no longer appear as invincible as they seemed when we were children. We worry about them. Having a son close at hand reduces our concern immensely.
He's willing to go abroad, for a residency at least. And if he likes it, who knows, he might decide to stick around. I did so, but I am sorely disillusioned, and I hate my life and training, while enjoying the money and other kinds of freedom. It's a deeply personal decision, not everyone who would flourish abroad wants to go abroad. My dad could have made it big in the States if he really cared to try, but he had different priorities. Such is life.
It is also not trivial to make the move. The UK is no longer a viable option because of recent reintroduction of prioritization of local graduates. The US is famously demanding. Canada, Australia and New Zealand are his best bets.
I love my brother, but he's not very good at studying despite being smart. His ADHD is worse than mine in that regard, even if he's more functional and independent in other ways. I had an uphill struggle getting into residency in the UK, I had to study so hard I almost went blind, and definitely had a few mental breakdowns. I do intend to continue tutoring and coaching him, even if I have a lot on my plate as is. Least I can do for my little brother.
It is also genuinely not easy being a first gen immigrant. I miss my family, old friends, and my pets. He would too. It is not nearly as clearcut as the West being outright superior in all regards to life as a doctor in India, even if you're gay, and he can work around the limitations here. He is absolutely not the kind of person who has rose-tinted glasses on, he's thinking ahead and doesn't see it impossible to find happiness here. Neither do I, if I'm being honest.
Well those are fair enough reasons. As someone who lives an another continent from my family I get it but I also always knew I wanted to wander.
If your brother wants to stay then a lesbian beard, or a surrogate seem like the best options ( I wonder if you might offer to help with that with your UK salary?). Marrying a straight woman is a really bad idea (and I personally feel immoral) I have a gay friend from a much more conservative culture then India who did that and even if everyone knows what they're getting into forever is a really long time and it can easily and did end in tears even with both of them having boyfriends on the side it. Lavender marriages can have tension with the Gay part being a horndog, most lesbians are not going to be thrilled with wild chemsex in the guest bedroom with randos but it sounds like your brother lives a lesbian friendly lifestyle (lol). Another possibility I cut from my original post was dating a transman. Depending on your brothers personal sexuality some might be masculine enough for him to be attracted to and they can both have children and really still have woman style attachment and dating styles. Most transmen would be thrilled to date a sensitive handsome gay guy right out of a novel but whether that would work or not depends a lot on your brother and I'm not sure the trans scene in India. Anyway good luck with everything.
It is both easier and harder to move abroad as a doctor. There's plenty of demand for those capable of making the cut, but also an enormous amount of red tape and restriction on the ability to practice. An American doctor can't (AFAIK) just walk in to India and pick up a scalpel, let alone the other way round.
Someone with a good job in design or marketing, or an engineer/programmer, might have a harder time leaving India but would then enjoy far more geographic and personal flexibility. God knows I wish I could work from home or remotely, but that's only really an option for senior psychiatrist with a flourishing private practice. Can't complain too much, I make decent money and have an enviable degree of job security in return, at least till AI comes knocking.
My brother is very much against the idea of marrying a straight woman, at least on false pretenses. And look, he's still young. At his age, I knew I wanted to get married and start a family one day, but it was a problem for the future. The future is, at least for me, just about next week. He has time, Indian culture and law might well liberalize further, and it has already liberalized greatly even within our lifespan.
He could get away with simply living with another man and calling them a friend, at least for many years. Eyebrows would raise eventually, but nosy neighbors or relatives aren't an insurmountable problem. Anything short of an official, legal marriage to another man is viable.
Marrying a transman? I haven't specifically asked, but I'd bet good money on him rejecting the idea. They're very rare in India, not that transwomen are common either. I don't know a single one, and haven't even heard of them through my extended network, at least while talking about India. A lesbian? Eh, maybe, if we can find one. Apparently there are networks for those seeking such arrangements. And you're correct that he wouldn't be starting regular orgies, the chick would be the front while he spends most of his time with his real male partner (and presumably she with hers). As long as she's available to drag along to family occasions or social events, it could well work.
Thank you for that, as well as for your advice. I am cautiously optimistic that his story will have a happy ending, and I'll move heaven and earth to make it happen. I know he would for me.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm pretty much your brother except I'm in accounting and am more of an autist. Grew up in the third world, thick skin, very heterosexual-passing in attitude, zero patience for flamboyant and dramatic anybody. My circumstances probably don't apply to your brother and Malaysian Chinese might actually be more chill than Indians about this, but I came out to my immediate family relatively early in life (in spite of my sister seeming to find it very weird and barely speaking to me about anything relationship-adjacent even today), and I hold my extended family at enough arms length that I don't really have to tell them honestly what I'm up to. I could not be more happy to not have to deal with female bullshit in dating, and am currently in a very committed long distance relationship with a bisexual guy (note I've already met his mother, it's a serious thing, there is a plan down the line to actually move in together).
In other words, it's possible to actually make this work. I second the advice of expanding his social circle into countries that are more accepting of these things, the more widespread buy-in there is to the idea of the Rainbow Identities, ironically enough the more normal the open homosexuals become. It's a consequence of social pressure that only the people who are super comfortable being openly gay in places like India are also probably not the kinds of people you would want to partner up with ever, virtually everyone else that's more normal is also less likely to be contrarian and radical for the sheer sake of it and as a result more susceptible to the pressure to conform. But don't rush into anything after a breakup. It's a recipe for bad decisions you'll just end up regretting. And bars dedicated to the Rainbow Community are never good places for finding long-term commitment.
Ultimately though, there's an inherent tradeoff between staying in India and being close to one's same-sex partner. You can't have it all in that regard. And keeping a relationship under wraps while pretending to be asexual or having a lavender marriage is a half-measure that's likely to involve a lot of deception and will probably be ridiculously exhausting after a while. I'm not sure how easy it is for him to keep his extended family at length in the same way I do, or to fail to inform them of goings on in his life. But in my experience being overseas makes the act of deflection way easier. I just lie to my extended family about my life every now and then, and barely think about them again. He's got you and your mother to back him up, which also makes any spiel he spins more convincing.
As an aside, you should not feel that bad about making gay jokes. You've been supportive, and if he tells you it's fine I see no reason to disbelieve him. I make quite extreme and very slur-filled jokes in that caliber all the time with close company, and can relate to seriously not wanting someone I know to tiptoe around me for fear of hurting my feelings. It can be very condescending to feel like you're being coddled or unintentionally forcing someone to self-censor when you would just prefer they be themselves, to the point that every time I get a sense that any of my friends are doing that I sometimes push them in the direction of making these jokes. Probably not a good time at the moment since he may be going through a breakup soon, but just thought I would add that.
Thank you. I'm glad to hear from someone who's lived through this themselves and come out intact.
I can't really compare cultural conditions in Malaysia to my part of India, but my brother is close to being maximally lucky in terms of what he can expect in these parts. Maybe he'd be even better off if our parents were left leaning academics, but then he'd be poorer too, so it's a wash.
The thing is, my brother was never particularly involved in the local gay community. He doesn't consider his sexuality core to his identity, he's not an activist. His close friends are mostly straight, and the women he hangs out with don't see him as a gay best friend (even if he can be catty on occasion, and so can I). I don't think he specifically wants to immerse himself in the LGBT community, he just wants to be accepted as a normal dude who just happens to prefer sleeping with and loving other men.
He passes for straight even on scrutiny from his closest family and most of his friends, albeit with some suspicion. I do think that he might benefit from moving somewhere more liberal, but there are very good arguments for staying. He was never as dead set on fleeing the country as I was. Ultimately, it's up to him and I'll help figure out how to make it work.
I wouldn't go that far, honestly. India isn't Uganda or Saudi Arabia. He could probably cohabit with another man and dodge questions indefinitely, unless he publicly declares that he's married to a man and starts making out in public. Even then, I think he could get away with not much greater risk to life and limb. My mom joked that if he ends up a gynecologist, then there'll be plenty of women seeking him out because he's gay. There's a kernel of truth there.
You can go to high end clubs and see clearly flamboyant gay or trans people, and it's not a problem. There are practicing doctors who are out as gay (or make zero effort to hide it) and they do fine.
I see no real reason to tell our extended family either, I think it's fine with him if just me and our parents know. If he was genuinely asexual, then the same questions would arise, and we know he's already very discreet. I don't think he wants the fuss of a public marriage, and everything else can probably be shoved under a suitably robust rug.
Thank you. He really doesn't want me to walk on eggshells around him, or to treat him any differently. I don't intend to. If I say that something is "hella gay", then I am not claiming that homosexuality is inherently bad, anymore than when I say "Jesus" out of incredulity implies that I'm a Christian (quite the opposite). I never had any malice in it in the first place. If he did object - while I'm a free speech advocate, I am perfectly happy to adjust my vocabulary depending on context, fortunately that's not necessary.
Same here; I come from a relatively liberal, atheistic family, though the same thing could not necessarily be said about the extended family. My immediate family have basically agreed it's a good idea not to tell them lest they Actually Die.
It's good he has supportive people like you helping him along.
It has less to do with life and limb (I didn't perceive that as anything other than a remote risk) and more to do with my uncertainty about how sustainable the situation really was in the long run; for example whether the extended family would ever seriously pressure him to get a wife and child or something similar. Extricating yourself from pointed questions about that is a bit more difficult when you regularly see them, and there's less of an excuse to not show proof of whatever you lie to them about. Admittedly this was also based on a bunch of stereotypes about the extremely close-knit and privacyless nature of Indian extended families which I imagined would have made it harder. Or maybe that's just representative of the type of Indian who chooses to migrate to Malaysia.
But if the family situation is such that you can indefinitely deflect it and get away with not telling your extended family anything, then yes, ignore that part of the comment; the calculus changes significantly. Though the ban on commercial surrogacy is definitely still a consideration.
I think this is one of these attitudes that's very common among gay people who don't centre their identity around being gay or relish using it as a social bludgeon against others, the type that doesn't care about being an Activist and mainly wants to live undisturbed as you've stated your brother does. The converse is depressingly common in some circles though - I was once in a friend group with a "non-binary" woman who compulsively engaged in such tactics to police people's behaviour, and it took a herculean effort for me to contain my disgust. I find myself so estranged from these people, it's almost as if I'm looking at a different species entirely.
Your intuitions aren't wrong, per se, but India is a big country, with many different kinds of Indians! For example, if my brother had been born to a few of my paternal uncles, he might not have ever come out until his immediate family had died of old age.
The more conservative parts of our family are not that conservative by Indian standards. Enough to make us worry for the sake of our parents, but not ourselves. He's not going to be shunned or attacked, but our parents might face pointed critique or thinly veiled criticism. My dad is more old-fashioned than my mom, and he might internalize it and agonize over if he raised us right or if this is somehow his fault. I stress that he's never said or done anything actually homophobic, and he would probably get around to it eventually. It would just hurt him a lot.
It helps that our extended family doesn't live with us, or next door for the most part. We aren't very close to our dad's side anyway, we'd lose little if we had to cut them off or be cut off. Unfortunately, can't say the same about how my dad would feel, such ostracism would hurt to the core. I don't think it's likely, but I think there's a non-negligible chance of it. His older siblings raised him after his dad died, and he has tried to return the favor ever since, well past what I would personally deem reasonable. Let's just say we would significantly more wealthy if he had been more selfish and hadn't put half my cousins through college and uni.
Right, I did say that I'm perfectly happy to hang around with LGBT people, but I draw the line with the "queers" or "Enbies". Call me cynical, but the majority are just ornery and attention-seeking straight women in denial. This caused plenty of conflict with an ex of mine, but I don't care. If you are functionally indistinguishable from a straight person and only sleep with straight men, my charity wears thin (barring the terribly dyed hair and baggy clothes, which does not constitute a distinct sexuality).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I doubt anyone else will offer this advice, but here it goes. He should approach this like a man would have approached it for all of human history until like the the last 10 minutes. Find a woman, have a family, and whack off to your gay porn/golden shower fantasies in the actual shower every morning.
The modern approach to homosexuality is so incredibly self indulgent. Maybe the thought of wife and kids is horrific to a young gay man. But consider the alternative - ending up an old queen, alone, no legacy, dwindling family.
The idea that one needs to orient their entire life around a sexual preference is disordered - no matter what that preference is.
I hear there are effective treatments these days too. CBT and/or Jesus.
I mean all of this sincerely. There’s likely no one else offering this advice.
I don't really resent your advice, though I strongly disagree with it. Besides, my brother wants a longterm monogamous partner, and wants biological kids to raise together (he even mentioned recent advances in producing viable ova from male sperm, which I've heard of, but will likely take half a decade before becoming available to the public). I would be very sad if he didn't have his own kids, and if he's willing to, then I don't particularly care if he's sleeping with men or women.
Do you extend this to straight men and women clearly organizing their lives around their sexual preferences, or is it only a problem when it's not "normal"? What do you think heterosexual dating, marriage and family formation is, if not?
More options
Context Copy link
I'd assume that for most of history, most men did orient their entire lives around their sexual preference. Regardless of how "disordered" it is to want to fuck your wife and marry her for that purpose.
More options
Context Copy link
Why should a woman marry him? What's in it for her, from her point of view?
Presumably financial and familial support outside of sex and romance.
A lot of women won't get the latter in any case.
I imagine it's one thing to be married as a woman to a man you're not sexually attracted to, but it's entirely something else to be married to one who is not, and is incapable of being sexually attracted to you. I'm guessing most women would opt to remain single than to sign up for the latter.
I agree that most women would prefer not to have that, but in the grainy truth of reality, I know women with worse marriages than that, who would do well to trade their current husbands who don't have sex with them for a rich gay husband who doesn't have sex with them.
At any rate, when I ran a straw poll the most common number of marriageable prospects reported by Mottizens was 1 or 2. (Reinforcing that I am some mix of immensely lucky and a slut with low standards) He only needs to find one woman into the idea out of the whole vast universe of people.
More options
Context Copy link
Most women? Yes. But as I've speculated down thread, my brother gets enough female attention that there are almost certainly going to be women who would still ask for marriage and hope for kids. Maybe most of them might be a tad optimistic, or less charitably, outright delusional, but there's a reason psychiatrists stay in gainful employment. (I am not nearly as handsome and live in a different country with no solid plans for return, but all else being the same, my parents still regularly have to field marriage proposals on my behalf.)
And that is restricting myself to heterosexual women, God knows that if he did express a willingness to have a lavender marriage, there would be plenty of market demand. I don't think that's a bad option, at least if every party is on board and fully informed.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
He's a handsome man with a decent amount of money, and also about to become a doctor. I don't know how many women would still pursue him if he came out as gay, but I suspect the number is non-zero. Straight men do chase lesbians too, and even more gay men have a thing for trying to "convert" straight men. It's even a meme that there are bi/gay men pretending to be straight on Grindr to attract attention.
For/Into marriage? With children? Because this is what OP was describing.
I have some very bad or very good news for you about the entire kink of orientation play.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes. It can and does happen.
Out of curiosity, I asked Claude, and here's a link to it's reply.
https://rentry.co/iwp599d4
ChatGPT:
https://chatgpt.com/share/69c167d0-f6b0-800b-a861-551b7be7be49
TLDR: there's a lot of denial about homosexuality, and a wealthy handsome doctor from a good family is a catch so appealing that plenty of women will ignore the fact that he's gay (even if they might end up regretting that decision later). Claude is more confident than I am, but I think both of us are directionally correct.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What is the state of official polygamy in India, btw?
Illegal, even for Muslims who have their own specific legal system when it comes to marriage (so do Hindus). But... it's been known to happen, albeit not anywhere particularly civilized.
Is it illegal in the sense that, "You can't get two marriage licenses without a divorce license in the middle?" Or illegal in the sense that, "If you are married and caught with a mistress living in your house you trigger some serious anti-adultery laws?"
In the sense that unless you are caught with your name on multiple marriage registries, the government is very unlikely to care. Even if one of the wives gets disgruntled and lodges a complaint, I doubt it's likely to go to court. Note that this applies mostly to rural and backward parts of the country with a Muslim majority, though my parents (gynos) tell me they've occasionally seen men come in with multiple women, explain they're his wives, and ask for care. It is a very, very small minority, and I don't know any examples personally, not that I go around asking.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
truly complex situation, in which primarily you cannot be the unbiased psychiatrist (howsoever you may want to be).
(personally, i am in similar but precursor situation as you. i found about my bro is gay/bi through my very close friend who found out about my bro from his friend circle. so my bro has not come out to me, since he doesn't need to. he has two girls also, and for social sake (my mother), bro and his wife are keeping it under wraps. overall, a very complicated social and personal situation. i can just be an observer without untangling the problem).
in short, be active supporter (not passive). engage a neutral therapist for him, which need not leak info to you even (patient-doctor confidentiality, which your bro can trust). and ask/nudge him to pursue wider social net.
Just a note that my brother saw your reply, and he thinks we could not have gotten better advice. Thank you again.
More options
Context Copy link
Thank you. That is a very substantive and helpful reply, not that I would expect otherwise from you!
I am slightly shocked and surprised, but only in the sense that I am saddened that he didn't feel ready to tell me earlier, and because of the personal difficulties he's faced and will face without the opportunity for me to support him. We've talked about this, a lot, albeit far from enough. I think he's rather relieved that the two members of his family he opened up to did nothing but shower him with love and support. Of course, we will talk about this further, I just think I've finally had a much clearer picture of what's going on.
I am optimistic that it won't take months or years for me to process this. I did somewhat suspect, after all, and I can't see any change in how I treat him. I even cracked the usual jokes today, we're not walking on eggshells. His sexuality is nothing to me when compared to his health, happiness and career.
I am treating him as my little brother, and absolutely do not intend to become his psychiatrist or therapist. I don't think he needs one very strongly, he's more stoic and pragmatic (and functional, in some ways) than I've ever been. The biggest complaint I can make about him these days is that he doesn't study hard enough, and to be fair I did the bare minimum in med school. I asked if he was depressed, and barring rather reasonable episodes of sadness for understandable reasons, I didn't get that impression that all. He's more worried about my mental health than his own, and so am I in all honesty.
If I ever see any cause for concern, I will press on him strongly to see a neutral third party, that's a promise. Even if he doesn't need any medication, talking things through can only help and it already has. We are a close-knit and loving family that rarely keeps secrets form each other, and I am immensely grateful for that.
Regarding the end of his relationship:
While I like his "best friend" as a best friend, he hasn't been the perfect boyfriend for my brother. I won't go into too much detail here, but there are reasons beyond him being bi that would make me strongly advise my brother against seeing this a lifelong affair. Once again, not a bad person, and I am fond of him too, but residency and distance have killed many a heterosexual relationship already.
Right now, the BF is having second thoughts about breaking up. So is my brother. My dad is charmingly clueless, and wants them to move into an apartment together so they can either work or study full time (the BF is far better at academics, and he's optimistic it'll rub off, I suspect other things will be rubbed off too). Maybe they can stretch things out a year or two, it's not necessarily imminent.
I have strongly ordered him to let me know if and when the breakup happens, no matter where I am. I intend to be there for him, and I will call or at least text far more regularly than I already do. He is justifiably annoyed that I have the same character traits that make me withdraw and reduce contact when I'm not doing so hot myself.
Good ideas. There is a lot of practical benefit to him staying in India, both for financial reasons and to keep an eye on our increasingly elderly parents, but if that comes at the cost of his happiness, I'm booking the visa and flight for him.
I swear I had known about the single parent thing at some point, but it had slipped my mind. I'll have to double check if it's an issue for a married gay couple. Of course, legal channels are not the only option in this country, nor does he have to stick to this country forever.
Oh, I can see why this hit close to home. I'm not sorry for you, because I don't see much to be sorry about! I do hope your brother is bi and not gay, not for moral reasons, but because that is a kind of compromise that is far easier to make, even in the West. Good luck to the both of you, and I hope one day he finds the strength to open up to you about it. I'm sure you love him dearly and will treat him just the same. This is the kind of shit that brothers are for.
I will do all of this right away, except possibly the therapy -(unless I see a clearer indication). Thank you again, this is precisely the kind of advice I had hoped to receive after mustering up the courage to share this, even pseudonymously.
regarding my own situation, ngl, sometimes i do feel (when i read post like this) to just blast off my bro - why the hell are you not telling me this and should have told me a long time back (whenever you understood that yourself). and i have come to know about it through a third person (although, that third person is more brotherly than him, tbh). etc.
his wife is the one who has the most difficult situation, from my POV. so for her sake, things remaining unknown to most is a reasonable solution. but it still is an emotional issue.
regarding the stoic nature of your bro. sometimes, it is just an outer shell (speaking from my own experience) while there is lot of internal emotional turmoil. personally, you should just be there for him, if and when he wants to have your support. that's all.
I don't know how I'd have reacted if I had found out through a third party and had to wait ages for my brother to come clean. Can't blame you for feeling some bitterness about it either; if I had to guess, I'd probably get impatient and seriously confront him, albeit with good intent. In a way, the fact that I have multiple (often turbulent) trysts with women has annoyed/exhausted my parents to the point that probably felt relieved with a son who didn't let women get to his head. I need to ask him to buy me a drink for running cover, even if it's accidental haha.
My brother genuinely is more emotionally resilient than I am. God knows that the dysthymia and depressive tendencies came to me from my mom, and he mostly lucked out. Still, I'll keep a close eye, and my mom is perceptive and will manage any concerns once I'm back to the UK!
Hmm. That really is a tricky situation. For her sake, I hope your brother is simply bi, and suppressing his desire to have sex with men while in a relationship, in the same way most men suppress their desire to sleep with other women while married. I do not want to judge him for misleading someone by feigning interest in women while purely gay, but then again, I don't think I could get hard enough to penetrate a man in the first place if that was asked of me. Presumably, with two kids, the attraction is non-negligible. I can only hope his marriage is stable despite the difficulties, and at this point it's a non-trivial problem with no easy answers. You seem like a caring brother, so I do hope he at least acknowledges it at some point. I agree that it's not worth poking at too hard unless someone is clearly suffering.
i make myself understand that there is nothing i can do about it. both of them have to manage as best as they can. i can only support both of them, as best as i can, and when needed (if there is). he is prolly not a bi. so, it is technically a problem. but other things are bigger issues. they are a happy family from social point of view.
i feel, it will become a very self-regarding move to relieve my own emotional itch, rather than something which he feels the need for. this is also why i feel that whatever be your bro's relative resilience as compared to yours, since he has come to you at this point (at the juncture of possible LTR breakup, there is a deeper need for you to be there for him actively. in any case, life is always interesting and worth (even in the worst of situations, there is always something to look for).
i watched "It's a Wonderful Life" few days back. and it is a must watch. it is a fairly common recommendation for US/UK people, but not for us (in general).
I wouldn't be quite that harsh on yourself. Some aspects of a person they're set on keeping to themselves might well be your business: say a friend or family member doing dangerous drugs, and you find out through an oblique route. It's a bit tenuous to connect that to sexuality as an analogy, but I hope you get my drift. You have every right to feel some level of dissatisfaction, and I wouldn't hold it against you if you did ask him outright. Just being gay, is as far as I'm concerned, totally fine. A marriage of convenience (potentially one-sided convenience) changes the calculus somewhat. I can't blame you if you intervened on behalf of his wife and kids, though I'm not sure there's even a reason to intervene, and what you really want is to have him just tell you the truth and explain why he kept it from your his entire life.
If his wife is okay, and the kids are happy, then it does make sense to not rock the boat. Then again, she might be deeply embarrassed and unwilling to speak out because she fears the social and personal consequences. She wouldn't be the first person to stick around in an unhappy/lukewarm marriage for pragmatic reasons. (I am absolutely not bold enough to claim this is the case, I don't know any of the people involved!)
On the other hand, simply politely telling him you found out and you're disappointed by the charade is not, as far as I can gauge, a bad thing to do. And I suspect that is all you consider doing.
I'm lucky that even during my worst bouts of depression, it never went from passive/intrusive thoughts to active suicidal ideation or planning. But if it had, you bet that I would have fought hard to remind myself that I would be sorely missed by my family and other loved ones. I hope nobody in the stories we've shared has reached that point.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link